Anxiety Always (Remastered and Reissued)

This isn't a new post. This is a remastered and re-released previous post; rather a personal one. I put it up a month or two ago and it got a pretty decent number of hits. A part of me freaked out at some point and went 'Hey, dude. You're oversharing on the internet'. I'm not really much for talking about myself - not in my everyday, normal human sort of life anyway. So, I hit delete and the post disappeared from my profile.
Obviously I didn't wipe it completely. I made a copy first. Otherwise this re-post wouldn't exist.

And that was that. Except, of course, that it wasn't.
I got a message sent to me on Facebook: a friend from long ago, someone I really should have kept in better contact with. She thanked me for my post. For this post. She told me I was brave.
Throughout the course of my thirty-five years on this ball of spinning rock and dirt I have been called a lot of things (granted, most of that was during primary school). But I cannot recall ever being called 'brave' before. It felt good.

When I first seriously began writing - during my sparrow-boned and narcissistic teenage years - I told myself (with the kind of self-obsessed hubris that is pretty much unique to teenagers) that I wrote because I wanted to make some kind of impact - to create something that echoed out wider and larger than myself (a bit like ripples spreading out from a stone cast into a pond, if you want to get all simile-happy about it). I guess in my strange little way I wanted to change the world.

Now, I have to be honest with you. I continue writing because I think I'm pretty great at it. I have a ton of words in me and they all clamor and shout to be heard and sometimes when I read them back I do think: 'Man, I've got something here.' I know that I'll never change the world or start a revolution or anything. I know that these words will never make me rich. Or famous. But I keep writing - even though I could be spending all this time doing something that I enjoy more: like reading, listening to music, watching a B-Grade horror flick (or an old episode of QI), or shouting obscenities at pigeons.
But deep down that arrogant teenager is still inside of me. I figure if I can write something, anything, that...I don't know...resonates with someone else, something that matters, even if only in a small, fleeting way. If I can manage that...
Then that is reason enough.

Also, by taking down the post I was chickening out; pure and simple. I would be once again hiding a part of myself that I have no business being ashamed of in the first damn place. I shouldn't feel guilty for my misfiring synapses and skewed brain chemicals.

I have a birthmark - a wide olive-brown stain on one the side of my neck. It looks kind of like the impression of a palm-print pressed into the skin. For a while there, as a kid, this caused me a bit of distress. When you're real young you don't want anything that marks you out as different; it potentially makes the whole weary business of school just that little bit harder. But as the years melted away I came to accept it. It became a part of me - something that helped define the sense of me that I had in my head. A few years ago I ran into a guy I'd known back in those days. He mentioned something I'd written about that birthmark, back in intermediate or whatever. He said he'd really admired me for that.

I should also mention that when my baby teeth finally fell out the new set that grew in boasted a strikingly prominent pair of canines. Thus, I was rumored to be a vampire for a while; teased a little for it (back then vampires were sadly neither cool nor sexy). But over the years those teeth have become my thing - something that separates me. I even resisted when my parents offered to get me corrective braces. So I'm still a vampire (though now also a vegetarian).

All these things, these imperfections - the birthmark, the fangs, the weird crafting, my struggles with a comparatively minor mental illness...
These flaws make me who I am. And I am not ashamed of who I am.

So there you go: I'm a vampiric, music-and-bad-movie-fixated, closet bogan/covert hippy/undercover Goth/frustrated novelist. With a mild case of OCD.
It doesn't really take courage for me to admit that now, I even feel a certain odd pride. Because if I can live with this then it means that, in some small way, I am strong.

                                                                           (...)

Alright, first things first. This is a music blog and the title of today's post is lifted from the debut album of the electronica outfit Adult. ('and the award for least-Google-friendly band name goes to...'). A husband and wife duo that hail from...I'm going to say, Detroit; they seem like they ought to come from Detroit. Their sound is an abusive mix of abrasive, grimy electroclash scrawled across with dissonant no wave and post-punk influences; Ladytron with a mouthful of blood. The vocalist sounds like Siouxsie Sioux picking a fight. Nervous, tense and troubled; they have released a handful of albums and the titles are a dead giveaway for the uneasiness of the music pressed into those little polycarbonate discs: 'Anxiety Always', 'D.U.M.E' (Death Unto Mine Enemies, I believe), 'Gimmie Trouble' and 'Why Bother?' There is a great time to be had there, tons of fun for the maladjusted. I recommend them.

But they are not the subject of this post.

I've noticed that you get more hits on your post if you give away a piece of yourself; a little personal truth: the blog as confessional booth. So here's a little piece of me.

Since adolescence I've been living with a mild form of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. Now, a lot of folks will lay claim to this - often they'll smile apologetically and say something like 'I'm a bit OCD about that' or whatever. By this, they usually mean that they like the towels folded a certain way.

Nope.

That isn't OCD, I'm afraid. That's simple fussiness and that's totally cool; everyone is fussy about something. Unless you feel compelled, even forced, to perform certain (often quite time-consuming and seemingly meaningless) rituals in order to stave of the sense that something terrible will happen if you don't...

Well, you're probably not experiencing OCD.

Obsessive Compulsive Disorder is an anxiety disorder. Basically, at it's core the whole thing stems from some deep, pulsing sense of anxiety; of fretfulness; of something bad just waiting to happen. An archaic term for a troubling or worrying thought was a 'maggot', as in a 'maggot of doubt', or a 'maggot of uneasiness'. It is the best term I have ever heard applied. Picture it: something pallid and squirming, curling and gnawing away somewhere deep in you brain, writhing in the back of your mind. It's as good an illustration of how it feels as any I can imagine - that larval thought that simply won't. Go. Away. Sufferers develop the rituals as a means of banishing the thoughts and I have to say, from my own experience, that the rituals do genuinely help. After they are completed there is a weird sense of achievement, perversely it feels like something has been accomplished. The anxiety is allayed. But, crucially, never banished. Not for good.

