I was wheezy, my eyes swelled shut and I was hoiked to an out of hours doctor who gave me antihistamines. A couple of failed attempts at rehoming rescues (my dad had patience for approximately 48 hours) was my closest interaction. For decades I would be mindful of being too close, or especially rubbing my eyes but cats were fine if I took cetirizine. Over time though, it has definitely lessened.

With me allergic to cats and Pam allergic to dogs we had house rabbits for years. They were adorable housemates, and their fur smelled of hay. I miss them, but since we moved the living room round we don’t have room for a protected space any more. Plus the yard gets lots of foxes. The rabbits all tended to stay downstairs, in ten years only one went beyond the shire, and only once. A cat could have the run of the house.

My biggest worry was that we took the plunge, got attached and my allergies were too much and we had to rehome an already discombobulated cat again. That’d be awful for us and them, we were always going to rescue. But a few trial runs with nothing worse than a bit of an itchy eye and I decided to take a little look at the SAA website, the same place we rescued all our Rabbits.

And there he was. “Chunky” Charlie.

A 10 year-old British Shorthair, he was found crying in a park with demonstrably no idea how to survive outside. He’s clearly had a collar on all his life but was found without one. The sanctuary are familiar with this kind of story unfortunately, and all too often they are abandoned - the chip details went nowhere, save the name he came in with and his date of birth.

I sent the picture to Pam saying that we should meet him, and a few days later we did, the SAA being just a ten minute walk up the canal. He’s a big old chap, 7.1kg when he came to us, and had spent the past 3 months at the SAA, the latter couple of weeks in a smaller quarantine pen as the larger pens flooded. I’d taken some antihistamines before I went and I spent a good amount of time getting amongst the dander, all signs looking fine.

Straight away, we knew. We just knew we had to try, allergies or no. A home check, some sage advice and 5 days later on 16th January Charlie came to live with us. Carrying him back down the canal path I was stopped twice by people cooing over him, marvelling at this ‘big, beautiful boy’.

We were all excited and nervous; after a slightly fractious first night with some tummy upsets and a small scratch, Charlie realised he had a home and we realised what a difference he made to our house immediately. The sanctuary had had him on a delicate diet because of his stressy tum and as expected, this settled completely in a couple of days. A bit of litter tray trial and error (high-peeing cats are a thing, we discovered) and we settled into a routine. Within the first week we learned about claw sheaths, hairballs, tear staining and scratching mats.

Its been less than 4 weeks and it’s like he’s always been here. We have breakfast together, he sits on a chair behind me when I’m working from home or on a chest behind Pam’s desk, depending on where the sun is. He is still on a slightly modified diet to manage his weight and snoring (which is heartbreakingly sweet) and Charlie has strong opinions about this - it’s clear he has been fed extras from the kitchen all his life, he knows the drill at dinnertime.

My photo cloud is full of pictures, I can’t stop staring at him in lovestruck awe. He has a catalogue of chirps and meows (mainly around the provision, or lack of food). His purrs sound like the Dilophosaurus that did for Denis Nedry in Jurassic Park. His ‘big stretch’, his tiny little nose, the way he has a favourite spot on a rug by the radiator, and leans into a good chin scratch.

My allergies have been mostly fine. I got a hair in my eye the other day, that wasn’t my favourite. My skin itches sometimes but it does in February anyway, its hayfever season. It all passes quickly. More importantly, my mental health has noticeably improved, my resting heart rate is lower and I sleep better even with the clockwork alarm call for breakfast.

As I sit here in bed typing this, he’s in between us snoring softly, our resolution to keep him out of the bedroom for ‘allergy reasons’ lasting all of 72 hours. We’ve made some good decisions in our 21 years together, meeting Charlie is up there as one of the very best. He’s 10 so we don’t know how long we’ll have with him, but every day is a blessing - he’s a grumpy, snoozy, frantic giant ball of fluff and I love him.

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It only squeaks when you walk past a certain point and it is one of those noises that gets subsumed into the background hubbub of the day until later at night when it becomes an early warning system for anyone using the bathroom. It’s right under the bed, under a carpet in the middle of the room, and only became an issue shortly after we redecorated. Perhaps something got stuck, knocked loose or whatever.

I even tried to find it at one point, moving furniture and peeling back a freshly laid carpet to hunt the elusive squeak. I thought I got it too, fashioning an ingenious shim with a piece of wood. The squeak was almost imperceptible for less than 48 hours.

Wishful thinking. The cat came back, the very next day.

I had a choice. Pragmatically, I could strip the bedroom and undo weeks of renovation or accept the fact that sometimes floorboards squeak. It is frankly one of many squeaky floorboards in an old house and I have enough going on. On the scale of 1-10 it ranks about a 3 on the eye-twitch-ometer and given previous attempts at DIY I’d probably end up accidentally sawing a hole through the universe.

I am learning to pick my battles.

This may seem like a trivial example but it’s just one of a thousand ‘not quite right’ things that compete for airtime simultaneously; a chorus of compliance which grows like mould when I’m struggling with intrusive thoughts, which is where I need to be focused on at the moment because the medication hasn’t been working as well as it used to, as I expected it to.

I thought it’d follow the same script as it always does:

• I slowly dip

• I don’t realise

• I try to manage without meds

• I change my mind, titrate, back up.

• I feel better and think I’ll be ok this time.

• Am fine for 9 months

• Titrate off

• Repeat

This has been my merry-go-round since I was 20. Not this time. I’m seeing some improvement at step 4 but I’m maybe halfway to where I’d expect to be at step 5 by now.

This is also indicative of how I perceive the world, a series of checklists against which I measure my karmic score - I am literally beating myself up for not being good enough at getting better. I’m doing everything else right (diet, exercise, therapy, sobriety, work life balance blah) but I’m still not sleeping properly, I have paralysing bouts of anxiety and a misinterpreted WhatsApp message made me cry the other day.

I should have improvement, stability, certainty by now. The irony is not lost on me.

But unlike the squeaky floorboard I don’t need to peel back the carpet to nail the planks down. Peeling back the carpet was what started all this so I am currently stood in a room of all squeaky floorboards, except I have a toffee hammer. (I also found a ton of metaphors under this carpet, I hope you like them)

I have long resisted the simple fact that - for me - the meds I’m on don’t work nearly as well at low doses for OCD so I’ve moved up to the right dose. I’m finally accepting that it’s time to bring out the nail gun. For ages I convinced myself that, if I could logic myself safe for 30 years, I could do it with just the bare minimum help and therapy. Good vibes only. That chemical help was just a crutch.

That is of course hubristic and stubborn and quite hypocritical as a mental health nurse. Plus it nearly went very wrong and it’s not even true. I couldn’t logic myself safe at all, I just created a giant maze of weird coping mechanisms. The idea of ‘big guns’ medication frightened me because I am relinquishing control to a third party, and control is what keeps my brain from spiralling into chaos.

But the bottom line is I’m just really really scared. I’m just so sick of this cycle and I’m genuinely frightened that this time I won’t come out of the dip, like this is the best I am going to be. I know it isn’t going to go away, but I am scared I’m not strong enough to cope with what’s left. I feel like I have to work harder than ever to keep my head above water.

I don’t want to be writing about my weird brain, I want to be writing a complex interwoven spy thriller with juicy murders and sultry femme fatales. To get there I need to do everything and if everything means nail-gunning the floorboards down so I can do my therapy in a quiet room to actually build resilience then so be it. It’s not fun, I have to have an ECG, I get headaches, my stomach is off and I have that weird taste in my mouth again.

But I am done trying to cut corners. I’ll do anything. That way, when the cat comes back, we can be friends.

PS: The Cat came back is one of my favourite cartoons, seemed appropriate.

PPS: I’m probably going to move these OCD posts to a new section, so you can choose to follow them, I appreciate they aren’t for everyone.

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It’s something I’ve been mulling over for a while, but I don’t feel like I’m learning so much as playing a game. And I got demoted from the “Diamond league” yesterday after over 2 years and I just didn’t care. If I’m serious about being intentional when using my phone, gamified stuff has to go, it’s a sure-fire gateway to habits I’m working hard to break.

So au revoir monsieur Chouette. It’s gone along with the socials and honestly it feels bigger than Instagram, which I used compulsively. A little insight is a dangerous thing, when you start to approach your habits with a raised eyebrow. Anything which means that I have to pick up my phone to do a repetitive, reward-driven activity is something I now view with a healthy scepticism. I want my phone to become functional again.

This all comes on the heels of a biiiig ol’downswing too. Properly in my boots for a few days and huge spikes in hypervigilance and rumination, all day. I’m more curious than concerned weirdly, the trajectory isn’t conforming to that which I am accustomed and I’m intrigued as to why. On paper I’m doing everything else right, but there’s something definitely needs tweaking. I’m still waking up at 4.30 every morning (6 weeks now) which definitely isn’t helping but I absolutely don’t want meds for that, they make me feel really weird and I already feel really weird.

