It is only to be expected that the visual media would concentrate on the more visible aspects of the disease; thoughts do not lend themselves to visual representation, and a film about a life spent feeling anxious while quietly avoiding all possible harm would not make gripping viewing. The anxious, avoidant life doesn’t make for a thrilling read either, which may be another reason why – apart from the shame and desire to cover up, or the hiddenness of the disease – even in these self-outing times, there are still relatively few OCD memoirs on the shop shelves. Alcoholism, drug addiction and manic depression make sufferers do all sorts of wild and extreme things that non-sufferers would never do, but find very compelling to read about. A single episode of major depression, suffered and then recovered from, has its own built-in narrative structure, which takes the protagonist and the reader into hell and out again, having learned something on the way, maybe.
When Dante goes into hell in his Inferno, what he finds is a place full of damned souls condemned to perform the same painful actions again and again, to go round and round in circles – quite literally, in some cases. Dante is in a privileged position: as the heroic protagonist and narrator of the tale, with Virgil as his guide, he is able to move through the circles in which the damned are condemned to stay. Along the way, various sinners tell him the stories of how they came to be damned, he thanks them, takes his leave of them, and then moves on. As a writer, this journey provides him with a beginning, a middle, and an end. Out of one day in hell, he gets enough material for a third of an epic.
Meanwhile the damned are stuck in their circles. Were Dante to return the next day, all that he could expect from them would be stories he’s heard already, told in exactly the same words. So he moves on to Purgatory, and then to Paradise. No sense in boring your readers to death.
At least Dante’s experiences are interesting to read about. Imagine if, instead of witnessing bleeding, weeping trees, lovers blown about by gales, popes stuffed head first down burning holes, and sinners forever eating the brains of other sinners, he’d seen the following:
First Circle: People making lists.
Second Circle: People checking to make sure that they haven’t left the oven on.
Third Circle: People washing their kitchen surfaces – again.
Fourth Circle: People touching the back of every chair they pass.
Fifth Circle: People opening envelopes they’ve just sealed for the third time, to make sure they haven’t made any mistakes on their job application forms.
Sixth Circle: People phoning their husbands to ask for reassurance about the roads they’ve just crossed.
Seventh Circle: People sitting on their sofas trying to anticipate everything bad that might happen if they go out on a planned trip and then deciding it would be easier to stay at home . . .
It’s a tormented life for sure, but that doesn’t make it an interesting one. In fact, I would say the sheer repetitive tedium of it is a pretty large part of what makes it so tormenting. Then on top of the tedium, there’s the anxiety, intense and ever-present; the exhaustion; the frustration, because you know that you are getting in the way of your own life, but it seems beyond you to get out of it; the painful awareness that your behaviour makes you a trial to the people around you; and of course the shame, the shame of not being able to control yourself like a normal, sensible person would, and the shame of knowing that your predicament is ridiculous, comical even.
It’s not an interesting life, but it is quite an interesting predicament. As I’m a poet, who finds that the admission of this is usually quite enough by itself to interrupt the flow of easy social intercourse, I felt that I probably had less to lose by airing my predicament than most. And I do believe it needs some airing.
1. Erving Goffman, Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (Prentice-Hall, Inc., New Jersey, 1963)
2. Body dysmorphic disorder, bulimia, trichotillomania, compulsive skin picking, etc.
3. Sigmund Freud, Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices (Standard Edition, Volume 9: pp. 115–28, 1907)
Nightmares
27. Sometimes I am not sure I have done things that in fact I know I have done.
The Padua Inventory
———
Here am I,
Little Jumping Joan;
When nobody’s with me
I’m all alone.
Nursery rhyme
Much as it surprises me now, and would probably surprise anyone who knows me, I do know what it is to be fearless – or, at least, I remember how it was. One memory in particular shows how different I must have been once. The summer after I was three I ran away at the funfair, and without realizing it, got lost. It’s one of those memories that has to be reconstructed from its few surviving fragments. First of all, I see the fair, colourful, noisy and tempting, across the field from the pavement where my family are waiting, and feel my impatience to be there; then I am already halfway across the field and look back to see my family – my parents, my baby brother, uncle, aunt and cousins – standing in a row in the distance; here is the merry-go-round that I had seen from far away and was so desperate to ride on, and across the path I can see a ride I know I am too little for, with chairs on cables that flare out from a revolving disc; next is the view from the back of one of the wooden horses, as the roundabout slows down and my mother and father come into view; now my mother lifts me off the horse – she is wearing a brightly coloured buttoned blouse which is one of my favourites, and, for no reason that I can see, she is crying.
These days I can see the story from the terrified mother’s viewpoint, but this doesn’t make the memory itself any more frightening. It remains stubbornly sunlit, coloured by a happy child’s belief that everything will be taken care of. Some people seem to have retained a version of this belief into adulthood. I see them wobbling down the middle of main roads on their bicycles, helmetless, talking into mobile phones, and I wonder at them. There’s no one moment, no one trauma I could identify as the point when I lost that sense of safety, but I know that I still had it a few years later, because I was – in my own head, at least – a tree-climbing legend.
