everyone i love is capable of dying

ocd as love, misfiring

At eight years old, I became obsessed with the death penalty.

We were going on our first big family holiday that summer, flying to San Francisco and then hiring a car to drive to Yosemite National Park. I didn’t know much about America, but I did know they still had the death penalty there, a fact so cruel and unbelievable to me then that I latched onto it and could not let go. Months before, I convinced myself that while we were there, my Dad was going to be wrongly convicted of a serious crime, and go to prison; I would then, somehow, have to stop the authorities from sentencing him to death. It would all be down to me.

This was more than a one-off spiral. Whenever anyone mentioned the holiday, I would flush cold with dread. I spent quite a while planning what I would say when questioned by the police. I loved - and love - my Dad so much, I couldn’t bear to think about it, and yet I had to, some horrible force compelled me to dig my thumb into that bruise over and over again. The worry was so precise, yet had appeared in my head so fully formed I wondered if I was a psychic, whether I had a duty to tell my family so that we’d know not to board that plane. Simultaneously, though, I knew I could not tell anyone, because it wasn’t going to happen, because it was ridiculous. Both these thoughts co-existed without argument. I was stood somewhere liminal and queasy, between the realms of the sane and insane, one foot firmly planted in each. I didn’t know it, but I would visit again.

2.

When I was very little, my family did not have a car - we had a dark green campervan. I used to think his headlights looked a bit like eyes, his bumper like a nose. Some cars looked angry, glaring at you as they passed, but our van had a friendly, benign expression. He was kind.

My little brother and I would sleep in the tiny space in his roof on a thin grey camping mattress, air thick with his smell, which was unpleasant, musty seats and the quease of carsickness. I loved how cramped it was up there, how I could reach out and touch every wall, like a womb. Every night before sleep I would line all my soft animals up in a row and kiss them on the forehead one by one. (I say soft animals not stuffed toys because my mum always used to say, they don’t like being called stuffed toys. It makes them sad.) This was easier while camping than at home, because I’d only bring five or so animals camping, whereas at home I had more than twenty, and if I thought I’d missed any out, I’d have to start all over again. But then when we were camping I had to wait until my brother had gone to sleep and then turn on my torch and do it. Sam was only three, but I still worried he’d think I was acting strange.

me in my favourite cupboard; i’ve always loved tiny spaces

Our van went to Cornwall and the New Forest and I think even France once. But he was getting old, bits were rusting or falling off of him, and when I was about seven, I think, my parents decided to get a proper car, and sell him to a man who lived down our street. One of the last times we went out in him, I had a cut on my index finger and I deliberately blotted it with the seat fabric so that some of my DNA would be on him forever. I felt very clever doing this, like I’d found a way to claim him as mine, a secret the man down the street would never know.

In the years after, he was always there at the front of that stranger’s house - he probably didn’t get the chance to go camping and sit anywhere beautiful. He was probably confused, I thought, wondering where we had gone. Then one day he wasn’t there anymore. We never saw him again. I persuaded myself it was the bloodstain on the seat that meant the man chose to give him away, or scrap him. I couldn’t get that thought out of my head. I’d made him sad. I knew it was ridiculous but it devastated me. Our van was sad, wherever he was, or maybe even dead, insofar as a van could be dead, and it was my fault. It was all my fault.

3.

There is a poem I love, by Ollie O’Neill, called Everyone I Love is Capable of Dying: Everyone I love is capable of dying and I am in love with this fact, how unflinching it is, how lucky I am to be able to prepare for at least one abandonment. Nothing is sexier than the prospect of being left, and the dead do leaving so well. Love’s appeal is in its propensity to end in heartbreak. What you can do before that is magical…

In January 2021, I was diagnosed with OCD because I could not bear that fact, how unflinching it was. My Nana had just died of COVID; the time span between us finding out she might die and her dying was twelve hours. If that could happen then anything could happen, was my logic, and my logic was sound. The chance that somebody I loved might one day, at random, stop existing, was higher than zero. This was not irrational. The problem was I couldn’t accept any probability other than zero; I couldn’t relax. I could get that chance back down to zero, however, by doing a series of actions, like touching wood within ten seconds of having an intrusive thought about somebody dying, and if there wasn’t any wood available to touch within that ten seconds, clenching my fists or shaking my head like an Etch-a-Sketch until the thought went away. Not doing those little rituals, I thought, would mean not loving that person. I had to follow them through on the ridiculous off-chance that it might be protecting them; I had to protect them.

