I’m standing outside the support group room with my mum.
I peek in through the door’s glass window. I see a huge circle of people sitting on plastic chairs.
“I’ve changed my mind, Mum. I don’t want to go.”
“Come on, we’ve come all this way—just go in for a little bit and see how you find it. I’ll be right by you.”
“I don’t want to. I really, really don’t want to.”
I peek in again. I see a woman with long brown hair talking, but I can’t hear what she is saying. She is making lots of gestures.
Mum opens the door and pushes me in. I let out a loud squeak. About thirty heads turn to look at me.
“Welcome! Have a seat,” says a man sitting in the corner of the room. “We’re doing introductions. So you just have to say your name, your experience of OCD, and how your week has been. And you’re welcome to pass if you would prefer not to say anything.”
I sit next to Mum on the other side of the circle. Each person speaks for a minute or two. I pass when it gets to me, but Mum makes up for that.
“This is Lily, and I’m her mum. It’s our first time at a support group. Lily doesn’t really want to be here, but I’m hoping that it will be helpful for her. I’m here because I want to learn more about OCD and how I can help Lily. Hello, everyone!”
She gives a little wave.
“Welcome, both of you,” says the man again. He actually does sound quite welcoming.
It’s odd, because I always assumed that if I met a group of people with OCD, they’d all be sitting on newspapers to avoid contamination with the chairs, wearing gloves and perhaps surgical masks, tapping things repetitively.
But everyone here looks normal, and only a few of them have contamination fears.
I also thought there would be no point going to a group like this, because no one would have similar obsessions to me, but it seems that was wrong too.
“I always wanted to be a teacher, which I am,” says the girl opposite me. “But I ended up teaching adults, because I’m scared I’ll harm children if I’m around them.”
“I’ve had a really bad week because I feel like these thoughts are never going to stop,” says one guy.
Another says, “My OCD centers on preventing harm. So if I see anything in the street that could be hazardous, like glass or whatever, I have to do something about it. I’m always looking out for things that could cause harm so I can remove them. And I have some contamination problems. But I’ve had a really good week. I feel like I’m having a breakthrough with my CBT.”
“My OCD also revolves around stopping bad things happening,” says someone else. “Particularly to animals. Last week I saw a frog on the pavement so I tried to move him to a grassy knoll so he wouldn’t get trodden on.”
“I do that!” chips in a guy across the room. “I pick up snails and slugs from the pavement and rehome them. I also retrace my steps to make sure I haven’t trodden on one.”
“Anyway, so I pick this frog up, yeah—and he jumps out of my hand, right into the road. And then bam, right in front of me—squashed by a car.”
There’s a collective intake of breath as the group acknowledges the psychological implications of sod’s law conspiring against the frog Samaritan.
“Yeah,” he adds. “I was pretty upset.”
Halfway through, people talk to each other during a fifteen-minute break. The man who welcomed us comes over to introduce himself as Thomas and asks how I am doing.
For the second half he calls for quiet.
Conversations fade out, and people who have moved around scurry back to their seats. Across the room, the woman who said that she crochets to keep herself focused on something other than her thoughts goes back to making an orange scarf.
“Our discussion topic today is guilt, how it affects us, and what we can do to overcome it.”
There’s a collective murmur of approval at the choice of topic.
“Oh god, don’t even get me started on guilt!” says someone. “I’ve got enough guilt on me to go round the whole of the UK prison system!”
Everyone laughs.
I feel like I have come home.
Later I lie in bed, feeling more comforted than I can ever remember feeling. There are people like me. Others out there who spend their days caught in the peaks and troughs of endless thought.
I am not a freak.
I roll over and put my arm around Rocky, who is curled up next to me. I breathe in the soft talcum-powder smell of his fur and listen to him snoring gently. I’m so glad I’m not alone anymore.
Since Rocky has been sleeping up here, I’ve stopped opening and shutting drawers and wardrobes to make sure nothing is inside, and stopped checking behind the curtains and under the bed.