In the meantime though, thanks to a bit less scrolling, and a bit more intent, I’ve been able to make time to read actual books and listen to music properly. Until very recently I’ve found that really difficult, with print feeling dense and impenetrable and my attention wandering. I’ve always listened to a lot of audio books but it’s nice to pick up a paper one.

I finished the Vegetarian by Han Kang. I was actually convinced I had finished it already but got it confused with another one on the list. So I picked it up yesterday and absolutely devoured part three. It’s a beautiful, haunting and vivid investigation of expectation, grief and transformation.

Speaking of devouring, I’m also listening to King Sorrow by Joe Hill.

It’s exciting, disturbing and very funny. Bullied kids find a way to exact revenge but at a terrible cost. I’m a way off finishing it yet but every time I think I know where it’s going to go there’s a new fun wrinkle. I’m loving it.

Other books I have enjoyed listening to recently:

• The Devils by Joe Abercrombie - Hilariously bloody fantasy romp

• Butter by Asako Yuzuki - An effortlessly delicious book which made me hungry

• Beyond the Wall by Katja Hoyer - Berlin pre/post wall, fascinating

• Turtles All the Way Down by John Green - A beautiful depiction of OCD

• Slow Horses series by Mick Herron (all of them) - Spooky Spy shenanigans

Music-wise I can highly recommend Little Foot by Calibre. Ella recommended it to me and my favourites have switched daily depending on my mood. I’m not sure what category to put it in - Ambient Drum & Bass maybe.

Run Tun feels like someone is blanketing my amygdala, while Choosing Beggar feels like being swallowed by a benevolent, spectral Whale. It’s an incredible album. It’s the audio equivalent of one of these:

Bit of a non-sequitur summary today, but better out than in, eh.

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“And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you..”
Friedrich Nietzsche

Going back into ERP therapy in July this year was, I thought, a shrewd proactive choice to check in and keep my levels topped up. I’d been discharged from services in March 2022 and I thought was doing just dandy. Sure, I still got caught up in stuff from time to time but it passed. I had it sussed. (It’s at this point that a sombre Morgan Freeman voiceover tells you I did not in fact have it sussed).

Andy Dufresne - who crawled through a river of shit and came out clean on the other side.

It was about 10 minutes into the first session back that I realised I was only about halfway down that particular sewage pipe. I’m probably going over bits I’ve mentioned before since I started my whimsical journey of self-actualisation, but I need context to tie all these strangled metaphors together and I’m not reading back. I live in the present now, man.

My therapist, a splendid human who is in America*, didn’t argue when I said I thought I’d probably gamed it first time round. I was saying this through snot-bubbles and sobs over Zoom - just like 2020 only with less sourdough. I knew I’d cherry picked the bits of therapy I found useful and swerved the hard stuff, because I felt better than I’d felt for years and I naively thought that wave would continue forever.

Imagine my surprise, three years later when I have to admit to myself that wasn’t dandy. I’d simply (like usual) just got used to the gradual increase in symptoms which crept in over that time, like a frog in a pot. I’d been so blasé about it that I’d proactively contacted the doctors in December and said I wanted to come off meds and see how I go. I don’t regret that decision, not at all; I was as strong physically and mentally as I’d ever been at that point and I was certain I had the resilience to fly solo. But I’d caught a thread on a nail and not noticed, and I was unravelling.

ERP (Exposure & Response Prevention) for OCD is hard. It’s very, very hard. In summary you get to a point where you purposely engage with intrusive thoughts (The E) in order to consciously trigger the distress that goes with it, then sit with that distress without engaging in the compulsive behaviour attached with it (The RP). But I know it works because it has worked in the past, the first time round. What I did that time was address the triggers that scored maybe 1-5. They don’t give you the big stuff first, you have to build up. The 6-10s weren’t front & centre at that time so I thought it’d be fine to just apply what I’d learnt should I need to.

Plus it’s expensive. I was in a very fortunate position to be able to afford it but it wasn’t an inexhaustible resource. I made the decision that I had what I needed and I could do it. And on honest reflection if I’d been really disciplined I probably could have done better than I did. But I didn’t and here we are. So this time I was all in. No nook un-swept, no cranny un-explored. I promised myself if I was going to do this, and commit to it mentally, emotionally as well as financially, I had to surrender to it.

I still had the NOCD app on my phone from the last round of therapy. I used it like a worry stone, a talisman. Knowing it was there reminded me of the work I put in and the exercises I’d practiced. But these had dulled over time with complacency and a dash of hubris, and also themes change constantly. OCD doesn’t just latch onto one thing, that’s lazy writing for TV. OCD is like knotweed. It’s like an old house covered in ivy. You have to keep on top of it or it swallows you. When I restarted therapy I looked at the part of the app where I’d listed my triggers in 2021 and I didn’t even remember a couple of them, but there were loads that weren’t there because they weren’t a problem then, not yet.

The big ones though, the 6-10s, they were there. The moral scrupulosity, the self harm, the perfection/catastrophe tightrope, the public humiliation/ostracization, the visceral, vivid horror. All the hits on one CD. But first I really had to properly understand what my compulsions are, because I thought most of mine were mental compulsions (sometimes known as Pure O because its persistent obsessional rumination).

My therapist is brilliant because she just lets me pull threads and scattergun stuff, pinging the odd thing back until I make sense of it. Is this a compulsion? Is that a compulsion? Turns out the short answer is broadly Yes. I was determined not to pathologize my entire personality because I’m not OCD, I am someone who lives with it. But I have to be honest with myself because this has been my life since I was 10. My entire makeup is peppered with little rituals, physical and verbal tics, habits and behaviours which I have used to varying degrees for 40 years to reduce distress. The way I talk, how I grind my teeth, brush my teeth, read, open the door, check the oven, tidy up, balance my finances, start conversations, review conversations, check my email, everything.

It’s easy to say ‘Eeh, but that’s just how people are sometimes.’

That is true, it really is.

And I did that for a very long time, because I could reassure myself that other people did it so I was ok. But these things go far far beyond ‘quirky’ because I don’t choose to do it, I have to do it, or more often I don’t even know I am doing it until I’m halfway through. When I do notice, it’s then that I realise it’s because my brain is literally barfing toxic ooze at me, and spontaneously rearranging that huge bookshelf held the key to closing the valve. If I don’t I’m covered in brain ooze and I literally can’t think. And if I do catch myself halfway through I have the fear of the intrusion, the frustration of not catching it, and the embarrassment of a half-finished pointless chore that still needs finishing because the books are on the floor in the wrong order.

I’ve been so habituated to the little ones that I focus on the big ones - the finances one is huge, my phone is a convoluted and increasingly distressing app-dance, my absolutely baffling requirements for ‘just right’ which change depending on the trigger. Over many, many years I have developed (again, very common) a kind of amorphous doomscape call-and-response, whereby I don’t even need a clear trigger, I just need something nebulous to trip the sensors. By the time I got back on the meds it was just like pinball and I was becoming frightened to leave the house.

Knowing and understanding my compulsions has been by far the hardest thing to come to terms with this time round, and definitely the thing that tipped me over into the decision to go back on meds. I am much more cognizant of my compulsions now, a few months in and it has honestly been really helpful because although I know I have a LOT of work in front of me, for the first time in my entire life I know what it actually looks like.

I’m not staring into the abyss, I’m looking out of it.

*(treatmyocd.com is incredibly the most direct means of getting proper ERP for OCD, because the mental health services in the UK just don’t deal with it properly)

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I was at the work Christmas party, walking into a room of people the majority of whom I’ve never met in person. I started this job 7 months ago and I’m mainly remote so I rely on teams windows and voices. I’m better with voices than faces when it comes to recognising people, neither of which help because I am terrible at remembering names. It’s a running joke in our house.

I don’t really like Christmas, because I associate it with times in my life when I was very unwell. For some reason the epoch-defining OCD spikes that shut down my teens and early twenties all happened round the end of the year. Perhaps there’s a Vitamin D component to it, perhaps my association has built up to be far more than it is over the years, I don’t know, but it is always a relief when January 2nd rolls round. I was half-joking about forgetting how to socialise, but my colleague agreed enthusiastically. “Since Covid,” she said “everyone is more awkward.” We were talking specifically talking about work social events as we filed into the function room behind a man wearing an upside-down Santa hat.

The party was fine. It was quite fun actually. My new colleagues are great and there was a collective atmosphere of pride in a job well done this year. Nevertheless I left after the meal as the ‘disco’ was starting and the covers band were playing at a volume loud enough to dislodge fillings and I’d forgotten my earplugs. Plus when you’re sober, unless you have specific anchors to the narrative (which is impossible at a work Christmas do) watching people get banjaxed becomes boring quickly. So I picked my moment when the lights went down to the tune of Mr Brightside and made my exeunt. Nobody batted an eyelid when I left to be honest, they were too busy in the photo booth, and I wasn’t actually the only one leaving either.

