I am sitting in a bar opposite a man called Dean. He looks older than me, but not too old: maybe late thirties.
There’s something about him I like. He is funny, but he doesn’t seem to know it. I have ten items on my list at present.
“What would you like to drink?” he asks.
I want these routines to stop. Just once, I want to enjoy the company of another human. I know I’m not supposed to drink to make it stop, but there’s no denying it helps. No one need know.
“Wine,” I say.
We order glasses of chardonnay. Dean sips his at neat, regular intervals, seemingly at ease with the whole situation, and I pretend to be.
We talk about his life, we talk about mine. He holds my hand across the table, and I break my rule about not kissing on first dates. He is the sort of person with whom a couple of hours feels like not very much time at all, and also, he has nice eyes. I drink more wine. At around midnight, Dean decides I have had too much to drink. I am insisting I can get the Tube back. Dean initially agrees, but I don’t quite pull off my sober strut down the stairs to Bond Street underground.
“No, okay, look, just come back with me, my car is round the corner. You need to sober up,” he says. “Then I’m going to get you a taxi back.”
For some reason, this sounds like a great idea.
I remember the car ride in bits. I remember making Dean pull over outside a Lebanese restaurant so I can pee. I remember singing along to the radio. I remember getting to his flat and feeling sick. I remember sitting on the sofa with him. For how long? Twenty minutes? An hour? I remember thinking he really must be a very nice man, since he doesn’t try to take advantage, or even touch me. I remember telling him that if I can’t be perfect, I don’t want to exist. I remember him calling me a taxi, good as his word, and making me promise to text him when I get home safely.
“Lily! You need to get up for work!” My mum is screeching up the stairs.
I burrow under the duvet, trying to shut out the day and return to the point on my list last night where I started forgetting things. I need to see what, if anything, I can retrieve. I know that I’ve accumulated Blank Time again, which is always a bad thing.
The easy option would be not to see Dean again, because then I don’t have to think about the number of interactions that are unaccounted for. In fact, that would probably be the sensible option, given that he’s too old for me and has teenage children. But actually, it doesn’t even matter.
I think I suitably disgraced myself last night.
I doubt he will text. I’m wrong.
I have just arrived at Dean’s flat. We are going to spend Saturday together, because, for some reason, he has decided he wants to see me again.
At my feet, Rocky is yapping and chasing his tail like an idiot.
“I think we should get this one to the park!” I say, adding BOSSY ABOUT ROCKY to RUDE, because you shouldn’t tell someone what to do when they invite you to their home. But Dean doesn’t seem offended. He clips on Rocky’s lead with male efficiency, and away we go to Regent’s Park.
Dean tries to take my hand twice. This is probably my fault for letting him hold my hand on our first date—the alcohol made me care less about physical contact. But in today’s sober state, I am keen not to do anything disgusting.
I dodge him twice successfully, but he makes it the third time. I add CLAMMY HANDS as a red item to BODILY FUNCTIONS. The worst part about something like having clammy hands is that it is a real and disgusting problem, and all the CBT in the world won’t make it go away.
I let Rocky off the lead, but he trots along between us, underneath the arch of our hands, on his best behavior.
Dean laughs. “He’s so cute! He’s walking between us like a little child!”
I start to worry fervently that Dean might think I’ve trained Rocky to walk like this to convince him how nice it would be if we had children of our own, even though we’ve only met twice.
I add MANIPULATIVE DOG OWNER to BITCH.
Halfway through lunch at a pub down the road from Dean’s house on our fifth date, he asks me what’s wrong.
The truth is, nothing is especially wrong; it’s just I’m five minutes behind current time, analyzing a sexual innuendo I may or may not have made.
I adopt my honesty-is-the-best-policy approach.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “The truth is, I have OCD.”
He doesn’t say anything stupid; he just lets me explain how it is. I tell him the more I care about someone, the more I care what I do around them. I tell him that every time I see him, I care about him more . . .
“And so your routines are getting worse?” he finishes.
“Yes. Exactly.”
“Okay,” he says, pausing, wiping the corners of his mouth with his napkin and placing it on his lap.
“So you have a choice. You can either continue seeing me and just accept that I love being around you and there’s no need to do your routines, or you can do what you’re doing, and eventually, a few weeks or a few months from now, or however long it takes, you’ll end this yourself because it will get to the stage where you can’t take it anymore.”
I could emphatically deny this, but the truth is, I have been thinking maybe I should end it while it’s still a nice little romance I can remember fondly, before it gets totally destroyed by endless documentation.