Rocky makes the room feel okay. And I don’t like to check stuff in front of him. If I do, he tilts his head to one side and gives me such a strange look that I feel stupid—which is helpful. It’s good to be reminded how silly the things I do are, and because he’s a dog, I don’t resent him the way I would if a human was bleating at me to “just stop doing it.”
I remember what Dr. Finch said: “Your routines feed off isolation.”
I can’t sit at home all day, waiting for the help to come. That’s only going to make it worse. But I also can’t pretend there’s nothing wrong; that only makes me crash eventually.
And that’s when the answer I have been looking for suddenly arrives, like a gift: so simple, so pure, it’s amazing I didn’t think of it before.
I’ll be honest.
I arrange to meet Bill in his office at 10:00 a.m. on Monday morning, but it’s 10:15, and he’s still in a meeting.
I sit outside, sipping nervously on a cup of tea Doug has made me and trying to engage with what he is chatting to me about. Brigitte and her production assistant Nel come and join the conversation. Everyone here is nice. They coo over me, laughing about how if I take the job, I will be the new office baby.
“I can’t believe you’re only twenty! The youngest person gets to decorate the Christmas tree,” says Nel. “So your luck’s in this year!”
Bill finally calls me in at 10:45. I take a seat opposite him.
Deep breath.
“Have you thought about my offer?”
“Yes,” I say. “I’ve thought about it a lot. I would very much like to take the job. Thank you so much for offering me it.”
“Great! When can you start?”
“I can start as soon as you like. There’s just . . . There’s just one thing . . .”
“Oh yes?”
“I have OCD. And I’m trying to beat it at the moment. So I would need one afternoon a week off so I can see my doctor. And it’s possible that sometimes, if it’s going really badly, I might miss some work. I realize I’ve just made myself sound totally unemployable. But it’s either tell you and take the job, or not take the job at all, because I’ve tried covering it up before, and it always ends badly. And I . . . I really, really want to take this job. So I thought I’d just put it out there and see if you could still take me on.”
Shut up now, shut up.
I prepare for Bill to give one of three standard responses:
“Oh, I’m also so OCD!”
“Aren’t we all a bit OCD?”
“You can come and clean my house!”
What he says next takes me by surprise.
“What’s OCD?” He looks a little embarrassed. “I mean, sorry, I know I should know, but I don’t.”
“No, don’t worry at all. Well it stands for obsessive-compulsive disorder. So people who have it obsess over something, like a thought, or a worry, and then they do a compulsion to make that thing go away. And they get into a cycle where they can’t stop doing those compulsions.
“So I . . . I worry a lot about all the actions I do, like how I say stuff, and whether it looked funny when I did something, or whether something about me appeared disgusting, and then I have to write it down and think about it a lot to make it go away. I fill up endless notebooks making lists of everyday stuff that other people don’t think about. It takes up hours of every day. I’m also quite scared of dirt, so I wash my hands a lot. That’s probably more what OCD is known for.”
The only person I tell this to is Dr. Finch. I suddenly feel vulnerable and idiotic. Why am I telling a future boss about it?
“I know it sounds silly,” I add hastily.
“It doesn’t sound silly, it sounds hellish!”
Oh. Sympathy. That’s nice. I feel a little bolder.
“It is quite. Other people have different obsessions and compulsions, and it covers a huge range of things, because you can pretty much obsess over anything, so it’s quite hard to explain. But anyway . . . I . . . I totally understand if you think it’s not going to be possible to take me on.”
This is not a lie; I would totally understand. If I were organizing a workforce, I wouldn’t employ my brain.
“No, it’s not a problem. I’m still very happy to offer you the job. Thank you for telling me about it. It’s, er, it’s good to be open about these things.” He pulls a sheepish grin, and I get the feeling that even though mental health is still the elephant in this room, the room is trying to accommodate the elephant, which is more than I expected.
“So you’ve been at the new job this morning?” asks Dr. Finch, my folder on her lap, pen poised, ready to document this groundbreaking new development.
“Yes. I’m just coming to the end of my first week.”