Fundamentally I am far more aware of my social batteries now. Not just because I’m rediscovering my equilibrium on medication, but because I feel like the way I interact with the world has changed in the last 18 months. It took me at least that long post giving up drinking in 2019 to accept that a large part of my drinking was self medication, and the following five years to work out a new way of navigating the noise without booze. The reason it took so long I think, was I replaced pub for gym and did little else for a year. Socialising at the gym is different, and you can’t really think about anything else during jiu jitsu, you’re trying to preserve consciousness and limb function. Plus it was a strict, repetitive, endorphin-filled routine, and I felt physically great. Then Covid hit, and I couldn’t socialise if I wanted to.

After we were allowed out to play again I was all about training and the gym, it was my third space. My first and second spaces were both at home, so it made it all the more important to have somewhere different to go. Even during the brief interlude when I broke my leg I was focused on getting back to the mats, the community is incredibly important to both of us. Which is why when I started getting really really anxious about going to and being in the gym recently, it worried me immensely.

Taking a step back from something that makes me happy was a wrench, but I needed to work out what was going on. After I’d got through the first couple of weeks of titrating back on meds I started to understand that things had changed - since starting therapy properly this year I have found it harder to mask. Masking is commonly spoken of in relation to autism, but with OCD it is absolutely a thing. Your brain is literally screaming at you so in order to be in public there has to be a buffer between the outside world and the horrors. I do not let it show. I can’t. Only my therapist knows the full spectrum of all the most distressing intrusive thoughts and that took decades. I hold therapists like Allegra Kastens and Chrissy Hodges in such high regard for their no fear approach to it, they were my introduction to ERP.

I definitely can’t do that, but I am also finding it harder to maintain the veneer. People who know me very well could spot it, but I was very good at hiding extreme anxiety by just being boisterous, or busy. Sometimes I could even convince myself that I was broadly fine, ‘positive vibes only’ does work for a bit, ‘til it doesn’t then the wheels fall off. I really don’t like showing it at the gym though, and I don’t really know why, especially as it is the most inclusive, caring, supportive place and I co-run a men’s’ mental health group. Maybe it was because I felt I couldn’t disappoint people, I don’t know I’m still working it out. It’s probably the unachievably exacting moral scrupulosity that drives my OCD above everything else which I will never ever satisfy.

But the decision was made for me when I basically had a panic attack on the mats and nearly bolted. I spoke to a few close friends at the gym and of course they were amazing, but I still couldn’t shake this weird sense of shame that I’d let people down by being ill. Which is bonkers.

So now that I can think a bit clearer I’m back training properly and I’ve been renegotiating my relationship with the world, that’s the best way to describe it. I realise that my ability to mask the way I used to has changed and I have to accept that with this change comes a certain vulnerability which I’m not used to. As well as being quite frightening there is something oddly liberating about it, and I’m trying to approach it with curiosity because I’ve held this so painfully close for so long and I’m tired.

I’m really tired.

Photo by Adi Goldstein on Unsplash

I’d love to see what the inside of my head looks like on an MRI. I’ve seen the example OCD brains like the one above loads, I reckon mine glows like Marcellus Wallace’s briefcase. It makes sense, when you look at the MRI scans it tells a tale of overactivity, of energy consumption. I am under no illusion that there’s a dollop of health anxiety on this observational donut, but I am also comfortable that I’ve been navigating this landscape for the better chunk of four decades. I know what my own brain feels like, and it’s fizzy jellyfish.

This isn’t just a side effect of fluoxetine, this is what my particular flavour of neuro-nonsense feels like all the time. The difference with meds and therapy is that you start to think clearer so it’s not just a relentless din and there are periods of peace. Real, tangible, static-less peace. So when the whump comes, when the jellyfish pulse their chorus, they are still loud but they sound different. Further away.

When I write this stuff I usually just barf it out and edit it later. I’m looking at the above paragraph as I type and it sounds absolutely bonkers but it makes so much sense to me. That’s what it feels like. It’s fascinating to me that the action of me typing a metaphorical interpretation of my own neurons is only possible thanks to those self-same connections. Thankfully I’ve seldom been too distressed by existential intrusive thoughts (a very common subtype) because meta-analysis of one’s own neural pathways is a bit spicy even without crippling dread.

I’m still a bit fizzy now, if I’m honest. I was disappointed that things that really bothered me a month ago that I thought I’d bested, started bothering me again this week. Stepping out as an observer has helped, I do try and approach things mindfully when I remember, but I tend to be thinking so many things at once that mindfulness gets lost in amongst it all. What it has done for me this week is given me a renewed compassion and a better understanding of my compulsive behaviours (which are around order, checking and repetition) and I’ve been catching them earlier. I’ve been able to challenge them and sit with it - actively courting the whump. This sucks so much, I can’t even begin to describe. But it sucks a tiny tiny bit less every time, and that’s the work.

And in time, I will command my jellyfish army.

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In formative terms, there are always a few moments in a person’s life which really stick out. I look back on the year I lived in The Bedsit as one of those moments. Bedsit isn’t really used as a term any more; I said it to a young person the other day and they looked at me like I was describing a civil war tent. HMO is the more modern parlance I think, but Bedsit describes this place better than anything else.

Harrogate, 1996. Garbage had released their eponymous debut, Nic Cage was hammin’ it up good & proper in The Rock and Jarvis waved his arse at Michael Jackson during The Brit awards. I’d moved out of home aged 19 and for a few months I lived in a pokey little flat (no bigger than a Bedsit really) before accepting the offer to move into The Bedsit with friends down the road. I was working in a bookshop, had just started a new relationship and things were new, exciting and cheap.

The owner of the house was a man we will call Harold. Harold looked like a prog band roadie, barely spoke and ran his little fiefdom with all the concern of a man watching fruit rot in a bowl. The electricity ran on manual coin-fed meters that only took old 10p pieces, which ceased to be legal tender in 1992. Each room/dwelling had one and Harold kept a reserve of these which he swapped out fortnightly or whenever he could be arsed. In the meantime we all worked out that the gap at the bottom of the coin tray would fit a butter knife so you could just hoik one out and feed it in again.

There were 2 dwellings on the ground floor. One was rented by ‘The Hat’, who spent his every waking moment ripping bongs and playing Tomb Raider or Resident Evil on the groundbreaking new Playstation he’d bought from his burgeoning weed business. The other was a flat of sorts rented in the first instance by people with names lost to time, then by yet more people from the pub collective.

On the first floor was a bathroom, a kitchen, the payphone and 3 rooms - mine was one of these, next to the kitchen. My floormates were a hippy couple who had a huge collection of rave bootlegs (which they would play at an ear splitting volume to poorly disguise their clockwork scheduled sex-noise) and an incontinent alcoholic who, in rare moments of sobriety was one of the most intelligent people I have ever met. He would finance his evening’s drinking by rinsing a quiz machine, always saving a pound to do the same in the next pub when his winnings were done. The top floor was a self contained flat, again shared by multiple people, including my sister and her then boyfriend for a while.

The place was damp, peeling, uncarpeted and filthy. It stank of burnt food, burnt weed and years-old body odour. But it was a fucking fun place to live for a while. We felt like rebels, eschewing the crisp white shirts and jodhpurs of the Harrogate set and living free, like the guy on the inside cover of the second Prodigy Album flicking the Vs at the Police, except we were also paying nominal rent to a hapless goon. Whenever I see reruns of The Young Ones, I am reminded of this place.

It wasn’t all fun, free spirited anarchy, looking back. In fact it is a wonder nobody died or got tetanus. We all had unexplained skin complaints. The lack of carpets meant that there were nails sticking out of almost every floorboard, where they weren’t missing. The woodchip wallpaper (such that it was) was mouldy and the wiring in the kitchen was so flaky that the lights would switch on and off on their own. Add a house of feckless stoners into the mix and the place nearly burned down thanks to some fish fingers that The Hat had left under the grill while nodding off, bong in hand. Unsurprisingly there were no smoke detectors.

But the worst room in the house was the bathroom. It is going to sound like an exaggeration but unfortunately I’m not the only person to witness this abomination. The bath had no plug so you could only use the shower, which is no bad thing because nobody cleaned anything. Ever. The tide mark was thick enough to chip off. The tiles behind the shower were just put on top of other tiles, which meant that large, pink fungus squidged out between them, like the swimming pool in Annihilation.

Then there was the toilet. An unholy vessel besmirched by demons, it was treated with such disdain that one day we were witness to someone so lazy they’d not even bothered to lift the lid, and just shat on top of it. But that wasn’t even the worst thing. During some spirited renovation work which lasted at least 3 months, the downstairs flat had no ceiling in the kitchen. Remember the missing floorboards? When you were sat on the demon throne you could see into their kitchen.

I wish I was joking. We all thought it was hilarious. We never questioned that everyone was sick all the time; only when I got glandular fever did I start to think that my diet of cheese slices and pasta’n’sauce wasn’t hitting my macros. I lie of course, macros didn’t exist in 1996. We had alcopops.