“Why don’t you just treat this whole thing like an experiment?” says Dean. “Don’t do any routines around me. Then, three months from now, if you can’t bear to be with me because there’s too much stuff you haven’t accounted for, just walk away and start a new relationship with someone else and you can go back to what you were doing before, and know that all your interactions were perfect. But if, three months from now, you realize that you didn’t need to do them after all, and that you’re happy, then stay.”
It’s brutal. It’s radical. It includes a get-out-of-jail-free card. I like it.
This is how the next months go. I go to work, where I put off my routines until I don’t fear them so much, and I get to a stage where I write down only the very red stuff. I start to have more of a personality, which is ironic, because I always thought it was my lists that meant I knew who I was.
The experiment is both terrifying and liberating. I become more and more able to dismiss the words that come up around Dean by thinking of the whole thing as a giant game of exposure therapy. I go to his place pretty much every night, because, I reason, I should get as much time in with him as possible before the three months are up.
But why do the three months have to be up? What if I make this experiment my life? It has to be better than what came before. And if this really is just a giant exposure where you do something scary to test your previously held theory about something, then the results are pretty clear: I didn’t do my lists around someone. That person did not start to think I was a bad person and did not want to get away from me. Therefore, I do not need to do lists to stop being seen as a bad person.
Two weeks ago, Dr. Finch came back to an idea we had spoken about when I first saw her.
“Your routines are like insurance where the premium is too high. Imagine if I paid so much insurance on my house that I ended up paying more than the actual value of the house. Well, that’s what you do. You try to insure your life through doing endless routines, but the cost of that OCD insurance is too high, because you end up ruining the life you do have.
“Is it better,” she asked, “to do all these routines so you can feel sure you’re in control of everything you might possibly have done wrong, but end up miserable—or is it better to take the risk of letting some stuff go, but end up happy?”
I know which one I would have chosen before, and it’s not what I would choose today. I choose to take a risk in the pursuit of feeling human. Whenever I do come back to my house from Dean’s, if Ella is home from school, then I open my arms and pull her into a big cuddle. Every time I do it, I get a little less scared that I will harm her, and last week, when her curls tickled my cheeks and her arms twisted around my back, I felt nothing more than that I was one half of something hugging the other.
She doesn’t know this is our last session.
We are forty-five minutes through, and I still haven’t told her. We have talked about how much better I am. We have talked about how I can keep the improvements going. We have talked about how to avoid relapsing. We have talked and talked, endless toing and froing for three years, and now here we are. Fifteen minutes left to know each other.
“I’m not coming back,” I say, waiting for the room to cave in on me.
It doesn’t.
“And it’s not like before. This is it. I’m better than I’ve ever been, and it’s mostly thanks to you. And I . . . I won’t be coming here again.”
Dr. Finch doesn’t do anything for a few seconds, which is unlike her.
“Okay,” she finally says, slightly higher than normal, with a smile that starts to wobble, like her face is going to crack. “I don’t know what you’ve done to me!” Her eyes brim with a few disobedient tears, which roll down her cheeks. “I don’t do this.” She wipes them fiercely, laughing at herself.
“I have—” Her voice catches, and she starts again, almost whispering this time. “I have known you for a long time.”
And because there is nothing more to say, we walk down the stairs and into the car park. I get into the taxi, which takes me to the station, where I board an empty train back to London.
I stare out the window at the trees whizzing by, wondering which one could be hers, until they start to become buildings.
I have existed for twenty-one years.
I didn’t live them all, but from now on I am hoping to.
I take my medication, though one day I want to come off it. Sometimes I have bad days where gray thoughts saunter in like unwanted dinner guests; the trick is not to invite them to sit at the table. They get bored in time, and show themselves out the back door.
Occasionally I hear the ghost of my friend, tumbling down a forgotten corridor.
Let’s review that action, She might say. Or, In the end it is all done.
Except it’s not her, not really. It is only me, the times I get lonely, or fearful, and I try to imagine her back. Something about the voice is off—like an impressionist who’s an inch off the mark. I see through it.
I see myself.
I go to my support group. I have proper friends there now, and you can laugh or cry or say nothing at all.
No one minds either way.
I am grateful for the small things: for walking down the street and not being so engulfed in routines I can’t see where I’m going.
For having a child sit opposite me on the train and not worrying which part of their body my eyes alight on.
For every time I enjoy something beautiful, without telling myself that I will focus on it once I have finished my routines.
I can actually follow the plot of TV programs now, and I no longer use books as masks—I read them like a normal person, just like you have read this. Which assumes you are normal; maybe you’re not. Maybe none of us are. Maybe none of us would want to be anyway. But, for the sake of argument, let’s call me normal now.
I am better. I don’t know whether it’s for good, or if one day something might make me abnormal again. But that’s the funny thing about living. If you do it properly, you don’t know how the next sentence will begin.