Ah, my therapist at the time said, you’re one of those people.

Those people? I said.

You want to control everything.

I protested this. I was not an overbearing person, I told her. I was a wonderful daughter and girlfriend and friend. (This sudden burst of self-esteem surprised me, I didn’t really know where it had come from.) Yes, my brain would pelt me against my will with scenarios where I have hurt the people I care about the most; yes, I would anthropomorphise everything I owned, so that there were more beings I could imagine being loved by, and ultimately letting down. But all this came from love, I said. It wasn’t that I wanted to control the people I love - just that if anything bad happened to any of them, it would be my fault. Just that I took unwilling responsibility for their entire physical and mental wellbeing.

My therapist sat back in her armchair and pushed her glasses up her nose. Incidentally, that was to be our last session, because she’d also made some comments about how me being out as queer to my parents was “too much information”. But that didn’t really hurt, because I could mock her for it afterwards, turn it into an anecdote to tell friends over dinner. It didn’t sting as much as the truth.

It’s very hard, I’ve learned, to prove for definite that something didn’t happen. I’ll get intrusive thoughts that I’ve punched someone or cheated on Rosa or sent something inappropriate to my boss, and I’ve said to Rosa, well, I don’t remember not doing it, as if there is a universe in which I could press record on my whole life and watch it back on 2x speed to check. There are ways to mitigate it - turning all our appliances off at the wall, and saying to myself, I have switched this off, or taking photos of the plug sockets so that I know I’ve done it, and no-one will die in an electrical fire while I am out.

The world must be a very scary place for you, Rosa said to me once.

We joke that Rosa’s mental illness gets the better celebrity representation - Mariah Carey, Kurt Cobain, Stephen Fry, Halsey, Virginia Woolf. I lost out on this front. Lists of famous people with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder are sparse, featuring Kim Kardashian because she said she was “totally OCD” in a Glamour interview in 2012, and 16th century German priest and theology professor Martin Luther, who reportedly went to confession so much that the other priests found it annoying. OCD hasn’t gotten the Tumblr treatment yet; it hasn’t shaken off its status as punchline; no one is trying to romanticise it. It’s a fundamentally unsexy mental illness.

People talk about anxiety and depression like they are grey cartoon clouds, flat nebulous things. That’s how well-meaning public health campaigns represent it: been down lately? Struggling with your worries? The broadness of worries, settling over the mind like snow. They don’t quite get how sharp each worry can be, a knife that pins your whole self to the wall. When you have an OCD brain, you are so often held captive by thoughts and rituals so hyper-specific no stranger could empathise. It is far easier to say you are ‘feeling anxious’ than it is to confess you are auditing your entire life for reasons you might have hurt somebody; it is simpler to joke about your neuroses and swiftly move on than to mention you believe that a loved one might have a terminal illness and not know it yet. The line between pity and disgust is a fine one; I wonder where exactly it falls.

I don’t understand how anyone else does it. I know, logically, that living is about surrendering to the small but real possibility of disaster; of seeing it in your peripheral vision, but not turning to stare. But to my inner child, all this seems like misplaced trust. To stay sane you have to lean on, free fall into that trust, because 99 times out of 100 it will be okay, and at some point it won’t, it really won’t, and you can’t escape that. You have to live every day knowing that chance is not zero; but you have to live anyway.

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Hello <3 thank you for reading. It’s been a strange and stormy June so far in Cambridge - I hope you are under sunnier skies, wherever you are.

This one got a bit sad didn’t it. I’m not sure if it mimics anyone else’s experiences of OCD either - this might just be my personal weirdness. But I hope you can take something from it, regardless.

All love,

Ellie