At seven years old, I had managed to climb every flowering cherry with reachable branches that our street had to offer, and decided to move on to the trickier ones. I chose one that stood on the verge at the bottom of our road, a few feet away from the patch of wasteland we called The Green. The fork in its trunk was too high for me to climb into, but halfway up to the fork there was a truncated branch with a few bristly new twigs sticking out of it, and I figured that if I could get a foothold on this stump, I could swing myself up to the fork and climb on from there. I took hold of the trunk and placed one foot on the stump. Then I pulled myself up. For a moment it looked as though I was going to make it, but then I lost my footing, slithered down the trunk and scraped first my knee and then my stomach against the stump I had thought would be my ally. The scratch across my stomach stung like mad so I clutched it, bent double, all the way home. I tried to get my mother and grandmother to understand just how much my stomach was hurting, but they were more preoccupied with my right knee, which had a bleeding chunk taken out of it. I still have both scars, and I’m proud of them.
It was a nasty fall, but it didn’t end my climbing career. At nine I was spending my summer days on The Green with the other local children. Halfway across were two tall trees: one was inaccessible to everyone but the biggest boys, but the other was more accommodating. It was an exciting tree, a tree with a view: if you climbed high enough you could see the twin towers of Wembley Stadium. I liked to climb all the way to the top. Branches were pretty evenly spaced all the way, and this dictated my method: as I reached one branch, I would grasp onto the next one above it, then jump so that I was clinging to it upside down with all four limbs like a spit-roast, then haul myself round so that I was sitting astride the branch. Then I would stand up and repeat the process until I came to the top. Nowadays I find it hard to think about th
is without picturing myself falling onto my spine – which snaps in two. But in those days I liked nothing better than to stand on the highest, slightest fork and make the whole tree sway from side to the side like a metronome. Further down, other children would shout at me to stop it. I only fell out once, off one of the lower branches, and scraped my ankle on a bicycle that was lying on its side at the bottom.
Bicycles were every bit as important as trees. We raced each other up and down our cul-de-sac countless times, and we never wore helmets because excessive risk-aversion just wasn’t fashionable then. My small son is a child of a different time, and he does have a bicycle helmet, which he wears as a passenger on the back of his father’s bike. My husband always wears his, and just a few weeks ago I finally bought one of my own. As I write this chapter, I am in the middle of another course of cognitive behavioural therapy and as part of this latest drive to modify my behaviour, I have agreed to get back on a bicycle. I don’t think I’ll ever be ready to join the unhelmeted mobile-phoning section of society, but my dependency on walking, buses and other people’s cars is limiting my life and that of my family, so I accept that I should at least try to do something about it. I’ve started riding around the local side roads; I cast a bigger shadow on the road now, and my left knee complains in a way that it never used to, but I have to admit, it really is still fun.
The cycling exercises are only a small part of the work we’re doing. Most of the time, we’re trying to address – or redress – a certain negative bias in my thinking behaviour. It did not come easily to me to admit that I’m enjoying the cycling; these few paragraphs, in which I have been describing myself as a happy and adventurous child, have taken far longer than they should, because I felt so unlike myself when I was writing them. I’m never quite sure what to make of those memories which don’t support my steadfastly held picture of my life as one long, shameful spell in purgatory. If someone – a new friend, or a new therapist – asked me to tell them about my childhood, and I told the story that automatically came to mind, it would be quite a different one.
You never know what a small child is going to decide to be scared of. My son used to be terrified by a pre-school art show called SMarteenies; I think it had something to do with the giant paintbrush that hovers over the presenters’ heads during the title sequence. At his age, I was petrified of the Quaker Oats man, and used to imagine his dreadful, grinning face floating outside my bedroom window at night. He sometimes had Wee Willie Winkie with him. My Ladybird nursery rhyme book had a picture of Willie, next to the rhyme:
Wee Willie Winkie
runs through the town,
Upstairs and downstairs
in his night-gown,
Knocking on the window,
crying through the lock,
Are the children all in bed,
for it’s past eight o’clock?
The picture showed a wild-eyed boy in a nightshirt, running through some dark, topsy-turvy nightmare of a town, carrying a candle that burned with a ferocious light, like a piece of stolen sun. I was certain that if any child so much as peeped through a curtain after eight o’clock something horrific would happen to them, and that Wee Willie Winkie would be involved in it somehow.
There was another rhyme in the Ladybird books that would cause me even more anxiety than Willie Winkie’s evening rounds, and it went like this:
Hark! Hark!
The dogs do bark.
The beggars are coming to town.
Some in rags
and some in jags
and one in a velvet gown.