Friendships were forged and shattered in that place. Police knew about it, it got raided at least once. One tenant had a car parked outside but forgot about 2 pints of milk on the back seat which then exploded on a summer afternoon, coating the inside in rancid cheese. (He’d paid £150 for it and had to pay the scrap yard £60 to take it away). As neighbours we were probably absolute twats but less than we could’ve been given that it was a semi detached, the other side being derelict.

We all moved out gradually, having grown up or given up. When I left Harold told me he wanted a month’s notice, and I told him to shove it. He then found my mum’s number (its a small town and smaller still back then) and rang me there to try and intimidate me into paying, so I just went to the pub where we all hung out - including him - and just stood at the bar waiting for him to say something - he never did. I am not an intimidating person by any means and at that point I’d lost so much weight I looked like a javelin with an orange on top. But he was a chancer and an idiot, and wasn’t that kind of person either so we nodded a strange truce and went on with our lives.

He saw an opportunity to make some money and we saw an opportunity to save some money, while building a cast iron immune system. I looked on Zoopla just now and houses down that street start at £330k. Whoever took that on in the 90s would have paid 40 quid cash. I say ‘took it on’ because Harold got rid. He had to, because a few years later he got caught trying to sell a large quantity of class A’s out of the boot of his car to an undercover police officer and was rewarded with a spell in what would have been a far better appointed room than the one I rented off him. Swings and roundabouts.

Weirdly I still have fond memories of the place; listening to Fat of the Land, playing the PC version of Tomb Raider sat on the edge of the wonky divan bed. Given the blogs I’ve written recently about OCD and anxiety I genuinely don’t associate any particular spikes with that place, whereas either side I can distinctly pinpoint several. It was a strange Bermuda Triangle year where nothing could be more chaotic that that place so I think my brain just called a truce for a bit.

Not keen to test that theory though.

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Or, I could take a breath and understand that I wrote it when I was absolutely fizzing with a heady combination of unchecked OCD, spiralling anxiety and post-Covid brain fog (which is WILD. I’ve not felt that leaden since I had glandular fever*). I am pretty certain that Covid was what tipped my symptoms over the edge if I’m honest. Doesn’t matter though, would’ve happened sooner or later. Anyhoo, I barely remember writing it and I still passed FFS. Maybe I should cut myself some slack. But that as we know, is a whole ‘nother work in progress, much like my next assignment.

I’m not there yet but I can see the signs. I’ve heard people talk about seeing life in more vivid colour when they come out of a depressive episode, which makes sense. For me though, when I’m unwell everything is sharp, jagged, neon bright and jarring. When I start to come out of it the colours are more muted, the palette relaxed, the edges smooth. Right now it’s still bumpy but the spikes are starting to dull. Muted, pastel bumps. Like a Laura Ashley scatter cushion**.

* I was living in a bedsit in 1996, it was horrific. I’ll do a post about it at some point but the combination of poor diet, weed and literal mushrooms in the bathroom meant that when I got tonsilitis my body decided it needed a lot more time to recover. 6 weeks as it turned out. I’m surprised I didn’t get rabies.

** Does Laura Ashley even exist any more? I’m not going to Google it, I will live in blissful paisley ignorance***

*** It does.

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I’m back on Prozac for the first time in 13 years.

I was switched to Sertraline (Zoloft) in 2012, the last time I had a ‘brain based sabbatical’, having been on Prozac on & off for a long time. It was late October, I was working in the prison and I had completely taken my eye off the ball regarding all my protective tools. My OCD and anxiety (I was far too late to realise) was absolutely running rampant and I was an insomniac, paranoid, incomprehensible mess. My GP changed my meds because he said we should try something new. I wasn’t taking the Prozac anyway, I’d decided in my infinite wisdom they weren’t working. They probably were, they just weren’t enough to cope with what I was dealing with at the time. In retrospect, I think he also swapped them because Sertraline is marginally less harmful in overdose than Prozac.

I also believe I dodged a stay in hospital by a whisker because I’d fallen into a deep depression and voiced some very clear evidence of suicidal ideation in the consultation. I didn’t want to, but I thought I had no other choice; I had had constant, visceral, vivid and brutal intrusive thoughts of self harm and suicide for weeks and I was at my wits end. Thankfully I was able to offer some immediate reassurances.

It’s all a bit hazy now but I do recall for the first week or so I slept. 18 hours a day. My body and mind were absolutely ruined from months of running on adrenaline and a determination to bulldoze my way through this without actually trying to work out what ‘this’ was. I had made a solemn promise to myself and my wife Pam that I was safe to be left alone and I collapsed into the relief of exhausted capitulation. 4 months of intensive counselling, exercise, diet and gradual resocialisation and I returned to work. This time I saw my time out and left on my own, stronger terms about 18 months later with a spring in my step and a tiny little knotted hanky on a stick full to the brim with trauma I would resolutely ignore for ten years.

Then I decided I was ready. I wrote about some of the stuff in the Nursing Notes section on here, found a postgraduate course which helped me make more sense of some of it, and decided it was time to re-enter therapy. I’m not the same person I was in 2012 but I realise now that I shouldn’t have started the therapy without something, because it’s a spicy meatball. Like that bit where Beetlejuice demonstrates how scary he can be and all the snakes come out of his face, only it’s me looking at my own face. And it’s opened up some dusty old doors even the pre-millennium meds didn’t touch.

Back to Prozac. The OG for OCD, and having been on Sertraline for a long time I am glad I’m back on it, even a week in. Sertraline worked, but not the same. It’s the difference between furry earmuffs and earplugs; neither make the noise go away completely but one is definitely better. I thought long and hard about my options before speaking to the GP this time and I reflected on past prolonged periods of stability, relative to the stress in my life at the time. Prozac wins every time, even with the prison in the mix (I could’ve been on Laudanum, it wouldn’t have made a dent). I remember a month or two after first starting it in 1999 feeling a sense of relief I’d never experienced before.

Maybe I’m romanticising that a bit. It was 26 years ago after all. What is definitely true is that I took that feeling for granted and didn’t put the work in. Partly because I didn’t know what the ‘work’ was (ERP wasn’t a thing in 1999). I had made the terrifying intrusive thoughts go away for a bit and I felt like a human being, so that was a big tick in the win column. Cue close to 20 years of - at best - mixed results. I’ve done Prozac, I’ve done therapy. I’ve even eventually done the right kind of therapy but not with Prozac.

So I messaged the GP and asked for an appointment. After a brief kerfuffle with an online AI chat bot GP-o-Matic 4000 who took my PHQ-9 score and thought I was going to burst into flames immediately. I wasn’t, but my score was high and I’d have been concerned if someone in front of me scored that highly. A couple of phone calls later I got to speak to a GP who - thankfully - was a bit older and very experienced in the ways of mental health medication and wholeheartedly agreed with my rationale for restarting Prozac, given my history. The one advantage of being a trained Mental Health Nurse (RMN) with a long and storied history of synaptic shenanigans, I can sometimes be very good at articulating how I feel, noggin-wise. I should probably make better use of it instead of trying to white knuckle through stressful situations, but it’s a process okay?

I knew it was going to be weird, getting back to a therapeutic dose. I’ve done this dance before. While they settle SSRIs make me incredibly tired, sweat buckets, yawn continuously and really upset my stomach for about 10 days. My general mood also tends to vacillate between a startled rabbit at one end and Fun Bobby in Friends, after he stops drinking* at the other, to use a contemporary reference. An RMN would call that emotional lability, a normal person would call it mood swings. I know rationally it’s my brain getting used to the new chemical landscape and the needle will settle in the middle soon enough. I made the conscious decision to take a few days off, put the flag up to close friends and retreat while the worst of it passes, which I think it has, just about. Pam and I have made a den, watched films, eaten pizza, played Carcassonne and slept. A full reset.

I know there’s loads of research to say that the whole chemical imbalance thing isn’t as cut & dried as SSRIs might suggest, and that a lot of it is placebo. I’ll take it. I also know that there are plenty of people who can manage OCD/GAD/chronic depression without drugs. Cool. If you can achieve enlightenment by sunning your taint, knock yourself out. I can’t. I’ve tried both ways and half a dozen other ways besides. I stopped drinking almost 7 years ago. I’m vegetarian. I take all the recommended supplements, I exercise, I talk to the professionals and I do the work. On paper I could pass for an insufferable wellness guru floating through the San Fernando valley on a cloud of self-actualisation and patchouli - and yet. I tried it without meds, twice with the support of GPs and therapists. Didn’t work. They aren’t for everyone, but meds work for me.

