Thinking in Gray
It’s three months since I came home, and every day, my mom has bemoaned the gray hair that has infested her head. We’ve talked about how much she misses hair dye over our walks several times a week, and sitting on the couch last night, as she said she had finally scheduled an appointment to get her hair colored, she asked me a question:
“Is there any gray in your head?”
I misunderstood at first. I’m in my 20s and have never seen a single gray hair on my head. But she meant something else entirely, and clarified: Can someone like me think in shades of gray instead of seeing the world in black and white?
All-or-nothing ANTs have been my most common negative thoughts since I first started tracking them, and as my mom noticed, they make their way into every area of my life. I can be thrilled to meet a new friend, thinking the social problems that have plagued me are finally over, only to doubt I can ever make a real friend when people cancel plans. Although I’ve lost over ten pounds since coming home, I’m still nearly as unsatisfied with my weight at the beginning of the quarantine, even though I’m very close to my goal. And I went from yearning for DragonCon to happen against all odds to anxious that it wasn’t being canceled fast enough.
Usually, these thoughts don’t affect much in my life. They’re there a lot of the time, but they don’t often influence my behavior. In terms of the quarantine, though, it’s a lot harder to not behave based on these thoughts.
When I think about returning to Chicago, I’m excited and scared, anxious and anticipatory. Since it’s unlikely that my workplace will be one of the first few places opened during Stage 4 or beyond, I will probably be coming back before the office is open, meaning I’ll have to make the choice myself. I’ll have to balance several factors like which places are open and whether I’d be able to see my friends and the guy I’m sort-of dating so I won’t be lonely when I go back and will be able to try to resume my old life.
I’ve decided, for now, to hold off on any thoughts of moving back until at least the second week of July. After my dog celebrates his 14th birthday, I will have to make a decision that involves seeing shades of gray. How can I balance my need for social contact with my fear of getting sick? How will I tell when is right to go back if I’ll be lonely if I do it too soon and lose the everyday contact I have with my family, or too late and jeopardize my friendships with people who I haven’t seen in months?
The fact that my dog’s birthday is coming up gives me some time where I can fall back into this old pattern - after all, there’s no chance I’m moving back before then. But every day after that is going to be a choice, and it’ll depend on so many factors that it can’t be a simple black and white choice.
If no one is making the decision for me, like what happened when work shut down along with the entire city of Chicago, I find it hard to not oscillate between extreme thoughts along this spectrum. For example, “If you go back too late, you’ll never have friends like you did before” could be true, as could “if you go back too early, you’ll jeopardize the progress you’ve made with coping mechanisms by overeating out of loneliness.” It really does seem like the middle is an unobtainable territory and I’ll have to swing too far on one end or the other.
In CBT, I tried to learn about thinking gray. I tried to teach myself to think things like “I may not have the ideal job at first, but I’ll learn and get experience on my resume” instead of “I will be stuck forever in a horrible job.” I’m going to do my best to apply this technique to the gradual reopening of the world, but it’s complicated when, as Mom implied, I have a harder time thinking in gray.
Black and white thoughts come easily to me thanks to my history of childhood obsessions. I never thought something bad “might” or “may” happen if I didn’t do a compulsion. There was no gray, and I had only one choice - to do whatever I felt compelled to do before the bad thing happened. As I got older, these sorts of thoughts transformed into my all-or-nothing ANTs that plague me still.
I’m not sure what these thoughts may turn into next, but for now, I’m going to try to be as flexible as possible. When the time comes, I’ll do my best to listen to reliable news sources, local friends, and work to determine what time would be best for me to return. Maybe I’ll even try some old CBT practices involving writing alternate thoughts, scenarios, and more. In the end, I will make a choice, and in this situation, it will have to be something other than black and white. It’ll be one of my first experiences choosing gray, and I hope it’ll be the first of many more to come as I continue finding ways to expand the rigid world I’ve made for myself.
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.