If I have someone travelling with me, ABYSS is still there, but it shrinks to something like:
ABYSS
The anxiety it represents shrinks proportionately, and I have a far more comfortable journey. It’s not that I’m incompetent: I can do all the practical things – booking tickets, getting to the station on time, finding my way to the right platform, giving directions to a cab driver, everything – but I just can’t shrink my ABYSS. If I’m on my own, I can’t stop ruminating about all the ways in which the journey could go wrong, because taking responsibility for one’s own safety, in my book, means anticipating every conceivable problem, and planning evasive action for every case. So if I’m travelling to London, for example, I need be aware that the train might derail, that one of the other passengers might be a psychopath, that a terrorist plot might be due to reach its climax at King’s Cross at the very moment of my arrival, that I might trip up on the escalator at the underground, that I might jostle someone on the underground and provoke a fit of Tube rage which will result in a fatal stabbing, that I might step out in front of a car, bus, taxi, lorry, or white van with a trailer full of shrubbery on any one of London’s unreasonably busy roads. These are just the scenarios I can conjure up sitting at my desk at home; if I were actually making this journey at the present moment, I could do much better than that. Travelling with somebody for whom taking responsibility for one’s safety means behaving sensibly and not thinking about problems until they actually come up is so much less draining for me, so much less challenging, so much easier.
As taking responsibility for safety is so much more straightforward for the non-ruminator, it also makes sense to hand certain other tasks over to them too: handling knives, lighting gas flames, using power tools, climbing ladders, wiring plugs, opening the front door at night, giving medication to cats, deciding when it is safe to cross the road, administering eye drops to babies, carrying babies over hard surfaces – but I’m getting ahead of myself now. I’m sure you’ve got the main point here, which is that the OCD sufferer becomes more and more dependent on her safety guarantor, and as time goes on, everyday life for that guarantor becomes so much more draining, so much more challenging, so much harder.
It would be hard enough for these partners, parents and children of sufferers if all they had to do was to take care of whatever tasks the sufferer was avoiding, but most of them end up carrying further responsibilities. What these are will depend on the nature of the sufferer’s obsessions. My husband, for example, was my reassurer in chief – until he got wise to it, at least. Compared to some, he has it easy: he’s never had to keep a complete change of clothing in the front porch so that he can take off his contaminated work clothes and then walk through a bleach-infused foot bath before entering the house every evening; he’s never had to spend an evening going round the house checking that everything is unplugged, and then checking again, because the words he used in his first checking report weren’t quite convincing enough; he’s never arrived late to work because he’s had to spend an hour going through bin bags to make sure, but absolutely sure, that nothing essential has been thrown away by mistake; he’s never had to take extra care to move about his own home in such a way as not to disarrange a single ornament, cup, footstool, coffee table, coaster, book, newspaper, handset or tissue box; he’s never had to give up his job to become the full-time carer of a woman so petrified of germs that she can no longer touch anything or anybody; he has never been the parent of an adult so paralysed by her obsessions that she can no longer leave her bedroom and will only speak to her own family from the other side of a firmly closed door.
It’s not just the sufferer who suffers.
I didn’t think for a moment that someone like me deserved someone like Chris, I couldn’t quite see how I’d managed to wind up with him and I didn’t understand why he chose to stay with me rather than choosing one of those sane women you see walking around all over the place. Our relationship was simply implausible.
Even if I could be certain that Chris would never leave me voluntarily, there was still the possibility of early death. As I saw it, the women in my bloodline didn’t have much luck with their husbands in this respect. My mother’s husband had succumbed to a heart attack and left her widowed at fifty-nine. Then there was that dreadful day back in 1941 when my grandfather, in a moment of spectacular carelessness which cost his family dearly, tried to run for a moving bus and wound up crushed under it instead (you see what a lack of vigilance can do?). Whenever Chris left the house, especially after dark, I would extract a promise from him that he would be careful, not get knocked off his bike by a car, or beaten up, or knifed or anything like that. When I was having trouble sleeping at night, and his breathing was too quiet for me to hear, it was all I could do to stop myself poking him.
