bint-amina

[bint-amina]

it scares me everything will be gone one day

[bint-amina]

What does OCD feel like?

No words I’ve ever been able to find can describe how OCD feels when it’s at its worst. Like everyone, I’ve tried to grasp at metaphors that do it justice, but they always fall short.

When my OCD first started, and I was having intrusive thoughts that I was a child abuser, the guilt was so overwhelming and the anxiety so fever pitch, it felt like I’d killed somebody, and that I had a body buried in the back garden that could get discovered at any moment. I spoke about it here.

At other times, when my OCD was severe, it was the loneliness that was the predominant feeling. Like everyone in the world was on the other side of a big sheet of glass, so I could never really be where they were.

But it’s not one concrete feeling, it shifts and morphs. After a long time, the weight started to lift. The bad feelings started to less solid. Today OCD feels like lighter, more manageable, more distant. I feel happy – which I never thought would be possible.

Love the question by the way :)

[bint-amina]

I paint my nails nice and pretty and who cares. Who gives a shit. I’m trying not to give a shit but it doesn’t fit well on me.

— Joshua Jennifer Espinoza, from “It Is Important To Be Something,” curated by TC Tolbert for Poetry & the Body

[bint-amina]

“But then it passed, as all things do.”

— Khaled Hosseini, And the Mountains Echoed

[bint-amina]

Some days I want to sit in my sadness      like a parked car, engine still

hot but breathing, waiting for      a song to end. But some never

do.

— Emilia Phillips, from “Moonpie,” published in Underblong

[bint-amina]

interesting words to use instead of "OCD"

finicky

painstaking

fastidious

particular

precise

scrupulous

conscientious

persnickety (it’s a real word i promise)

accurate

meticulous

punctilious

exact

basically there are loads of really cool words out there, (persnickety!!) so you don’t need to appropriate OCD for your own use if you don’t actually have it!

[bint-amina]

that OCD feel when you can feel someone's handprints where they touched you hours or even days afterward

[bint-amina]

my mother’s blood is a kennel filled with feral dogs in each of their mouths, a hand that once fed them & now feeds them, only different, bloodsick, they mistake their own legs for prey, pitter pat of rabbit paw or fox between burrows.

— Brandon Melendez, from “Lupus,” published in Diode

[bint-amina]

[bint-amina]

Relatable OCD feels: guilt! guilt!guilt! guilt! guilt! guilt! guilt! guilt! guilt! guilt! guilt! guilt! guilt! guilt! guilt! guilt! guilt! guilt! guilt! guilt!

[bint-amina]

Let go and there is nothing tethering you to the stake that is always driven into the soft center of your vampiric world.

— Bianca Stone, from “A Brief Topography of the MSCOG,” The Möbius Strip Club of Grief

[bint-amina]

Gates of the Night (1946) 

[bint-amina]

[bint-amina]

My Friend Dahmer (2017)

[bint-amina]

Let me be pure/let me be holeless

Brynne Rebele-Henry, from “Self-Biography as a Girl with No Mouth” published in The American Poetry Review

[bint-amina]

You’re already doing it wrong. Doing it wrong before you wake up. Before you walk up the street.

Samiya Bashir, from “You’re really faithful to your abusers, aren’t you?” published in Poem-a-Day

[bint-amina]

“I want to be good, I said. I want to— yes, hear me— be again full.”

— Emilia Phillips, from “Heavy” published in Tongue (via lifeinpoetry)