The Drag of The Razor.......

                XXXXX WARNING  POSSIBLE TRIGGERS FOR CUTTERS XXXX

My legs are scarred but not by my own will. I am clumsy and  really have no business wielding a razor, but culture dictates that a woman must have smoother legs than her husband or words like "odd", "weird", or "gross" get thrown around. I am often considered "odd" and "weird" anyway for other reasons. I don't really  need to add "gross" to my repartee as well, and certainly not called "odd" or "weird" because my legs resemble a yeti in the summer time. So I shave...albeit it badly and often times dangerously.

What I found is I am used to cutting myself. I do it so often, I no longer feel the sharp stab of pain when the razor slips. I only feel the tug of the razor as it slowly drags across my skin. I curse not because of the fear of the pain, but simply because getting the bleeding to stop is a pain and requires more attention than I really wanted to give. It doesn't really hurt. It isn't pain as much as a slight sting. A sting that I no longer consider abnormal or unfamiliar.  It reminds me of how when I was a child, I would cry at the doctor's office because I thought I was going to get shots. My mother had coined an adage that I say to my children today,"Shots don't hurt they sting." An adage that turned out to be true as I got used to the needle pricks growing up. I guess all things considered it is a good thing I got used to them, as now I have to purposely stick my fingers four times a day for my diabetes testing.  I have become used to the pricking of my fingers as I have the cutting of my legs. They no longer wield immense pain, or the fear of it, they leave only a nagging sting that I quickly have learned to process and  ignore.

I find that having a mental illness for over thirty years has had quite the same affect. I no longer am terrified or upset greatly by the intrusive images and thoughts that my OCD throws into my face. I hate them. I am displeased that I have them in the first place but the stabbing pain of being tormented by them is much less than when I was a child, a teenager, or a young adult. I guess at almost thirty five I am no longer a young adult. Maybe I am a middle aged adult, or old? What is old anyway? I often feel we are old the day we are born. Cranky, angry, wailing, disgruntled, tiny bald people shaking our fists at the cold hard world and the injustice of it all. Who knows?

I am not sure that the pain of these thoughts is less because I have had them for so long or because I have had them in rapid succession so often that even they fail to surprise me, anymore. Maybe the fear levels have been raised so high for so long that I have become accustomed to them like an adrenaline junkie, that no longer gets a rush from roller coasters and now has to sky dive for the same endorphin release. Except that OCD is more scary than roller coasters or sky diving or spear hunting a pack of ravenous lions with nothing but a dull toothpick and a can of silly string. There is no more fear to be raised, I have already reached my intrusive thoughts adrenaline peak... I am no longer shocked by what OCD says or shows me. It has simply become a faulty pictured, static educed cable channel with nothing but old reruns playing over and over again.  I have seen all the episodes and know exactly how they end. It has become old hat. It no longer eviscerates my emotional capabilities. It no longer feels like my soul is shattering from the pressure of guilt or my heart is breaking from the pain. It is numbed by experience. The pain has become muted. It no longer hurts. It now only stings. I often wonder, if like my legs my mind is scarred. Big ugly red welts zigzagging across my cerebral cortex implying the deep cuts my OCD has tortured me with every second, every minute, of every hour for thirty years. I wonder a lot. I ponder on such things too often. Maybe I wonder too much?

To me the intrusive thoughts and images have become nothing more than the slipping of the razor, inconvenient and messy, irritating and annoying but no longer earth shattering or devastating. No longer completely time consuming or guilt educing. I have learned I can not prevent them or hide from them but I can choose to not let them take over my life.

