My Own Worst Enemy

I’m sitting at my favorite probably-wont-get-covid-here bar-with-a-couch, ostensibly writing my next piece for ADDitude magazine.

The still-in-my-head draft begins with a bit about how it would be nice if baggage, mental illness, and neurodivergence could fit nicely into individual buckets. If only we could say, “this symptom clangs around in the OCD bucket,” “that quirk lines the bottom of the ADHD basket,” and “that neurosis fits in the wider anxiety container.”

Writing for places like ADDitude gives me the money to make ends – if not meet – at least sit next to each other in captain’s chairs screaming, “he’s breathing my air!”

But if something is worth doing, it’s worth procrastinating.

Still, if I’m going to let ADHD procrastinate on writing about ADHD, I should be using my time to write on some prompts given to me by my writing coach that are due next week.

I keep playing with the idea of writing a book, but if I make the decision to write a book, I will die. Yes, I see the irony in that OCD is keeping me from potentially writing a book that would have some amount of focus on OCD. But, I did hire a writing coach to help me not write a book.

And really, I should be writing that ADDitude piece to pay for the writing coach.

So we end up full circle with mental illness and neurodivergence not conveniently settling themselves into categories.

This leads me here, writing about how sometimes you can spend nine years in therapy and still not fully realize all the ways the various disorders you collect play together in the sandbox of your brain.

I’m not really surprised – it’s all so intertwined that I’ll never be able to tease it all apart. I suspect if I did, that I would somehow cease being me at all.

I mentioned in my last post that I’ve been having conversations with my therapist about the therapeutic relationship. For all the ways it is entirely unique, it still mimics the sandbox. So any discussion of the therapeutic relationship means discussing my own issues with worth and confidence.

There has never been an absolute lack of either. It’s frustrating – though I can rationally believe positive things said about me or positive thoughts I have about myself – I cannot let them stick. It’s easy to write that off as falling into the low-self-esteem or low-self-worth columns and going from there. There’s some truth to it, after all.

But the mix of these conversations with my therapist and the feeling that if I decide to write a book, I will die has twisted the kaleidoscope (look, I’m good with analogies and metaphors, but I’m not consistent with them).

I think OCD may play into it more than I considered previously. It’s not just a fear that if I believe positive things about myself that I will be a self-absorbed, over-inflated ego of a person. It’s not just fear that I am wrong about any perceived strengths. It’s not just imposter syndrome. There’s a superimposed feeling that believing these things will make them not true.

I had never compared that feeling before with my way of finding balance with the universe. My way of trying to negate any broad statements made as truth.

And it is a feeling. It feels, physically and emotionally, the same as not writing a book because if I decide to write a book, I will die, which feels like my general cowering before a malevolent universe. It burrows behind my eyes and takes up space in my lungs. It paralyzes me with that dichotomy between knowing and feeling. Will I die if I decide to write a book? Maybe. Will I die because I decided to write a book? No. #ExceptYesOfCourseIWillOMG

It shows how insidious OCD can be.

It’s more obvious with thoughts like, “I wish my kids would just be quiet,” and then having to immediately follow that up with, “But not forever. I don’t want them to die!” Because the universe is just waiting to fuck my shit up.

Just as it’s difficult to prove a negative, it’s difficult to see a compulsion that manifests as not believing something. It hides behind the actual self-worth issues and lets them take the fall. After all, those fears and questions of worthiness are what fuel the whole machine in the first place. OCD, like all anxiety, is trying to be helpful – in this case, I think it is trying to save me from disappointment and from the risk of confirmation of my fears. But it’s like the Amelia Bedelia of helpfulness.

Because brains are messy, I hadn’t realized that my work over nearly a decade of therapy (even now, I don’t want to say “hard work” because maybe I haven’t worked that hard) to shore up the foundations of my self-worth is being actively sabotaged by my own brain.

The call is coming from inside the house.

I sort of wonder if the things I fight back against the hardest are the most likely to be true. But to think that seems dangerous.

I can’t decide if this is encouraging or demoralizing.

As I enter my tenth year in therapy, I’m sometimes surprised by the new reflections and pieces of myself that occasionally come to light.

I don’t precisely know what to do about this. Like with most things, I suspect there’s some radical acceptance on the menu, but finding the line between acceptance and giving up is as essential and frustrating as always.

My brain has always been adept at coming up with OCD symptoms that skirt the possibility of Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP) therapy. That’s the problem with thought-based compulsions mixed with unprovable obsessions, really.

You can’t bully, cajole, or persuade yourself not to think of the elephant on the pink balloon.

Still, for me, there’s a lot of power in the knowing and the identifying, the naming and the labeling, and of course, the writing.