The accompanying picture showed the beggars parading into a medieval town through its stone gate, watched by supercilious ladies in pointy hats and surrounded by skinny, excitable dogs. At the head of the troop was a brightly dressed boy, walking on his hands. One night – I think I was four then – I dreamed I was that boy, a little thief sneaking into my parents’ room to steal something off my mother’s dressing table. I managed to creep up to it without making a sound, but just as I reached out to touch the forbidden things that sat on it, there was a sudden explosion of noise, a blaring and trumpeting, then the floor tilted, throwing me flat on my face. When I tried to get up I found that I was stuck to it, as if I’d been weighted down with stones. The blaring continued, the floor tipped this way and that, and out of my parents’ enormous wardrobe burst a huge robot, the size and shape of a fruit machine, covered in flashing lights, sent out to judge and punish me.
I woke up before the machine could get me, but even though I knew that it was only a dream, for years afterwards, every time I went into my parents’ bedroom for any legitimate reason, I found I had to sing that reason as I went in, in order to prevent the judge-and-punishment wardrobe robot from springing into action. In retrospect, it’s tempting to see this as a taste of what was to come, a little advance warning from the neurosis fairy: the robot thought as my first obsession, the singing as my first compulsion.
Children who develop full-blown OCD before puberty are, more often than not, male. Joe Wells, the teenage author of the autobiography Touch and Go Joe (2006), is a good example. He experienced his first symptoms at the age of nine, and, typically for a child with OCD, these were indistinguishable from the symptoms an adult might have: he became obsessed with dirt and contamination, and developed a compulsion to wash his hands. Another child I saw on a recent television documentary was preoccupied with harm. He said that a voice in his head which he called Idiota was telling him to hurt his family, and as a result he was terrified of knives. Idiota also had a habit of reminding him of all the ways in which he might harm himself – by choking, for example. His mother was running out of things he would agree to eat. As I watched, I found I could recognize Idiota for what he was – a wellspring of obsessive thoughts – and fortunately for this child, the people who were treating him also understood the true nature of Idiota. It’s not easy for a child to describe the experience of OCD: the capacity to recognize one’s own thoughts as one’s own thoughts is something that takes a whole childhood to develop. The consequence is that the younger and less articulate the child, the harder it is to diagnose them accurately. The same goes for childhood depression, and for a long time the received wisdom was that young children were constitutionally incapable of suffering from it. There just wasn’t the evidence. None generated by mainstream psychology anyway.4
Despite the robot in the wardrobe, I don’t believe that I met my own Idiota until much later. On the other hand, at six years old I was already well acquainted with my inner Eeyore. I can remember my teacher Mrs Chandler telling me, with some exasperation, to ‘Smile, Joanne – you won’t crack your jaw!’ It must have been around that time that I was standing in the playground one lunchtime looking such a caricature of misery that a few of the nicer girls came up to ask me what the matter was. I said I had a broken heart. This was the only way I could think of to describe the feeling I had, as if I were carrying a bag of wet sand behind my breastbone – it’s the same feeling at any age, only as I got older I came to call it ‘being depressed’.
I couldn’t say what it was that had given me the wet sand feeling on that particular occasion: sometimes it was boredom, sometimes it was loneliness, sometimes it was just that my thoughts had taken me to an intolerable place. Standing in the line for the water fountain one day, it suddenly occurred to me that I was going to die – every one of us standing in that line would die one day; everybody in the world would die, even my parents and my aunts and my cousins. Everybody. In an instant, the playground, the day, the whole planet went tiny and far away. I saw in my mind’s eye a map of the British Isles, fading to black like an image from a silent film. A few months later my grandmother died. There had been no time to explain to me and my brother that Grandma was ill, let alone that she was not going to live for much longer. None of my morbid imaginings had prepared me for the real shock of someone I loved suddenly not being there any more, and I struggled to make sense of it. I wanted to kno
w – I needed to know – what this being dead actually meant. My mother told me, in answer to my questions, that Grandma had gone, that the body she had left behind was ‘just a shell’ and that dead people ‘lived on in our heads’. Her answers turned into the strangest pictures: one of my grandmother’s empty body as an abandoned brown carapace, resembling a Grandma-shaped woodlouse corpse; another of a cross-section of a head, with a sort of attic space in the top, in which dozens of tiny ancestors ran around like the Numbskulls in The Beezer.
The family religion was Judaism, and Jews are not encouraged to meditate upon the next world, whatever that might turn out to be; our proper concern is to live a just and fruitful life in this one, but I wasn’t aware of this when I was seven. Neither did I appreciate that God was, in all his divine qualities, beyond the apprehension of any human sense. I had a very clear idea of what He looked like: He was a man of average build, with short ginger hair, a ginger moustache and round, wire-framed spectacles. He wore academic gowns and a mortar board, and stood at all times behind a giant wooden lectern which rested on nothing in the middle of space. From there he gazed out towards the distant stars, with a benign, if rather vague, expression on his face. He looked like one of the Ladybird illustrations, one of the less disturbing ones. Someone must have told me that God knew everything, which would account for the costume and the lectern. I’m unable to offer any explanation for the moustache.
Woman Who Thought too Much, The Page 2