I am not saying I am cured or I don't suffer from extreme anxiety. I absolutely am not going to sit here and lie to you. I sometimes feel so much anxiety it feels like it is it's own entity, taking up it's own space in the room beside me. I can feel it's chest heaving up and down and hear it's deep gravely breaths. I can feel it's warm air, fetid and disgusting beating down on the back of my neck. But the fear of what OCD tells or shows me is nonexistent for the most of the thoughts. The harm thoughts, the sexual thoughts, the relationship fears, the homosexual OCD fears, the blasphemous fears ...all of the fears that used to stop me cold and make the palms of my hands sweaty and the bile rise in my throat, now cease to trigger the deep fear they used to. I find them  disturbing because they still occur and I hate them, but I know who I am and that I am not what my OCD says. I am not capable of doing or being such things. I never was nor will I ever be. I see them for what they are, lies. That is not to say that I don't still have the health fears and the other OCD tendencies. I do have them and sometimes the health fears do ramp up the anxiety levels. Sometimes I do have to throw out a sandwich I just made and remake it one, or two, or God forbid, three times because it may have touched the counter and it seemed "unclean". Sometimes I do get caught up in the OCD webs of deceit and terror but I am getting better with dealing with them. It is as it always has been, a work in progress. I have bad days and good, like most people suffering from a mental illness.

For over thirty years I have had almost all of the OCD fears at one time or another. Sometimes, they overlapped and I would deal with multiple symptoms at a time. What if I am gay....What if I am a sexual deviant and I just don't know it yet...What if I stab someone with this sharpened crayon....What if I have murderous tendencies....What if I have contracted Ebola from this library book....What if I accidentally poisoned the food with bleach I used in the sink two weeks ago ...What if I didn't unplug the coffee pot and the whole house burns to ashes.....What if I said something inappropriate and upset others.... What if....always what if... Sometimes it was just one really big one that halted my progress as a "functional" member of society. Leaving me to shut myself away and stay at home so there wouldn't be any triggers that would pop out of nowhere leaving me feeling vulnerable and exposed. Many times the fear was so great I had thought about ending my own life. I was in so much pain. I felt alone and lost. I felt  unworthy of love or acceptance. I felt dirty, guilty, and ashamed. And what's worse, I felt totally and completely insane. I knew what was happening in my mind wasn't normal. I knew what was happening to me wasn't normal and I had no idea how to fix it or make it go away. But it doesn't go away. Not in the traditional sense and you can't simply "fix" it. What you can do is learn to live with it and learn how to get around it. Learn how to forgive yourself for not being what you think you should be or for not being able to do what you think you should be able to. You can learn to choose not to give it power over you. To dictate how you feel all of the time. To let it steal away the most precious moments of your life minute by minute. It takes treatment and hell, maybe even thirty years but it can be better. The intrusive thoughts and images can be less like an knife to the heart and more like a shaving cut. Not completely painless but not a deep throbbing pain. It can become a sting instead of an amputation. More of a nuisance and less of an infliction. Will you be magically healed and cured? No, but you will be more in control of how OCD makes you feel. It can be done.

It has taken me a really long time to get to where I am now. Maybe for some of you it will take half the time or even less than that. When I was diagnosed there was not nearly as many treatment options as there is now. I mean, most people had never heard of OCD at that time. I don't know everything, but what I do know is if you are suffering then reaching out for help now, can literally save your life. It can make the bad times easier. It can make the OCD less rigid and smothering. It can help you feel like the magnificent and strong person you really are but are unable to see it. Whether you choose to get therapy or medication or just blog about it to the world. Please don't just suffer in silence. I did that for way to long and I know how painful and devastating that can be.


Neurotic Nelly

Drowning It Out....

I have always loved music. I mean really, truly loved music. It isn't just because I have always sung. That I love to sing in front of groups of strangers on a blackened out stage ( karaoke bar) with just one hot white spot light beating mercilessly down on me. Although, I do love truly that.  It isn't just because music fills the soul. It isn't because we all secretly get excited when we hear our favorite song on the radio and blast it as loud as the speakers will go. It isn't just a love to sing that favorite song as loud an as uninhibited as possible like no one is around. Or that one song touches you in a way that nothing else does. It isn't because I get totally lost in the songs and forget where I am and what I was doing before they came on. It is all of those things in one but it is something else as well.

Some of my first memories, grainy and fuzzy as they might be, are normal people's memories until I reach the age of four. Then they revolve around having obsessive compulsive disorder. In fact, it may be why I remember so far back. The biggest most devastating intrusive thought I can recall was when I was six or so. My sister had told me that when you swallow your saliva it turns to blood as it goes down your throat. Now, granted her biology knowledge was haphazard at best, she was only eight. Kids say the darnedest things.....Now, most people would have thought that was gross but would go on and forget about it or continue playing. Not me. Never me.

