There’s a squeaky floorboard in the bedroom. It’s a new squeak.
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.