I need store bought serotonin and I’m fine with that. I can’t do this dance again, I am pretty sure this is me now for the long haul, and that’s OK. It’s only been a week, and although it’s early doors (4-6 weeks to reach a therapeutic dose) I’m starting to feel definite changes. It has dialled the worst of the OCD/GAD symptoms down from an 8/9 to maybe a 5/6. Long way to go but that’s huge. I can see the wood for the trees. I’m interested to see where I go from here. I’m proud of how I dealt with this to be honest, I pumped the brakes later than I should have but still in good time. I’m not out of the woods yet and this is a whole-life deal, but it really shows me how far I’ve come in ten years. I feel quite calm (a very rare commodity recently) and keen to keep going with the therapy, supported this time.

I’m excited to get back to my favourite things with my favourite people, and for what comes next because I know I can deal with it. And you can too. If you need it, take it. But you need to do the work alongside - when you’re down in the well the meds are the ladder, you still have to climb up it. That’s the deal.

*Even when I was young I was uncomfortable with that depiction. It implied sober people were boring. When I first stopped drinking a close friend of mine called me Fun Bobby and I’ll be honest it really upset me. That said the flat, distracted affect is an accurate comparison here. Your mileage may vary.

Photo by Ksenia Yakovleva on Unsplash

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That’s what anxiety feels like when it’s peaking. The stomach churning, white hot terror of a nameless and inexorable dread, within clawing distance and intent on your doom. It’s your body’s threat response telling you to prepare for danger which - in the case of an alien with two mouths and acid for blood would be entirely justified, but not so much when you want to book your car in for a service and get the dates mixed up. Anxiety is normal, important for keeping us safe and usually transient. Where it becomes a problem is when the definition of a threat is too broad, and the response to a minor inconvenience is the same as a major event. It becomes a relentless tearful exercise in hypervigilance and catastrophising. It’s also incredibly self centred in some ways and when you notice it it’s hard not to lump it on the worry list in its own right.

I’m way too preoccupied with my perception in the eyes of others. Someone said to me the other day “I can’t imagine you having a cross word with anyone.” I looked at them and smiled, all the time absolutely excoriating internally myself for a joke that didn’t quite land five minutes earlier, irritated for being so hard on myself in the first place and terrified all this is visible on my face like a noticeboard. We were in a bar at the time and the background noise was such that I found myself zoning out to pick up on peripheral conversations too, removing myself further from the present. I felt like I was losing control of the situation and I gripped the table to stop myself from bolting. Cross words don’t count if they’re self inflicted.

If I could describe my default emotional state it is ‘waiting for the other shoe to drop’. The threat is a spectrum of the normal to the ridiculous;

• People are suddenly going to be able to see my intrusive thoughts and compulsions? Run out of town.

• I get an email from my boss? P45.

• HMRC letter? Tax fraud.

• I say something that isn’t interpreted the way I intended? Shunned.

• Triggering and upsetting news story? People will think I did it.

At least 2 of those anyone would have experienced at some point. At least a couple of those are demonstrably daft. And these are the low end of the scale. And everything goes through that filter.

There is a reason that OCD is sometimes misdiagnosed as Schizophrenia because the thought patterns are so irrational and disjointed that to the uninformed it could present as such. The difference is that in OCD there is an inate insight and awareness of its irrationality - I know it’s stupid, I just can’t stop doing it and I hate myself even more as a result. What makes it worse it that weirdly in times of actual crisis I am quite calm, as though my brain elbows its way in saying “This is what we trained for lads, lets go!”.

The most important aspect at this point in therapy for me, is the viewpoint. I am aware of my position as the central figure in it all, the only unbitten in a room of zombies just waiting for them to get a sniff of fresh blood and turn in unison, rending me limb from gory limb. Only they’re not zombies at all, they’re people with their own lives, own anxieties, drivers, fears, perversions and loyalty cards. They don’t give a second thought about me until there’s reason to and why would they? Because I’m worried about what they think of me? Who do I think I am? I’m almost positive that rationally, the things that keep me awake at night probably don’t bother the people in question one jot. But with me as the main character I see the narrative as all about me, and their reactions to me become currency tied to my self worth, always in the red.

Anxiety (and specifically in my case, Obsessive Compulsive symptoms) became easier to understand when I accepted it is about control and certainty. I crave conclusions, answers, finality. And it has to be immediate because invariably my internal alarms are screaming and I need to enter the code to turn it off. Accepting this means you can put measures in place to strengthen your ability to sit with uncertainty and be comfortable with the blaring unknown. It also means acknowledging that your default position of ‘main character’ has to change. Because once I realised that I truly understood the futility of trying to seek certainty from anything.

My main OCD theme is probably moral scrupulosity. It centres around a need to be perfect in every action and interaction measured against an absolutely unattainable and arbitrary set of rules. Compulsions (for me anyway) are rooted in self audit, checking and order. I have to know where I stand against some nebulous scoreboard 24/7. I’ve replayed conversations over and over so many times that they have not only lost all meaning, but I’ve lost literal chunks of memories to a blur of half-remembered infractions replayed to death. I’ve convinced myself I’ve I’ve offended so many people so many times it’s a wonder I’m not in a gibbet by a crossroads. I have engineered conversations, phonecalls and when I was younger even ‘chance’ meetings to check if someone is still OK with me (the precise definition of ‘OK’ being unknown to even me until I’ve had time to ruminate a bunch more).

I’m not even perfect, amazingly. My life is littered with cringeworthy actual things which, while they cause me shame and embarassment like anyone else, weirdly hold marginally less power over me than the nameless possibility of something new, or the magical uncovering of something old. It’s an odd juxtaposition, the aim of the condition being the worry about the thing as opposed to the thing itself. I have certainty in those things because I did or said the thing for sure, so I can’t extrapolate the fractal of every possible outcome... And yet there’s always a way to eke out an extra nugget of existential dread from a 30 year old conversation in a pub because I’m going to have more conversations, so I’m bound to fuck it up because I did that one time. They therefore become the statute upon which all else is judged. The verdict? Guilty. The sentence, purgatory in perpetuity. (And this doesn’t even touch on false memory symptoms, a whole other barrel of beans).

This will have common threads which resonate with most people. It’s normal human behaviour to ruminate and catastrophise sometimes. But when it’s all day, every day to a disabling degree that starts to affect when (and even if) you leave the house, you should probs talk to an expert about it. And understand it will be tough, because it kinda has to be for a little while; you’re learning new pathways which are probably deeply rutted and worn - some of mine look more Iike trenches.

This insight barfathon is the result of 3 months back in therapy, some uncomfortable truths about how I ‘gamed‘ the last round to avoid talking about the really hard stuff and the acceptance that, should an alien decide to fall through the ceiling one day and lay an egg in my chest, I’d mostly be woefully underprepared.

Mostly.

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The actual idiom is “Cut your coat according to your cloth” and refers to the need to live within your means financially, but it absolutely tracks to physical reserves. It rang true at the time because I had just trained and felt like I’d been run over. I had so much more energy, stamina and strength as recently as a few months ago but a bout of Covid, a new job and other personal circumstances meant that I’ve not been able to do a full week of training in months and I was feeling a bit run down.

This didn’t seem to dissipate over the following weeks to the extent I though I might be getting another bug. Then the clocks went back.

I hate winter. Other than the opportunity to wear some of the cool hoodies in my collection it is a soul-sucking, moribund desolate time of year. The seasonal festivities are a stressful, forced shopping experience and do nothing to alleviate the ceaseless urge to hibernate until spring. I have had Seasonal Affective swings all my life but this year it appears to have landed with extra doom. To use the idiom, with a full-size coat the swing into winter is irksome but manageable, but it was a bomber jacket by September and I knew it was going to be tough to restore fabric in time. I tried to mitigate it instead with a series of increasingly elaborate hats (mainly involving entrenched routine).

To a certain extent I saw it coming because I made it happen on purpose. I decided to change jobs this year on a point of principle, moving to a job I really enjoy but knowing the transition would bring stresses of its own. My wife also had major orthopaedic surgery which was delayed twice and took a tremendous physical and emotional toll on her, and a shift in the division of day-to-day labour which was as frustrating for her as it was exhausting for me. (Thankfully this meant a by-the-numbers recovery so far; we were a well-oiled machine much like her new metal leg). My second year of university started this month too - my dissertation year. I absolutely love it, but the workload is intense and the subject matter (crime and global justice) doesn’t exactly lend itself to ‘positive vibez’. So I’m cautiously navigating that because despite the subject it weirdly brings me great satisfaction.

If that wasn’t enough I also decided to restart therapy for my OCD in August which didn’t go to plan at all. In my defence timing wise I went in with the aim of a check-up, tweak a few things and be on my way, but by the end of the first session I was faced with the inescapable reality that I’d let things smoulder and fester for so long I didn’t realise how bad things were. And they were bad bad. So my choice was to step out and wait until things ‘calm down’ (lolz) or lean in and get on with it. This was the right decision, of course it was. But fuck me it’s rough. I am going to do a post about Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP) therapy at some point when I’m not as entrenched. At the moment it feels like that tipping point in a house renovation where it’d be less stressful to just burn the house down.

