I may have had obsessive-compulsive disorder before I was born. Really, my earliest compulsive behavior was sucking my thumb when I was still in my mother’s womb, and that’s already the beginning. So far, I haven’t changed this habit and often suck my thumb. At the age of three, my compulsive behavior developed into pulling out my hair, which would remove all the hair on my left scalp. My mother had to shave my head completely, making both sides look symmetrical. In high school, my compulsive behavior evolved into pulling my eyebrows. This led to bleeding, scabbing, and then skin disease, which eventually spread to my entire face. Until now, at the age of 28, I am still struggling to control these compulsive behaviors.
The typical obsessive-compulsive disorder that often appears in movies or media: I don’t have to wash my hands. But I have many compulsive personal hygiene habits. I need to spend two hours shaving my legs, two hours doing makeup, two hours doing hair, and so on. Everything must be done to the utmost perfection. Although I have been striving for perfection, obsessive-compulsive disorder often makes the results worse. I spent so much time pulling out my eyebrows, trying to make them look completely symmetrical, but in the end, not a single one was left because perfection is impossible to achieve.
Wearing any piece of clothing twice makes me feel uncomfortable because I’m afraid of contaminating myself. I’m worried about the clothes I wear, about getting infected while sitting on a bus seat, or about getting infected with pants on dirty streets. I have to change my socks and underwear at least twice a day because I hate the sticky and soft feeling of fabric fibers sticking to my body. I am also afraid of bacteria growing in damp places. Every time I take a shower, I have to wash my towels with hot water to prevent the spread of bacteria. This means that I spend four times more time on cleaning every week than a normal person. This endless daily behavior not only consumes energy but also has no return, I cannot calm my anxiety, and compulsive behavior cannot stop. These behaviors make me feel even worse about my situation.
Maintaining a full-time job is extremely difficult, partly due to the ritualistic behavior I spend on grooming and cleaning, which takes too long. Coupled with repetitive and intrusive thoughts, it can trigger emotional pain at any moment of my work. If I hear anything bad happening in the morning news, my brain will replay those scenes continuously, vividly. I am currently engaged in copywriting for human resources recruitment. If you have severe OCD, doing this job can be quite exhausting. The meticulous attention to details turned a simple task like writing a paragraph into three hours of agony. Repeatedly playing the scene of a friend being shot in the mind, it is impossible to concentrate on writing anything.
It is these traumatic memories that have trapped my brain in a vicious cycle. I imagine every detail of the traumatic scene in my forced thinking, whether it is something I have witnessed or heard of before. I pay attention to and think about the details like a criminal investigation police officer. I imagined every detail that happened, from the shape of blood stains on the concrete floor to the smell of different foods in the breath of dying people, and so on. All of these make my normal life very difficult. It’s difficult to alleviate my compulsive thoughts when they occur, which can be awkward in the workplace.
When I first started writing, it was also a kind of coercion. I use writing to record and analyze things that I think have hidden meanings. Later, when I was a graduate student majoring in art, I figured out how to use writing to train myself. Poetry can train my mind with intrusive thinking, because this process forces the prefrontal cortex of the brain to participate in logical thinking, rather than causing the amygdala – the emotional center of the brain – to produce strong emotional reactions. For me, its mechanism of action is similar to visual narrative therapy for patients with post-traumatic stress disorder.
Assuming I have a repetitive traumatic thought, I would immerse myself in this thought process, experiencing the emotional reactions involved, and then I would slow down to draw a sketch so that I could record in detail the situation that is fermenting in my mind. When I have exhausted all my imagination, I will use the language of poetry to express it. The process of writing poetry can separate each word from its emotional connotation, because I must consider word choice and sentence structure purely in terms of numbers, phonetics, and aesthetics. In this way, I compressed the details of the tragic scene into lines of poetry, calculated the syllables, and evenly distributed the word count of each line without disrupting the meaning of the sentence.
I have tried exposure and reaction prevention therapy before, which was effective for me. Now I use writing poetry as an adjuvant therapy. I let myself follow the train of compulsive thinking until the end, but it would be a logical ending instead of painful memories playing back and forth in my mind over and over again. This is a convenient trick to deal with obsessive-compulsive disorder, while also creating vivid and powerful works to explore the lasting effects of psychological trauma.
For me, following my own compulsive thinking has never been unsafe. Because once I passed the climax of the scene, I realized how impossible it was, and other more reasonable outcomes were not as dangerous as I had imagined.
For example, if my compulsive fear is a neighbor taking a woman hostage in his room, I would write down the situation on paper and try to find logical evidence to support my fear. Usually these pieces of evidence are completely non-existent, and then I realize it’s due to compulsive psychology. There is really not enough reason to believe that the woman’s crying heard through the wall is because she was kidnapped on the other side. This woman could very well be a neighbor’s friend. She encountered unpleasant things at work, or heard some sad news, or any other situation, which is more reasonable than being afraid of a terrorist living in the next room. Writing these scenes on paper helps me return to reality. By examining the logical sequence of these events, I realized that in order for my fears to be justified, there must be sufficient evidence to support the worst-case scenario I imagined in my mind. If these pieces of evidence don’t exist, then I know there’s nothing to worry about, and I can break the thought cycle around fear.
I developed this method under the influence of art narrative therapy. Art narrative therapy is the use of painting to re experience and resolve traumatic past events. I have experienced two rapes in college, and when I present the details of these incidents in an artistic way, I can trust myself and trust my descriptions of these experiences. This is a huge improvement in my emotional processing. Narrative therapy helped me end the repetitive playback of traumatic events in my brain. So I am also considering using this method to deal with other traumatic memories and intrusive compulsive thinking. I choose to use writing because for me, it takes less time and is less likely to feel discouraged than drawing a scene. Because for someone like me who has a symmetry constraint, painting is a very difficult and time-consuming task. Writing poetry is much easier, especially with the help of computer technology. On the drawing board of something that has already been drawn, you cannot ‘cancel the operation’, but you can use it countless times in the World document. You can also store different versions on your computer in case you want to retrieve any earlier drafts.
The following poem is written by me based on a repetitive and intrusive compulsive idea about my friend, neighbor, and colleague. He was unfortunately killed while experiencing a psychological crisis and seeking help from the police. My friend has always had suicidal and murderous thoughts. After being repeatedly rejected by the hospital, he believed that the only safe place left was the prison. But when my friend took out his gun, the police killed him on the spot.
rattat
I was sleeping alone when your brother drove you to the hospital.
Your blood is like a thick ribbon, splashing onto the car window.
I don’t know you very well.
The internet told me about your death:
A 25-year-old man first pointed a gun at the police,
Then he was shot dead on the spot, facing his own head.
Neighbors said that the man requested help,
But when the police shouted ‘put down your weapon’, he didn’t listen.
The police are also our neighbors, firing five shots in your chest.
He said he must protect his family from violent attacks.
He pulled the trigger, bang bang bang bang bang.
If I could lie down quietly tonight,
I will hear the moon crawling into my room.
Writing poetry definitely cannot cure my obsessive-compulsive disorder, it just adds an extra means to turn compulsive thinking into something expressive, which helps me stop ruminating. When I create a poem, I explore every aspect of the traumatic event and then pull it out of my mind, making it stop. I haven’t found an effective way to deal with my compulsive behavior, which can be severe when I experience stress. But at least now, after writing each poem, my mind can rest and stay away from the troubles of traumatic memories, fears, and worries. I hope to one day find a way to calm down my body, just like I found a way to free my mind.