The Dual Lives of Harm OCD – Balancing Dark Thoughts and Daily Life

I have paid more attention to my thoughts lately and I realize that it seems for every thought I have, I have a vivid video of it in my mind.  In good ways and in bad ways it is just always there, I’ll give some examples. 

I look up at the sky as I am driving and it is a dark, dark blue with clouds like a child has just blew into a bubble wand and the bubbles are all sizes and going fast in one direction as the wind picks them up and carries them over the trees.  In one instant, I don’t even think it is a millisecond in between my thought that it looks like there could be a tornado tonight and the video that plays out in my head of my car swirling up in a funnel, whirling us around and then rolling us over and smashing us on the highway. 

I’m not scared that there will be a tornado, I am not worried about getting to shelter, I literally am just looking at dark clouds.  Which makes me realize that my thoughts are so instant and so playing like a movie throughout my day, that I feel I almost live two lives.  I see the one that plays out in my head in all different ways and then I see the real one.  They happen simultaneously and at some points at the same times.  Another example is:

I’m sitting and listening to conversation of friends and family and engaging in that conversation. I am feeling included, interested, soaking up the sun on my face, it is all enjoyment in my mind.  For a split second I look at my ankle and I see that I can see my veins, in the instant that I see them, in my thoughts I take a knife and cut through them with a knife in a circle around my ankle, blood is pouring and gushing out of my ankle.  In that time frame I am still engaged in conversation and adding my two cents in.  How do these thoughts exist at the same time the logical side of my brain is carrying on conversation?

There is a picture I have seen of a brain MRI that shows what it looks like for someone with OCD and one without.  There are pieces of yellow showing activity in all quadrants of the OCD brain, the non ocd brain has one location where there is yellow and where the brain activity is focused on.  This makes so much sense to me, especially as I try to understand my disease and how it works.  Essentially there are things firing in all locations of the brain that shouldn’t be. 

I can understand more of why this would be so exhausting and why sometimes I feel like after I get up in the morning, that I count the hours until I can go back to sleep.  It’s way better then it was in January and February and it is liveable now with medications and self care but I also feel like my brain has always been and will always be showing me videos of my thoughts while simultaneously living life.  I can see why when I was in the dark, dark, place that I was, that every thought every couple of minutes was dark.  Now, I get very few of the dark, dark, images, they are just constantly playing videos of thoughts of my brain interpreting the real life around me. 

All of this brain functioning is also why I probably see so many analogies of things while I am writing.  It is as if my brain needs to see pictures to figure out the problem at hand.  In some ways like as in the case of writing, this is definitely a skill that I have and should be proud of. Why does the negative have to go with the good though?  Why do we have to have both?

Many artistic people are very troubled people, I have no idea what the stats are but generally, it seems that having a large artistic talent also brings with it some type of anxiety, depression or other mental health illnesses.  Is it because we see the world in a different way?  The expression of the way that we see it is what makes our skills as it is such a deep depth of pain, but it also has beauty, wonder and awe.  It is like the emotions are magnified and that creates the skill or talent. 

Is it worth it?  If you got to choose, would you choose it?  Well we don’t get to choose so maybe that question is just invalid.  The question maybe should be, what do we do with it?  We live with it, we tolerate it, we try to control it and medicate it, and after that we just try to share the good of what we get from it.  We take the part that is a blessing and enjoy it and we take the part that is a curse and we tolerate it so we can get the blessing. 

If all the ice cream for the rest of your life would have blue glass shards in it.  It would take you quite a bit of extra time to pick out the glass shards.  The only way though that you could have ice cream for the rest of your life would be if you did this and if you didn’t you could choose to eat the ice cream with the shards in it and likely choke and die or you could accept that this is what you needed to do to get the ice cream.  OCD is the glass shards, I don’t get the ice cream without it.  I have to take the good with the bad in order to get to enjoy anything at all and I would much rather do that then admit defeat and choke myself out on the shards because I didn’t want to take the extra time to fight and remove them.  The fight is worth the ice cream.

Chat again soon,

Michelle