Loving makes us so vulnerable. Every day we face the risk of losing the people we love, of disappointing or hurting or inadvertently betraying them, of dragging them into our pains and problems, of getting dragged into theirs, or being disappointed or hurt or betrayed in our turn. The partner you share your life with can cheat on you, the parents whose acceptance you have always craved can use every visit and phone call as a new opportunity to undermine you, the child you brought up, fed, educated and loved can grow up to write a memoir; she might not even have the decency to wait until you’re both dead. I’m painfully aware, as a I write this, that someone or other said that any family which produces a writer is finished,29 and I really don’t have the slightest desire to finish mine, or wound it, or annoy it, or embarrass it ever so slightly. So I’m being as careful as I possibly can.
During the pause between the last paragraph and this one, I phoned my mother and asked her if it was fair to say, in writing, that her early loss had left her with a legacy of anxiety? Yes, she said, it had, and it was fair to say so; she added that she had always got herself terribly wound up if my father was a bit late coming home. Then would it also be fair to say that that kind of anxiety gets handed down in a family? Yes, it was perfectly fair. So, I’ve said it, I’ve written it, and my mummy said I could.
Like my mother, my husband encountered more than his fair share of adversity early on in life, but in his case the legacy has been made up, mostly, of preternatural toughness and eerie calm. So when I asked him what I should call him in a book which couldn’t help but be revealing of both of us, he said to call him Chris, because that was his name. And when I kept him awake in the wee small hours of the first day of the new millennium, ‘talking’, as I put in my notebook, ‘about my angst’, he said one has to shrug and accept that life is horrific and unbearable, but live it anyway.
That’s what he does.
I wrote very little poetry in 2000, and most of what I wrote was dismal. Hence the line: ‘all I ever make is laundry’. I probably did make quite a lot of laundry that year, and laundry, along with pacing, picking and procrastination, is what I chiefly remember, but when I looked back at the written evidence, I found quite a few other activities.
That was the year in which I founded a local fundraising group for the Medical Foundation, volunteered as the group’s secretary, taught my first evening classes in creative writing, got engaged to Chris, planned our wedding, travelled to London once or twice a week to see my Jungian analyst, then made the decision to terminate the analysis, decided that for the qualitative research part of my PhD I would interview undergraduates about their essay-writing, drafted a semi-structured interview to use for this, carried out pilot interviews, then the main group of interviews, got married, went on honeymoon to Venice, came back, held the first copies of my book in my hand, had my book shortlisted for a prize for debut poetry collections, attended the ceremony, didn’t get the prize, read my first reviews – which were good, by and large – made my first tentative attempts to analyse the data I had collected, wrote and presented a paper on my methodology to the department’s PhD forum. In December of that year, I took on a new paid project, helping a prolific but unt
utored poet to organize her work into a book. Of that last, I wrote, ‘Not at all sure I haven’t bitten off more than I can chew, there.’ But I wanted to take the job, just on the off chance that it might make me feel other than useless, for once in my life.
My analyst said that her one worry about terminating the analysis that summer was that my guilt seemed to have lost little or none of its claws-into-me ferocity. Leaving analysis at that point seemed justifiable to me because I was soon to be married and published, and these two facts together would mean that I could never again be a sadloserwaster in the eyes of Party Girl; everyone knows that only a sadloserwaster would need to spend so much time and money on therapy. Or should that be, waste so much time and money?
Thanks to my great-uncle’s legacy – that which should have been my father’s – and Chris’s willingness to work and pay the bills while I wrote and studied, I had ample supplies of both, and I felt just terrible about it. The bereavements which had yielded the money had also inspired my best poems, which had led to my award and my publishing contract, and I felt, if anything, even worse about that. I was both parasite and patriphage. If I was becoming more and more fearful, it had to be because I knew, deep down, that I had it coming.