“And you decided to tell them about your OCD, didn’t you? How did they take it?”
“Yes, I told them. They’ve been really great. My boss says I can take one afternoon off a week to see you. I go for lunch with two of my colleagues, Doug and Brigitte, every day at the café down the road. They asked me about the afternoon I’m taking off and I told them a bit about my OCD and they were really nice about it. I feel good.”
That was the easy part. Now for the hard bit.
“I think you maybe have some idea of how I feel about you,” I say in a rush. The words hang in the air, undoable, dangerously precluding their end.
“It is a feeling I wish I didn’t have. It is a feeling that I think has sometimes got in the way of my treatment, because it makes me focus on perfecting my lists when I’m around you, rather than letting you show me how to fight them. It is a feeling that makes it painful to be in your presence, and for that reason, I need to get better as soon as possible, so that I can stop seeing you. Can we do that?”
“Yes,” says Dr. Finch. “Yes, we can.”
“Hi, I’m Lily, and I’ve had OCD since I can remember.”
I look around the group. People are nodding and smiling. Katie, who I’ve been to dinner with a few times and is becoming a good friend, grins and waves.
“It mainly centers on needing to record any actions that could be seen as bad and then justifying why what I did wasn’t bad, or if it was bad, remembering why it was bad. My week has been quite good, actually. I’ve managed to start a new job. And I told my boss about my OCD, and he was unexpectedly supportive.”
The group seems genuinely pleased to hear this. Round the circle, others take their turn to do their introductions.
“I’ve had a good week,” says a woman called Sheila. “I’ve discovered that what really helps me is putting off my compulsions. I tell myself I’ll do it in five minutes, or maybe ten, and I keep saying that, and then eventually I realize the urge to do it has passed, and I don’t need to do it anymore. It works really well for me.”
A chorus of other people say that they’ve found doing the same thing helpful.
I think about this strategy. Although it seems like I put my routines off, as I don’t fully assess them until I’m by myself, I’m always concentrating on going over them in my head so I don’t forget them. What if I tried to properly put them off? Could it work for me too?
The next day at the office, I adopt the mantra “Work now, worry later.” Words come into my head, and I tell myself that I will give them my attention later. From an anxiety perspective, I don’t feel the sheer terror that comes when I apply the orthodox CBT strategy of saying I will resist all routines.
Putting off the routines that arose in the first ten minutes of work when everyone was chatting and saying hello means that, for the first time in my two weeks here, I’ve managed to get some work done before 10:00 a.m.
I am inputting local news stories into our online publishing software. A missing boy, aged fourteen; a new celebrity moving to the area; the verdict of a trial of a local sex offender.
At this point, I’d normally spend a couple of hours thoroughly checking through the articles to see that I haven’t chucked in some rogue concluding line like “thanks for reading folks. FYI, I’m also a sex offender,” or “Just so you know, the missing child is actually in my cellar.”
Today, I only check through for standard spelling and grammar, and then hit the Publish button. I tell myself it’s okay, because I can check through them later.
The articles go live. I copy the links from our website and paste them into our Twitter accounts, typing the corresponding headlines into the tweet. I don’t read the tweet over and over to check I’m not about to publish “Saggy Granny Tits Are Coming to Surrey” or something similarly career-ending.
Bill calls me into his office for a chat about website stats. He is pleased with my progress. We chat for about forty-five minutes. I go back to my desk. I want to check, but I tell myself I can do it later.
Brigitte calls me over to ask what I think of one of her page layouts. I pop out for a cigarette. Later, later, I say.
I sit down and do some reading about a local pub for an article I might write on best cozy winter hangouts. Later, later.
I go for lunch. I laugh with Brigitte about something stupid her cat has done. Later, later.
I get back to my desk, take a phone call from an aggrieved local who wants to see more online coverage about golf. I’ve put down the phone and prepared to tell myself that I’ll think about my lists in another five minutes, when I realize they are no longer causing me fear.
They are just a string of irrelevant actions that happened in the last few hours, and I don’t need to change them.