With that in mind and to fully batter this metaphor, my coat currently looks like a bolero and I’m wearing two bobble hats and a visor going into Daylight Savings or British Drearytime, whatever you want to call it. Talking to my friend the other day, journalist about changes in seasonal mood and the need for extra discipline and vigilance around this time of year, familiar themes emerged that absolutely align with SAD symptoms as listed by the NHS and MIND:
- Drop in motivation
- Listlessness
- Extreme fatigue
- Hypersensitivity and tearfulness
- Feelings of Guilt and Worthlessness
- Appetite changes (craving carbs or loss of appetite)

But these also align strongly with OCD - the venn diagram is virtually circular in my experience so the effect is heightened. I have to force myself to do anything, I’m exhausted all the time. I’ve lost 8kg. Every single interaction is an excruciating exercise in over-analysis, auditing and recrimination. I question my existence and value in all things and I overcompensate with a forced bonhomie which feels obviously fake. I feel as though the space I take up in the universe isn’t mine, like I’m wearing someone else’s skin (think Vincent D’onofrio in Men in Black), meaning I disassociate a lot. Masking is common because behind that your brain is screaming at you.

I’m 49 for fuck’s sake I should have sorted this by now etc etc.

Writing about it helps a bit - it doesn’t matter if anyone reads it, it’s the exercise that counts. It also makes me feel better because I’m not trauma dumping on my loved ones, a whole other skin to a now planet-sized shame onion. On paper this all sounds dreadful and I guess it is, but I have been here before so many times and this is how it always goes for a bit until the noise dies down. But I’ll be honest I do feel a lot like the old lady in the Aphex Twin video at the moment.

Sitting with anxiety and uncertainty instead of trying to logic your way out (or perform compulsions) feels like your brain is on fire. You’re supposed to be doing something to address [Threat #6714257] but you can’t, because you’re training yourself to understand that it isn’t a threat at all. And I know it works, it’s worked before but this time it feels different and so much harder. I know I have to stay this course and grind it out but this one’s as bad as I can ever remember it.

I’m reminded by my therapist that this is what ‘real world ERP looks like’ and I am employing my techniques correctly to sit with it so I must persevere. I’ve disabled social media in an attempt to reduce the sensory overload which has definitely helped to some degree, but also takes away a big diversionary (and hugely compulsive) tactic to get some of that sweeeet sweet serotonin. It also isolates me from social contact with friends though, compounding the existential angst. Triffic. And doing all this in the dark just takes the piss, cool hoodies or no.

On paper I’m doing everything right. I’m writing this sat next to a SAD lamp, bathing my face in a clinically bright light. I am forcing myself to go out. I am eating healthy food, and I am putting the hard yards in therapy-wise. And I am talking about it, or at least saying it out loud. My wife knows me better than anyone on earth and is a still point in my turning world. So I’m tacking patches onto this coat one way or another, I should audition for Joseph. I’m at a point this morning though, where I am considering restarting medication*. I have been on SSRIs for most of my adult life and I have been quite intractable that I wanted to do this without meds for as long as possible (almost a year now), but at this point in the rodeo and - to use a term I really dislike - I’m struggling to see the benefit to ‘raw dogging’ mental illness.

As a mental health nurse I remind myself that if I was saying this to anyone else, I would stress that store-bought serotonin is fine. I should probably listen, and I could keep it in my new coat.

*considered it, did it. We'll see.

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I’m writing this sat on a futon in the spare room, absolutely full of whatever strain of novel Coronavirus is the de rigeur this year. I’m nextdoor because my wife Pam has had major orthopaedic surgery and needs the space to thrash about getting some sort of comfort as she heals. Plus, on top of multiple sclerosis she certainly doesn’t need the ‘vid, which is why I used one of our spare tests when I woke up the other day feeling like I’d been hit by a truck. Sadly we live in a small house and I was probably barking it round the house for 24 hours before I developed symptoms, so it was no surprise when she tested positive this morning.

Interestingly her symptoms are different to mine. I have classic flu symptoms - sweats, shakes, fatigue - plus I’ve lost taste and smell. This is all really odd for me because this is the first time I’ve ever actually tested positive. I do believe I may have had it before but have always tested negative despite having similar symptoms to Pam when she’s tested positive. It’s weird. Pam’s symptoms are currently limited to heavy fatigue; this presents a conundrum because she’s already fatigued from MS all the time anyway, added to the fatigue healing from a big operation, then there’s a virus to boot. So on balance she’s kind of ok. Her assumption is that her enforced rest and regular prescribed painkillers have been keeping any fever in check, whereas I have been quite run down generally recently so it kicked my ass. The loss of taste and smell for me is the worst. It has made me really anxious and I feel oddly removed from the world. Everything tastes beige and textures don’t make sense.

First time testing positive, but why test at all? The NHS says you don’t have to and even if you do you’re not obliged to do anything special. For me though, I know enough people with autoimmune conditions who have been absolutely wrecked by Covid that it just makes sense. It is no extra effort and to be honest, if there was a test for other strains of flu I would take them too. I don’t want other people to get sick on my account whatever the underlying cause, if I can help it. And I’m in a fortunate enough position that I can work from home until I’m asymptomatic so I’m going to. The NHS says you don’t have to, but at the same time they are bracing for another brutally overstretched winter season. So me staying home for 48 extra hours is no great shakes. Moreover, I live with someone who has a chronic autoimmune condition. Whilst she is thankfully ok, the understanding interactions ‘twixt SARS and brains is still being studied. They are releasing new studies into long Covid and understanding more about how it mutates every day.

Everyone I’ve spoken to speaks of it affecting them or lots of their contacts this season, with a resignation previously reserved for flus of the past. This is really where we should be I suppose, we need to get on with it and accept it as part of the ‘landscape’ of bugs. It’s still interesting to reflect on how 5 years ago we were still navigating a series of lockdowns. But the thing that hit me was that it was by far the worst I’d felt since I got swine flu in 2008, but that swine flu was still far, far worse. I genuinely believed at one point that I might die that winter. If we'd had the same circumstances in place back then I wonder what would have happened. There is a theory that a winter of very heavy snow slowed spread because people couldn’t get anywhere to spread it.

I’m not sure why I started writing this, I just felt compelled to do some writing partly because I haven’t for ages (my uni course, work and other concurrentl life events diverted my attention) and partly because my fever has broken I think. I’m not sure why I'm even trying to say if anything at all. I have found it interesting to reflect on how I reacted to the positive test, pausing between a sense of responsibility and an understanding that I am very much in the minority as the world moves on. I’m certainly not flattening any curves by my actions, but I’m happy with my choice. I hope you stay well, and I hope I get my missing senses back soon.

We’ve been together for 19 years, bringing with us no shortage of bits & bobs from our previous respective relationships. We have been in this house since 2010 and there are boxes in the loft we’ve never unpacked. The house isn’t messy, but it’s definitely ‘busy’; we’re both guilty of adding to a mountainous collection of general ephemera which has collectively brought us joy. We’ve decluttered before, we’re certainly in a better position than we were a few years ago, but the accumulation of ‘things’ has continued.

We’re not profligate, ostentatious or reckless but we’re both guilty of a hyper-focused immersion in hobbies. Board Games (a lockdown lifesaver), comics, books, zines, vinyl - the standard Gen X midlife youth-reclaimers which are exciting and fulfilling to collect. More recently though, I feel as though I’ve reached ‘peak stuff’. I’ve started to feel less inclined to complete collections, chase rarity, fill shelves with books I’ll absolutely read at some point after I’ve read the other ones. I have a nebulous urge to shed a self-created carapace and breathe clearer, simpler air.

In recent years I have made gradual but fundamental changes to my day-to-day life, starting with sobriety in 2019 (which coincided with a personal commitment to improving my physical fitness) and more recently a decision to stop eating meat. I used to be quite belligerently omnivorous but more recently I’ve started to feel differently about that position. I have no intention to proselytise on my about-face, it’s a personal choice, but it speaks to a deeper sense of change that has been bubbling under for some time.

I know why - In the years since I began to feel truly in control of my OCD, for the first time I’ve been able to come to a place where I’m comfortable exploring my sense of self that isn’t being masked by decades of carefully crafted coping strategies. I didn’t really know who that was, in the sense that my place in the world has become simpler. I realised in therapy that a lot of my outward behavioural persona has been built around being gregarious and visible. Since I stopped drinking and started working through everything with the right therapist, the person underneath is far more quiet, introverted and content. He was always there - Pam’s always known him, a few close friends too. But as the public facing person, that’s new.

I’m also still learning what that means; it’s incredibly easy to slip into old familiar patterns, especially in social situations where verbal and non-verbal cues aren’t ‘just so’. Not interjecting with random chatter in order to subtly gauge whether you’ve somehow managed to offend the whole room during the intervening 1.4 seconds of silence still feels like I’m being turned inside out. Baby steps.