My journey to and from the university, which I made as little as possible, became suddenly more abyss-like around the end of the summer term, when I travelled down for my last supervision of the academic year. I got on the train at the end of the line at Cambridge, as usual, and had the carriage to myself for five minutes before a tall, lean man hopped on. He leaned out of the doorway smoking for a few minutes, then he threw the butt onto the platform, smiled at me with pointy Bond-villain teeth and sat down in the seat opposite. Unlike me, he obviously enjoyed talking to strangers on trains, and entertained me all the way to Harlow Town with vignettes from his life: somebody had spread rumours around the estate that he was a kiddy-fiddler, all because he had opened the door to a child in his underpants – I don’t remember all the details but I think the whole thing ended up with him in court because he’d bitten a bit of someone’s ear off, which was a perfectly reasonable thing to do, because he hadn’t started it, but all the same he was the one who got charged with GBH, and where was the justice in that? I agreed that there was none, and shook a little. All the time, I kept my finger on the page I’d been reading: it seemed more than my ear was worth to ask if I might get back to it. He got off at Harlow Town, with a ‘God Bless You’, because I was obviously a good girl, and now we had established that that stretch of the Liverpool Street line would ever after belong to him, and all the other pointy-toothed bogeymen.
It was a pity, because up until that day the Cambridge–Liverpool Street leg had been the easiest of the trip for me. The worst time had always been the beginning of the return journey, when I had to wait, helplessly, in an underground concrete car park, often after dark, for the taxi I had ordered to pick me up and drive me back through thunderous and unwalkable streets to the local station. The wait never failed to set off my Unbearable Feeling, which would only abate – a little – when I had sat myself safely down in the cab and it had begun to move away. God alone knew who or what skulked about on the campus at night, and I didn’t want to find out. That evening, after my encounter with the ear-biter, I found myself waiting with a worse-than-usual case of Unbearable Feeling, so it was another pity that this turned out to be the one occasion when the cab driver who’d been sent to pick me up decided to pick up somebody else instead. I phoned for another driver, who arrived five minutes later, outraged on my behalf and very apologetic. It didn’t help much.
They were the most trivial incidents, I know that: someone talked to me when I didn’t want him to, and later that day I had to wait longer than usual for a cab. I’m at a loss to explain why they were such terrible experiences at the time, and why they left me so shaken for so long afterwards. I can’t, in the end, find an explanation that would satisfy a rational reader – I suppose that’s why they call it a disorder.
Chris married me and my disorder at the end of August, and then the three of us went off on honeymoon to Venice, the perfect venue for generating both romantic memories and imaginary near-drowning incidents. In the week that we were there, Chris took an album’s worth of photographs and I took copious notes: what we saw, what we did, what we bought, what we ate, what I feared, which bits of me hurt and when, and what we saw on Italian television: ‘Bath in rose milk. Cut armpit. Ally McBeal in Italian.’
My entry for 2 September begins: ‘3 a.m. woke up thinking 2 September, it’s significant – why? Then realized why “Papa was a Rolling Stone” had been going round my head for a couple of days: Dad’s death.’
I know it’s 3 September in the song, but the unconscious recalls feelings more precisely than it does numbers.
The 3 September was our last day in Venice. We went up to the restaurant on the hotel’s roof for our last Venetian meal; we had eaten breakfast there every morning, and I had once peered over the edge of the parapet, a mistake I didn’t make twice: ‘once had seen over the edge, cld’t get the thought of plunging over ought [sic] of my mind – what is it with me and fear at the moment?’ We had beautiful food and ‘an added light show – courtesy of an electrical storm on the Adriatic horizon – pink & orange sheet lightning – Chris thought the strange colours might be the result of pollution.’ I recorded that a huge Cunard liner drifted past, slowly, like a ‘lit-up glacier’, and that there was a ‘cute cherubic two-year-old’ sitting at the next table. Finally I noted my ‘slight alarm when realized had a great lamb bone in my mouth, but got rid of it after a second – worry quite out of proportion, as was my unease over the high location of the restaurant, and the storm – as I said, why is my fear so disproportionate, so out of control?’
