#and the ones that have compelling monsters/stories tend to trigger my intrusive thoughts really bad | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

ana-motion-nua-ba2a · 6 years

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A response to Jekyll’s summary of the case

I might be about to get too personal for a record of things that will hopefully eventually earn me a degree. But it's 3am, and I've just finished reading Jekyll and Hyde in one sitting, and the last pages of Jekyll’s testament almost brought me to tears - because of how much they resonated with me. I feel like that needs to be recorded, as it's doubtless going to influence my take on the writing task.

I don't have an official diagnosis, but I've been informed by multiple medical professionals that I fit the description of/display symptoms of OCD. Which means I get intrusive thoughts, and am compelled to perform either physical or mental rituals to try and dispel them. These can be commonplace, like the idea that all door handles carry germs, so I should open them with my sleeve; or that I need to wash my hands after tying my shoelaces, because who knows what they might have picked up last time I was walking outside.

They can also be deeply, profoundly distressing, and hinge on subjects of serious moral weight, they may even relate to criminal acts. With those kinds of thoughts, what tends to result is a mental ‘spiral’: desperately trying to convince yourself that the thoughts are untrue, that they are simply a result of doubt and overactive imagination, rather than something you would honestly contemplate - while at the same time, the thoughts grow stronger and become more insistent that you have no way of knowing any of this. Sometimes there might be more concrete rituals, such as trying to purge the thoughts by thinking of something else, or examining relevant memories and personal response to those memories. In my case too, one I've experienced was a warped version of a calming breathing exercise, where I'd be frantically counting up and down from seven as I gasped for air.

Because I've had experience with those kinds of intrusive thoughts. For almost two years, starting from the end of my first year of A-levels, one particular fear seized me by the throat. It wouldn't let go until I mustered the courage to Google the term ‘intrusive thoughts’ - terrified, until that point, that if I did so, I'd find nothing familiar, and have to cope with the fact that my thoughts weren't intrusive, and were purely myself.

Luckily, I recognised myself in the description I found. But up until then, I had been suffering, more than I think the average eighteen-year-old ever expects to suffer, and definitely from something that would never even have occurred to my friends. Suffering, in fact, in a way I was surprised and almost scared to recognise in Dr. Jekyll’s story.

I will never discuss the nature of my intrusive thoughts publicly, but I know the exact, fleeting mental image that first triggered them. I could recognise, and still remember, each time I unwittingly came across new information related to them - information which the thoughts dutifully took on board and used to mutate and grow into something yet more multifaceted and harder to suppress. (Suppressing intrusive OCD thoughts is never a good idea, but at the time I didn't know that OCD was what I had). I always had a sense that these thoughts weren't exactly my own - it was like I had some strange entity following me around, just a little behind and to the side of me, constantly whispering in my ear “But what if…?” no matter how much I argued. Even seeing Jekyll refer to Hyde as a he, not an I, trying to distance himself, has disturbed me, as that's a case of someone much more involved in bad things than he wants to admit - which is exactly what I always feared that I was.

And just like Jekyll trying to hold Hyde at bay, the thoughts got harder and harder to suppress. I turned to social media, to fandom content and my favourite creative media, desperately searching for distractions. I still haven't completely shaken the habit of being up practically all night on my phone, trying to find something funny or mentally engaging enough to pull me out of the thoughts for a brief moment; even though it's no longer necessary, it's almost like a survival instinct, like some phantom anxiety still lingers. Like Jekyll, I feared falling asleep - or more accurately, I feared the stretch between lying down to sleep and actually drifting off, being trapped in a dark room with nothing but the Thoughts going round in my head. That was another function of being on my phone: to distract me until I was too exhausted to think before sleeping.

Just as Jekyll found, the efficacy of these kinds of patch-cures grew less and less. Just like Jekyll, I isolated myself, told nobody about what I was going through because I knew I could never explain it. Not knowing any alternative for what the Thoughts could be besides my own thoughts and my own nature, I didn't know how to explain the little voice at my side or the increasing helplessness effectively, and feared that it would simply sound like a confession.

I feared being the monster that my Thoughts insisted I was - ‘the horror of being Hyde’ - but my fear also embodied Hyde’s selfish obsession with never being discovered, knowing that if the truth of my thoughts came to light, I'd be condemned, and basically unable to pursue a normal life. And I hated myself for being concerned about that, because if I truly was so monstrous, I didn't deserve the things I feared losing. I'd have moments of irrational terror that people could read my thoughts, and I'd broadcast litanies insisting to any such hypothetical person that I didn't want this, that I knew I shouldn't still want good things and a normal life if this was me, but that I was clinging to every scrap of evidence that suggested it might not be.

Even the ‘shudder’ that precludes the transformation resonates. As my Thoughts got worse and more all-consuming, they'd be accompanied by full-body tremors and chattering teeth, which I can only assume was an extreme physical response to the fear I constantly felt. I took to wearing socks to bed to trick myself into feeling warm, otherwise I'd be up all night wracked with shivers.

‘The powers of Hyde seemed to have grown with the sickliness of Jekyll’. The more I fell into depression and terror, the harder it was to fight back against my intrusive thoughts. It was ‘closer than a wife’, even in a startlingly literal sense - I couldn't get rid of it, and although I am still with my girlfriend of the time, I didn't feel able to articulate any of it to her or my family; indeed, I felt as though just by associating with them, I was polluting their lives, and owed them my isolation. My own ‘love of life’ and reluctance to give it up when it was barely a quarter over became an abhorrent thing, a selfish thing that I didn't deserve to cling to, inherently tied to the Thoughts.

And the ‘callousness of soul’ brought on by ‘habit’ - that's where I reacted most viscerally. The thoughts I had really were monstrous, but the longer they went on, the more normal they seemed, and the more they felt like an inextricable part of me - separate, yes, but with no way to be removed. I would have moments where I'd almost come to terms with them, which in itself would plunge me back into the spiral worse than ever, filled with a conviction that I'd almost actually become what they embodied.

And I did, in the end, before I gathered that last push of strength to save myself, feel as though the only acceptable option was to kill myself, and take my Hyde down with me.

#narrative strategies

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