OCD is defined as a two-fold mental health condition, where a person has recurrent disturbing thoughts, and then performs specific behaviours as a form of self-comfort and assuagement. The ‘obsessive’ component comes from these intrusive thoughts, and the ‘compulsive’ from the rituals and repeated behaviours used to alleviate their discomforting nature.
At 12 years old, the focus of my obsession and those frontal regions of my brain became education-based. Anxieties about school (and later college and university) became the subject of my obsessive thoughts, while the compulsions were related to my schoolwork and educational activities. It was a predictable and logical obsession for me to develop; for many teenagers, the school environment catalyses or exposes these types of anxiety-based disorders. The deadlines and exam anxieties, and the friendships and socialisation create an intense environment that demands much mental and physical energy. For a young person with OCD, it is easy for these social and academic anxieties to become irrational, or for them to supply further material for an anxious mind to overinterpret and overreact to. For a brain that cannot healthily process anxiety, the cesspool of newness and social anxiety that is the school environment is an easy source of inspiration for obsessions and compulsions.
At 12, I was nicknamed the ‘scribe’ for my obsessive note-taking. My teachers said they had never seen a wrist move so fast. Sometimes the words people used were nastier and more unforgiving, but the prospect of failure was infinitely crueller. I laughed along with everybody like the idea of missing something important wasn’t sickening and fundamentally stressful, like I wasn’t recording even the teacher’s disfluencies and filler words, like my fingers weren’t bleeding onto the notepaper. ‘Wait, Sir, could you repeat what you just said? What was the last part? I just missed the last part.’ I couldn’t assess the relevancy of information or identify the unnecessary or the useless; I had no informational filter. The obsession was academic perfection and omniscience, and the compulsion was this verbatim report of the lesson. These habits and strange behaviours made me very sick. The repeating of comforting phrases and behaviours, and the repeated pleas for reassurance affected my personal relationships and the quality of my work. It culminated in eleven rewrites of an Othello essay when I was sixteen, and eventually in complete avoidance of school.
I’m better now. Part of it is the medication I’m sure, the spike in serotonin that reduces those intrusive thoughts and associated behaviours. Part of it is the compromise and the kindness with which I think about my body and all it can do. And if I learned to attach less expectation to school, it was as a means of survival. I learned that compulsions aren’t solutions and that you can’t do something perfectly enough or pleasing enough to quiet something that wants only to hurt you and scare you.