OCD Awareness Week 2020: My Monster
Throughout my childhood, I would have used the word “monster” to describe my head. I thought there was something so fundamentally wrong with me that could never be fixed, and then when I went to my child therapist, she encouraged me to see the OCD inside me as a monster who I had to beat.
It would take me a good deal of time to see myself as separate from my mental illness. For so long, I couldn’t separate the Ellie who felt magnificent when reading my favorite books or marvelous while I played my favorite games from the monster that lived in my head. As a fan of fantasy from an early age, I took to the imagery of fighting monsters in my head to help me fight back against the thoughts that plagued me.
Even with these images in my head, I found it extremely hard to forgive myself for what I perceived as failure. Anything from doing a compulsive behavior to obsessively worrying about something for a whole day made me feel like maybe the monster wasn’t something inside me, it was me after all.
Self-love has been difficult for me throughout my life, as throughout my childhood I berated myself for my interests, for failing to behave like other children, and for being - in my opinion - the worst coward in the world. My opinion of myself has improved over the years, even though I still find it very hard to think of myself as brave even when other people try to convince me.
I haven’t thought about this moment of trying to love myself and think of myself as a monster at the same time for a while, but I was reminded of it when I saw the International OCD Foundation’s activities for OCD Awareness Week 2020. The first challenge - and the one that stuck out to me the most - was to “draw your monster.” In other words, the challenge asked people living with OCD to draw a representation of what it felt like to have a monster in their head.
As someone whose artistic skills (or lack thereof) are nothing to brag about, I started looking online for pictures of monsters. Maybe, I thought, I could write out what I was feeling and come up with a way to describe a monster so well that it could be visualized by someone reading what I write. And once I decided to write about a monster, I thought of how I usually write new characters - I think of everything I can about them physically and emotionally.
I started to think about monsters. Did the one in my head have mucus that it leaves behind in a sticky trail? Perhaps it was gooey, grotesque, or gory. Some of the pictures of monsters had protruding bones or were just close enough to human to be unsettling. Did my monster walk on two legs or four, or some other fantastical number? Did it have shackles for hands, or wires to keep a prisoner inside? Or perhaps, did it have a fair form that belied its cruel inner nature? And what color would it be? Yellow, the color I hated for most of my childhood because it reminded me of vomit? Red, because even though it’s my favorite color, it reminds me of blood dripping and congealing?
I Googled monsters to get more inspiration, and after the obligatory pictures of the energy drink can, most of what I found was Cookie Monster, my favorite Sesame Street character. I instantly dismissed the idea because he is not at all scary to me, and since OCD is experienced through a life of fear, I needed something terrifying. I then realized that I would be equally scared if a demon-looking monster or something like Mike Wazowski from “Monsters Inc.” came into my bedroom in the middle of the night. In other words, just fear can’t cut it.
I took some more time to reflect on a walk around the neighborhood. What would a monster look like for someone who is scared of so many things, but this monster is the origin of all the fear? I thought that it might have to be something enormous like Cthulhu or Godzilla to encompass all of its facets. I tried to use my imagination, picturing monsters as I walked.
Surprisingly, I didn’t picture something like in the sample photos from the organization that depicted a one-eyed, many-limbed monstrous creature that looked like a villain in a Disney movie. Instead, I thought of a picture I found some years ago and saved in my mental health advocacy Pinterest board that felt more like what goes on in my head than anything else.
It’s a picture of a wolf pacing in the snow, circling and circling and circling until its paws bleed. The blood outlines a perfect red circle. The circle has to be perfect, just as OCD rituals have to be completed perfectly or they feel like they don’t count. But even in that picture, the monster is never shown. Just the wolf, emaciated and scared, yet fiercely determined. There is a fierceness in its eyes and the way it grits its teeth that shows that although it is still circling, it is fighting back as much as it can.
As I reflected more on the wolf, its dogged determination to fight back whether it’s alone or in a pack, I thought of animals in groups - and the answer came to me.
The closest I can come to assigning a monstrous form to my OCD is a large group of German cockroaches spread out across an apartment, a house, a life. I had an infestation when I was in grad school, and the experience felt similar to my overall experience with OCD:
Every time I entered the apartment, I knew that there were going to be cockroaches there, but I never knew where they would be. I didn’t know if they would affect me during a normal part of my routine or if I would have a day free of them. They were just there, endemic.
Every time I saw a cockroach, I felt filthy and disgusting, just like how I felt every time I succumbed to the immense pressure in my head to do a compulsive behavior or act differently based on obsessive or anxious thoughts.
I didn’t know if a cockroach sighting was just going to be one single roach or a group of them clustered together, like when I found a large group in the shower when I fled there to escape other roaches. Likewise, I never know if a single derailing of my day will be all that happens, or if I will be assailed by negative thoughts on all sides.
Cockroaches aren’t inherently disgusting. Even though I’m so disgusted by them, the main thing that repulses me is the idea that they are carrying germs. In other words, they represent more than they are, and they give me a visceral reaction even though they’re not themselves able to bite me or harm me in any other way.
Cockroaches are small(ish) bugs like ants, which is what I’ve called my automatic negative thoughts since I went through cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT).
They also remind me of the experience of collecting the corpses of dozens of cockroaches only to be told by my building manager that I was exaggerating things, that he didn’t believe there was a problem, and I was far too sensitive. “One or two cockroaches are normal,” he kept saying, and he didn’t believe me even when I had fistfuls pouring out of the vacuum cleaner. Likewise, I have been told so many times that OCD is just in my head and I could overcome it easily. These people don’t see what is truly there.
And then there was the day when I was eating macaroni and cheese and a live cockroach walked out of the bowl. I dropped it to the ground, grabbed my purse, and practically ran to the nearest police station, desperate to get help from someone who would believe me. I ended up getting help from a very kind detective when I reached my breaking point with the infestation, something that has happened to me with mental health as well. It’s not necessarily a huge, traumatic event that breaks a mind, although it can be. Sometimes, it is the small things accumulating over time until there are so many things on one’s mind that another one is simply too much to handle.
Most importantly, even though my first reaction to cockroaches usually involves running and screaming, I can beat them in a variety of ways. I got them out of my old apartment with paper towels and by vacuuming them. I got rid of many of them by asking for help from my roommate, a detective who ended up declaring the building unsafe and in need of bug bombing, and with the chemicals used in the bug bomb. Some of the bugs were defeated without help and others needed help from a variety of sources.
If I had better artistic skills, I’d draw a pile of cockroaches hissing and writhing in pure anarchy, disorganized, diseased, but still looking like regular roaches. It can blend in, after all, but there is still something making it different. A certain attribution making it monstrous. And this year for OCD Awareness Week, I encourage everyone to think of the monsters that may be afflicting them and be kind and accepting to others, because we can never see their monsters unless they feel safe enough to share.
Ellie, a writer new to the Chicago area, was diagnosed with OCD at age 3. She hopes to educate others about her condition and end the stigma against mental illness.