There’s a wider conversation to be had about the effect of consumerism and ‘retail therapy’ as a short term fix to deeper issues, that’s not for today and I’m not qualified to offer anything other than anecdotal evidence. For me though, I’m starting to understand that one of the reasons why I collect things - I will go all in on a certain topic - is if I can attribute a sense of completeness, order or improvement to it - It’s a rush of happy chemicals which helped to quieten the incessant noise in my head - it’s a compulsion. That realisation was huge.

So I actively want less now. I don’t need much at all, I’m incredibly lucky, so being able to decide to focus on being present with the truly important aspects of my life is certainly a privilege. I do have to be rational about things like this though - not all my ‘things’ are the fruits of compulsive behaviour - I am collecting the Future Sound of London back catalogue because they are brilliant - but if I go through my Amazon order history, I can pinpoint ad-hoc bulk purchases which match OCD spikes perfectly. I’m quite surprised I hadn’t noticed it before but it’s all too easy to pathologize everything when you start making progress, so mindful reflection is important. I’m not mad about it, a lot of the things I bought were really useful, it’s just another example of how layer upon layer of coping strategies are slowly showing themselves as I become less reliant upon them. That can only be a good thing.

Living with OCD of the ruminant persuasion (I have very few physical compulsions, it's all conveniently cerebral) a bad day is like having 15 TV channels playing simultaneously, most of which are telling you you're either utterly dreadful, doomed or both. Imagine being sat on the top deck of a full bus and everyone has their phone out, blasting diss tracks or doom preachers; It's not always that bad but it is never not present in some form or other.

It's exhausting and frustrating but I'm used to it - more recently I have had the right kind of therapy to help me manage it better. That said, my inner monologue often becomes an outer monologue simply because there just isn't space in my head for it to stay there. 

I should preface this by saying I'm OK, I'm just having a bit of a spike at the minute which is normal. I'm also injured and can't train at the moment - exercise is very much my 'mindfulness' and any protracted time away is irritating, but coming as it is when I'm also ill and on a bit of a downswing, a spike is almost expected. The difference is that I feel more comfortable talking about it nowadays. And writing it down means I don't feel compelled to mumble about it while hanging out the laundry.

My OCD first presented itself when I was about 11, and I kept it to myself until I was 23. Some of my intrusive thoughts were horrific, visceral and terrifying and I told nobody. I was convinced beyond any doubt that the only outcome was prison or hospital and I planned my own death several times. I didn’t know anything about OCD I just thought I was a monster. It was chancing upon a book review on Amazon which led me to a forum, a GP and a medical diagnosis of OCD. I had counselling, started Prozac and for the first time I could remember I was able to turn the noise down a bit. 9 years of ruminant white-knuckling had done a lot of damage by then though, and I still didn't actually divulge the more visceral intrusive thoughts to anyone for another 20 years.

Over those intervening years (and especially since ERP therapy) I have reached a stalemate of sorts with my brain, in that I can sit with the intrusive thoughts I'm used to - the golden oldies - without spiralling into a meteor shower of compulsive rumination. It's a fragile truce though, any new theme or seemingly inconsequential life-event can short-circuit my delicate shield array and the meteors rain down like cognitive Kerplunk. My compulsive need to self-audit and rationalise to the quantum level takes over and before I realise I'm doing it, I'm having full blown conversations with myself while driving to the gym. 

Of course, everybody talks to themselves sometimes, just like everyone has intrusive thoughts. It's what the brain does. It's only when it's part of compulsive coping behaviours which start to affect your daily life, that it becomes an issue. My wife knows what my current brain temperature is based on the volume and cadence of chunnering she can hear from the next room. It's better than it was certainly, but nearly 40 years of learned behaviour is a very deep rut to escape.

It also has left me with a highly tuned ability to notice both verbal and non verbal cues - something which came in very handy as a mental health nurse, but can also be used to convince yourself that you're universally despised because someone raised their eyebrow in a way you didn't expect. And with that double-edged sword also comes the inescapable fact that such ingrained behaviour has permanently altered my own memory. 

While my recall of random trivia remains as steadfast as ever, my recollection of personal life events is shockingly bad. This is common in ruminant OCD because you spend so much time auditing every single facet of every single interaction you've ever had with anyone to satisfy your fear of impropriety/injury/insult/whatever that they become simultaneously dilute and more upsetting as a result.

And it's never enough. I will have convinced myself utterly that I behaved inappropriately, offended someone, or did something dreadful, so I've mentally autopsied that event to such an extent that it is a fractal mess.

But I still remember there's 4500 species of crab because that fact simply exists regardless of my interaction with it. 

I wouldn't wish OCD on my worst enemy. Rationally I know it's ego-dystonic (it is upsetting because the intrusive thoughts are counter to your moral values; it's the distress they cause that makes them 'sticky' and starts the loop) and I can calmly walk it through when explaining it to someone else. But if I'm tired, ill, or stressed all the rationality in the world doesn't do much - if anything it makes it worse because you try and force rationality over something nebulous and it only makes it more confusing. 

I've re-read this about 30 times, because it I'm not sure what the point is I'm trying to make. It doesn't quite scratch the itch but it felt right to just write. I'm going to post it anyway because being comfortable with uncertainty is what the therapy is all about.

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To the adult eye (I still have it somewhere) it looks more like a coincidental mineral striation or something, but to 5 year old me it was the leg of a giant flying reptile - the fact that this behemoth would've had the proportional feet of a pigeon was irrelevant. The Dinosaur Club as I recall were very kind about my assertions, leaning neither one way or the other as to my fossil's authenticity, thereby allowing me to bask in my discovery until I worked it out on my own. Better to foster the passion with plausible denial than crush the paleontological dreams of the readership.

To this day I still find myself drawn to the minutiae of things. The Ebola virus drew me in for a few years in the 90s, it was the Titanic for a good while after that. This was all pre-internet mind, so the research was done in libraries and physical bookshops. I was lucky enough to work in a bookshop so free reign of the microfiche was a double-edged sword. Yes, microfiche - we didn't get anything approaching a computer system until 1996 and that in itself was a source of deep fascination which led to a career pivot into IT. It's so exciting to scratch the surface of a subject and find fractals beneath. Take Otzi the Iceman for an eclectic example - Found in the Otztal Alps in 1991 this neolithic hunter-gatherer has been the Rosetta Stone for all manner of scientific disciplines. Weaponry, diet, dentistry, gene sequencing, farming, clothing, tattoos. Any one of these focal points could take you on a decades-long obsession if you let it. I chose this as an example because there is an instagram account dedicated solely to the understanding of tattoos in archaeology. Rather than make this an Otzi deep-dive I'd encourage wider reading on what has been discovered in the 33 years since his discovery (there have even been recent theories that he was killed by another person).

It can be anything. One friend has an obsession with denim bordering on the forensic; he can identify the manufacturer of Japanese selvedge denim by the distinctive weft patterns made in the fabric caused by flooring under the sewing machines allowing the shuttle to bounce in an unique way ('Slub', in case you wanted to know). Until I heard him talk with such excitement about the subject I had assumed Selvedge was just a marketing thing. Not so, it is a labyrinthine adventure with as many segues as you want it to have. I asked another friend to explain to me what ILC2 cells do in the brain (relating to her PHD) and immediately received 10 minutes of voice notes around the subject fizzing with genuine excitement.

There is something so joyful about listening to people talk freely about a topic in which they've immersed themselves. My best mate was cycling competitively for a number of years. Listening to him talk about his wattage and other statistics he'd honed obsessively made me genuinely happy. Not because I wanted to do it, it sounded torturous. But because it made him so happy and that's infectious. One of the positives of social media (which unfortunately gets mired in the oh-so-many dreadful aspects) is that you can carve your own niche and other people can find you. My favourite example of this is Francis Bourgeois, who has made trainspotting an example embracing one's passion without filter or compromise. I know nothing about trains beyond their immediate function in getting me from A to B. But I could watch his videos all day for the vicarious joy they bring.

I couldn't pin down a particular subject I am immersed in right now, but that's ok. I think doom scrolling instagram has numbed me a bit to investigation as random tidbits of info are thrown at you; tiny dopamine fragments and factlets (did you know that the total mass of ants on earth roughly equals that of humans? I didn't until about an hour ago. Not sure if it's accurate, but it's fun to know). I'm trying to be better at disconnecting from that quick-fix option, or at least using it in a more mindful manner.

My new obsession is out there I'm sure.

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In one day last week I got targeted ads for Viagra, incontinence aids, hair loss shampoo, hair transplants, hair removal, hair dye, prostate tests, testosterone supplements, cancer checkups and all manner of life/death/incapacity insurance sifted to guilt dads of [insert age here] into not leaving your children with nothing if you peg it this afternoon. I don't even have kids. I've also noticed that recently (on Instagram particularly) if you mark an advert as irrelevant it continues to send them. Only after you've marked the same ad as irrelevant more than once will it go away, though it's often replaced with another ad for the same thing, using subtle changes to make it arguably different enough to continue. 