For me this created an inability to swallow my own saliva. Every time I tried I could see it in my head turning to blood. So much so, that I was convinced that I actually could taste blood. I would spit constantly. I got in trouble for going around like a baseball player that dips and spitting everywhere. It was the first time I had to hide a compulsion. I started pretending to suck on the collar of my shirt so I could spit into it. My sleeves as well. I knew this was gross and going to make my shirt wet but the horrid thought of swallowing my own saliva became torture. I didn't want to taste the imaginary blood anymore. As I did it the more, the worse the obsession got. I started having a choking sensation every time I tried to swallow. Eating became a battle. I was so hungry but the thought of swallowing the food had become foreign to me. It seemed like a pure hell. If saliva turned to blood what would a bite of hamburger turn into? My parents started to see things abut me that scared them. I wasn't wanting to eat much. I was spitting. I was afraid to swallow anything and I would cry. I had started washing my hands to the point of them bleeding. I would slap myself in the head to make "my brain" stop yelling at me. I started touching things repeatedly.  They weren't sure what was wrong but they could no longer pretend everything was normal with me. They took me to a doctor who said I had OCD but it might go away on it's own. It was the eighties and OCD wasn't commonly treated in children that young.

Thankfully, after a long talk with my parents I was told that spit does not turn into blood and I was able with constant reassurance, to eat and drink without freaking out. This was the time I was at most vulnerable with the intrusive thoughts. I didn't know what they were or that it wasn't like that for everyone else.  That is also the time I became obsessed with music. I loved all of it. From classical to country and everything in between. I would lay on the floor with my head up against the speakers, imagining a really talented miniature people on a tiny stage inside the speaker. Oh how I wished I was a singer in the speaker.It became my first sense of silence. It took me away from my brain and what it was telling me. In the song I can feel what the singer feels. I can be someone else for a few minutes and I learned if I turn it up loud enough I can drown my obsessions out....

It's hard to describe the hell that living with this mental illness is like. The constant chatter of your intrusive thoughts playing like background noise. Sometimes yelling. Sometimes just talking, but always about bad things to come, bad things it says you will do, negative thoughts and feelings. It's much like having a defunct fortune teller in your head blathering  bad predictions that never come to fruition because she is a terrible fortune teller. A gypsy fortune teller that is "seeing" your future through a pink plastic bouncy ball held together on the table with duct tape and using poker cards instead of tarot cards. Hell, she isn't even a gypsy. She's from Brooklyn. She doesn't even tell fortunes. She flunked out of beauty school and picked this as a side job until her internet college classes are finished for the semester. Yeah, it's like having that in your head but she never sleeps. She never rests. Never ceases. It's like sharing you brain with someone else but that someone else is you. A you that you hate. A you that you despise. A you that makes damn sure to torture you daily. And music, glorious music can give me peace. It can put the "fortune teller" away for as long as I hit the play button. Here I feel normal. Here I can feel safe from unwanted images. I am free for the first time of my life. So do I love music? It saves me. On a bad day when I want to stick my fingers in my ears and scream until it stops, I can put on headphones and turn it up. The lyrics sooth my fragile, sunburned, and exhausted soul like a warm balm. It soothes me. It takes me away and I am flying. It makes me smile again. It allows me, a terrible dancer, finally get the chance to dance. I can sing and forget that I have this issue, because when I sing I can be a character that the song is describing. I can be the heartbroken lover. I can be the angry cheated on spouse. I can be the outcast wanting love. I can be anyone else rather than the girl who looks so perfectly normal and yet is so completely not. I can feel less broken. I can be quiet. My brain is quiet. It's too occupied and Oh my God, is that amazing! So for me music isn't just a distraction or something to pass the time. It is my saving grace. My brain doctor. My medication. It is my salve. My bodyguard. My hero. My secret weapon.

On bad days I can sing. On bad days I can dance. On bad days I don't have to be sad or lonely or scared, I simply just have to turn the music up until my mind is a whisper not a roar. I just have to turn the volume dial and drown it out. Ahhhhhhh peace finally.

Neurotic Nelly