One possible explanation was that I had come off the Prozac again; another was that I had declared myself officially normal and terminated the analysis. Maybe I was overdoing it with the laundry. What’s clear from my increasingly whiney and repetitive journal is how much I was struggling with my PhD. The wedding and honeymoon had given me a useful excuse to ignore it for a couple of months, but then the new autumn term came around and I needed to come up with something to show my supervisor. I had reached the crucial stage, the data analysis stage, where I had to take my interviews and relate them to the themes in my literature review in some meaningful and reasonably novel way, knit the separate parts together into a plausible thesis, identify whatever my point was and then get to it, in an appropriate number of words. My supervisor thought that I had some promising ideas. I didn’t. I was painfully aware that I had never received any training in qualitative research, and to me my methods, both for gathering and for analysing data, looked pathetically patched together. The whole thesis looked patched together to me. I told my supervisor that I needed to go back and transcribe all my interviews in full, just to make sure that I didn’t miss anything. This would take a nice long time, it was a huge task, and while I was doing it nobody could reasonably expect me to produce any conclusions and in doing so risk saying something, in a public forum, that might be uninteresting, irrelevant, stupid or wrong. I was supposed to be writing a thesis about the anxieties which arise in academic work and I couldn’t get over my anxiety about it. It was a mise en abyme; an oroboros; a slow, reflexive disappearance up an arse.
I obsessed about all kinds of things. I ruminated, and asked my husband for reassurance about my ruminations – a habit we called my ‘what-iffing’: What if we had fallen over while crossing the road and the car hadn’t stopped? What if that swelling on my lower lip (which turned out to be the mucocel) was cancerous? What if that mobile phone company that kept sending me bills for a phone I wasn’t using sent in bailiffs and big black dogs while I was in the house by myself? What if the clear discharge from my vagina was a symptom of cancer of the womb? What if nobody wanted to buy our house? What if somebody wanted to buy our house but the house we wanted to buy got taken off the market? What if
I had fallen into the Venetian lagoon while wearing a heavy backpack? What if the only reviews people took notice of were the two bad ones I kept wailing on about? What if the two bad reviews were the only really incisive ones and I owed it to the world to give up and stop pestering it with my God-awful poetry? What if I finished my PhD, handed it in and it failed? What if everyone else went on to have babies and I never did? What if I had a baby but fucked it up because I was too neurotic? What if I NEVER WROTE ANOTHER DECENT POEM AGAIN? In April, I finally went to the doctor, and took Chris with me – which made sense to both of us, as he was undoubtedly suffering too.
Now the medical notes can pick up the story again, beginning with a letter from my latest GP to the head of psychological treatment services at the local hospital, saying that he would be ‘much obliged if this lady30 could be assessed for treatment within your service’.
She has recently come onto my list and presented on 26 April saying that she was in a crisis on that day. She was tearful, overstretched, had taken on too much, was moving house and was not getting to sleep easily. She had been in therapy in London with—, and was requesting that she could re-start therapy here. I prescribed Fluoxetine 20 mg daily for her . . .
He made his request for an assessment for me, and concluded with: ‘I should say that she is married, and says that she is very happy in this relationship, and the house that she is moving to in Cambridge is very much to her liking.’
Of course, there was a waiting list. There always is on the NHS, but I can tell that this one wasn’t too bad, as the referral letter was dated 11 May and my appointment for assessment was sent out on 18 July. That’s really not bad at all, and in the meantime, I saw the kind GP again. We discussed what he called my ‘depression/anxiety thing’. He didn’t tell me to go out and have fun, nor did he read me a lecture about not getting all put out because I couldn’t get everything I wanted. I might well have been luckier with this GP – and I think I was – but our better working relationship might also have reflected a more mature attitude on my part, or perhaps health professionals always take a married thirty-something woman more seriously than they would a twenty-something girl. I think perhaps we all do, and it’s not entirely fair of us.
Woman Who Thought too Much, The Page 21