I write this of course knowing full well that women have this to the nth degree from the moment they are old enough to be categorised. I mention my ad-bullying to Pam, and I receive a knowing sigh and an eyebrow in return (an eyebrow which has itself been targeted by at least 2 adverts in the past 24 hours). But I don't do it to draw comparison, rather to allude to a wider sense of unease. I have noticed the way cookies and ads track online activity for years, with the merest hint of an idea around running shoes, dehumidifiers or whatever following your every move online for days afterwards. But AI does more with the premise by adding context. The adverts it sends aren't just aimed at a quasi-me shaped bracket of people, it feels like they're tailored to me. Minority Report shopping mall, Blade Runner gangway style. 

As someone in their late 40s, the phrase 'midlife crisis' has been looming for a while. I have seen the cliche manifest in more than one of my peers and the old tropes are very much alive and well. I'm not interested in sports cars, I am in a very happy and mutually fulfilling relationship, we behave like idiot teenagers most of the time and I already have loads of tattoos. So in terms of whims aimed at rekindling the notion of lost youth I'm not really searching for anything. For me I do believe the closest I have come to a crisis was at 42 when I stopped drinking and took up Brazilian Jiu Jitsu.

Five years later I'm on the fence as to whether it truly qualifies; I certainly have a level of fitness far beyond that which I had in my twenties, plus the sport is full of spritely, enthusiastic young people whose positivity and encouragement is infectious. Unfortunately their collagen, athleticism and stamina aren’t and as a result I sometimes leave the mat feeling very old indeed. Add to that a slew of recent targeted ads, unsolicited mail and general social cues which remind me in no uncertain terms that I am 'of a generation'. 

Social engineering aside, I still feel comparatively youthful in spite of an increasingly involved list of minor grumbles, tweaks and niggles which generally revolve in a manageable orbit. But it's a tense peace, with something as simple as cold weather sending a meteor into the ecosystem and all of a sudden we're in a Roland Emmerich disaster flick, only with more suppositories. With that in mind it is easy to feel singled out when the metabots glom onto certain key attributes and hammer them relentlessly.

Most of the time it sits in the background, an acceptable irritant in the day-to-day. Some days it does hit a little deeper though. I'm already very aware that I have comfortably slipped into generational cliches - new apps seem scary and pointless, modern music sounds weird, I need a firm insole in my shoes. Add to that a sense of unease in my job at the moment, which is quickly tempered by a stark realisation that I am in an age bracket where it is a factor in my re-employability. A recruitment company shared an interaction on LinkedIn the other week where a company actively restricted their job openings to those under 50 because they want a 'young, active workforce'. This may be an aberration, but it plants the seed in the mind as to one's value. 

I do enjoy my job and I'm quite good at it, but it frightens me sometimes that this is where I will be forever. If I had my druthers I'd go back to university in a heartbeat. I'd immerse myself in linguistics, history and science and emerge, learned and elbow-patched with robust opinions on the evolution of language in the application of mental health care. I'd write a book - a fiction one about monsters and stuff. I'd invest in my gym. These things feel tantalisingly within reach yet so very far away because I'm constantly reminded that I'm about to miss - or already have missed - 'the boat'. The constant, relentless peppering of reminders about one’s age can't help but foster a sense of melancholy I suppose - I need to reflect on this a bit more before going full-mope, though it does feel quite cathartic to voice it out loud.

In the meantime, I deleted Instagram.

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Whilst this is a broad stroke depiction, the sad fact is that senior management are often more concerned with being seen to act, than the positive effect of any action. 

I got an email on Friday advertising a new mental health initative at work; these have been advertised as 'lunch and learn' events covering topics such as Desk Yoga, Mindfulness, Menopause and Neurodiversity awareness.

On the face of it, this could be seen as a bold and refreshing approach to the needs of staff and it might have, had had it not arrived on the heels of a series of brutal redundancies, process changes and a tone-deaf response to the increasing voices of concern around the business.

Concerns have been raised for months about the way the business is handling reorganisation. As someone who has seen his fair share of expansion by osmosis in the IT sector over the past 30 years, I am no stranger to the realities of consolidation and restructuring. But when these concerns are backed up with demonstrable evidence of a decrease in productivity and quality of end-product, being told that we're going to be taught how to breathe better on our lunch break is particularly jarring.

Lunch and Learn is an example of how the approach to remote work is misguided and it starts small; if we were all permanently office based, time away from our desks to walk to a colleague, the kitchen, the smoking shelter or wherever would be factored in.

Since Covid and the shift to a more hybrid approach there has been a push to maximise work remotely. Horror stories about camera snooping, keyloggers and pressure-pad cushions did the rounds, the reality being marginally less authoritarian but no less insistent. 

It doesn't need to be a robot arm prodding you into productivity to be toxic. A simple act of making you sit at your desk during what might be your only time away from the screen in order to tell you how to 'build resilience' at work is at best ignorant, at worst a glimpse at a cruel parody of compassion.

As a mental health nurse with my own first hand experience, I am all too aware of the detrimental effects a toxic and unhelathy work environment can have on the mind and body. I made a promise to myself a long time ago that I would 'Work to Live' and not the other way round. I've done it the other way round, it nearly killed me. 

As a result I retain a level of experiential cynicism for any 'initiatives which demonstrate our commitement to mental health in the workplace' on one hand, while slashing staff, uprooting established, effective processes, ignoring multiple reports of valid concerns and running roughshod over morale company-wide with the other.

I don't need an outsourced wellness consultancy firm making me ‘aware’ of these issues, we already are. What we need is positive change to the environment in which these things breed. No amount of pizza can cover that up.

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There are three houses on a little spur as the roads curves and our house is one of them. There has been a broken bin on the pavement opposite our house for months and despite numerous calls to the council it remains defiant, lidless, full of water and the discarded odds and sods of any number of passers-by.

In a fit of motivation we decided to clear out the loft today and, on the way back from a very successful tip run I saw the bin in its usual spot and decided it was my duty as the good neighbour to do something about it. What that actually meant was drag it into the alley next to the other discarded bin which has become a dog poo bag repository. Again, the council are aware and utterly unbothered, though hopefully joining forces will increase their power to influence the great and powerful.

My plan was to gently agitate the bin to drain enough of the water out to move it. Whilst it was incredibly heavy I was able to tip it back and forth enough to get some of the water out until the point where my confidence overtook me and the whole thing lurched forwards, belching months of stagnant water and rotten detritus on the roadway.

Thankfully it fell away from me because the smell was pretty horrendous. I'm a nurse so I've smelt far worse but that doesn't mean I want it outside my house. It wasn't my first choice for a Sunday afternoon but I just sighed, swore and got on with it, picking up the bottles and cans off the ground. In retrospect gloves would've been a boon at this point but my wife was able to grab the industrial dustpan from the shed and the bin was soon next to its friend in the alley.

Having cleared everything away I followed up with the Karcher as I was concerned about the food waste and icky water being a hazard for the neighbourhood dogs. As it stands now I've boil washed my clothes, scrubbed myself raw and the road is cleaner than it has been for years, so all's well that ends well I guess.

What wouldn't immediately wash off though, was skyrocketing anxiety. My ‘official’ diagnosis is OCD and GAD with chronic depression. It sounds dreadful and it very much can be, but with the benefit of years of therapy, navel gazing and medication I have a pretty decent handle on my mental health.

I do get blindsided from time to time and it is invariably stuff like this. Events which are uncertain (or I perceive as such) and have the potential to induce shame or embarrassment. The fact that what I did was actually a good thing on paper is irrelevant in this mindset; I publicly created a horrendous mess in the street and my neighbours hate me. Add to this the risks of infection, contamination and harming other people/pets and we have the emotional equivalent of a rotten bin of garbage belched all over the road.

An essential part of recovery and therapy in OCD is becoming friends with uncertainty. The lack of absolutes is what drives the compulsion as a salve to whichever intrusive obsession is causing distress. In this instance I had a taster plate of my main food groups - shame, guilt, contamination, being thought of as a bad person.

From a fucking bin falling over.

It's easy to read these words as I write them and see the ridiculousness of it all; OCD doesn't take away your ability to see how insane these thought patterns are, that's what makes it so insidious and painful. What I see first though, is as opposed to spiralling for hours or days as I used to I sighed, swore and got on with it.

One of the most powerful words I found in therapy was ‘probably’. Doesn't matter what your intrusive thought is, if you can answer it immediately with ‘probably, but in the meantime I'm going to go about my day’, it begins to lose power. Don't get me wrong this is incredibly difficult, painful and frightening. But with time and discipline it works.

And it changed my life.

In a seemingly inconsequential event I realised something quite profound; I saw the extent of my progress writ large in the garbage and I'm going to celebrate this small victory on the longer journey.

The Dusty Notebook is intended to be picked up from time to time as a repository for whatever's in the ol’ mindtank that would benefit from some fresh air.