I can't speak for those that feel they have to count the times they flick a light switch on and off, nor those who have to count the number of objects touched, in a certain way, in a certain pattern. I've never felt compelled to count anything (perhaps why I didn't do particularly well at mathematics) and my experience of living with this anxiety disorder has taken different forms throughout various phases. My condition is very mild, undiagnosed (well, except by me in an apparent bid to make my psychology degree worth something), and for the most part controllable.

For the most part.

Something is classified as a 'disorder' when it negatively impacts upon your life: professional, personal, whatever. Certainly my condition has never impacted upon my working life. My personal life, well, is perhaps a different story. It's something I've managed to keep hidden much of my life, except from those closest to me. It's also something that I've only recently become comfortable discussing. Shame is a big part of this, embarrassment as well. See, the thing with OCD is; sufferers are totally self-aware. They know that what they're doing is illogical, irrational and would make no sense to anyone else. That doesn't make it any easier to stop. The rules are the rules. So, I've hidden myself a bit in the past. I've withdrawn from circumstances that might either exacerbate or reveal my condition to others. It's my dirty little secret, y'know. This is less of a thing now than when I was younger and full of those raw chemical emotions of youth. As you get older you become...I don't want to say 'at peace with yourself', that sounds saccharine. You become more yourself, I guess; accepting that the way you are is okay and if other people have an issue with it, well, hell, that's their problem.

My condition was at it's peak when I was a teenager, probably.

It began with contamination phobias. It really latched on when I first learnt about the scabies mite. I have a number of tiny red dots in my skin. They look like tiny, blood-shedding pinpricks. They are the result of pigment or melanin or something gone a bit weird. They are nothing. I freaked out a bit when I first noticed them and asked a pharmacist. He told me they were probably scabies (despite the fact that they didn't itch), so I read about scabies.

I really frigging wish I'd hadn't done that. It really doesn't do for a paranoid to discover that there actually is a kind of insect (okay, arachnid, or mite...whatever) that lives under your skin and can be transferred by skin-to-skin contact. Things kind of escalated after that, the thought of some kind of contamination spread by touch stayed with me and became twisted, corrupted by the maggots in my mind. It got so I started to think other contaminations could be spread by contact, so I started keeping my stuff separate (though never food on my dinner plate, though I understand that is a bit of an OCD thing) and fretting about which objects I'd touched myself, and in which order.

It all got a bit strange. I would have been fourteen or fifteen at the time.

Then I went to a doctor. He took a look at my blood freckles, observed that there was one on my hairline (scabies mites never venture above the neck), that they didn't itch, or spread and concluded that they were....careful, big scientific term coming up - red dots.

The scabies fears faded after that, and eventually the contamination thing eased as well. I'm not weird about physical contact any more, though I still have a bit of a thing about blood-drinking, semi-parasitic insects. You might even call it a minor phobia. They freak me out.

Years later, I fell in love and began talking to the stars. Okay, there's no way to not make this sound odd, but you have to understand that I was a teenager: still a seething morass of violent hormones, wild romantic ideals and also burdened with a pretty deep-set inferiority complex. Basically, I figured I didn't deserve her and what began as a weird pseudo-romantic quirk turned into a ritual. Most nights after I'd seen her and spent time with her, I'd stand on my parent's back lawn and gaze up at the endless star-shattered sky. Now it might have sounded like a prayer, and really it's not all that different from kneeling down and murmuring your hopes and fears into your interlocked hands - palm pressed to palm. I prayed to the stars and the moon if it was there hanging golden and fat in the sky. Only it wasn't really a prayer because I am now - and was even moreso then - at best an agnostic. I knew nothing heard me, that there was no God hovering silently in the spaces between stars waiting attentively on my whispered words. It was the ritual that I thought brought me luck and staved off the inevitable, looming break-up.

It didn't work. The relationship ended. The world moved on and I stopped talking to the stars.

Two interesting asides from this little chapter of my psychosis. For a start, shooting stars aren't actually all that uncommon. I saw quite a few and they are pretty cool. Another intriguing occasion was when I startled an intruder. I was just out there star-gazing when the security light attached to the garage flicked on. For a second I didn't think much of it (a strong wind was usually enough to trigger the damn thing) and then a dude walked smartly around the corner and into my parent's backyard. He was solidly built and appeared to be wearing a camouflage-patterned jacket. The light was at his back so his face was just a silhouette.
I said hello.
He froze in a wholly gratifying fashion. Now, a couple of things. Firstly, he couldn't see me - I was well back in the shadows and he would have been night-blind from the suddenness of the security light, so he wouldn't have known that I was just a skinny kid hanging out in the dark. Secondly, I have a strikingly deep (I've been told it's 'big and booming') voice. So I wouldn't have just sounded like the jumble of bird-bones and coat-hangers that I resembled.

He mumbled something about looking for someone else and walked briskly away down the drive. I stood out in the dark for a little while longer - finishing my ritual - and then went inside. I didn't feel nervous at any point, which is odd. I didn't even feel startled when he first appeared. End story.

That was a long time ago. A lifetime ago, it feels like now. The me that existed then is now long gone; buried down deep in my bone and marrow, perhaps, but for the most part he is just a lingering phantom. When I stumble upon anything that I wrote or sculpted back then, in that time it is like looking at the work of a ghost: a 'me' that doesn't exist any more.

I don't miss him. He was, for the most part, a mixed up and frequently sullen kid that withdrew from those closest to him and said some terrible things. I didn't like being a teenager much. Everything got easier when I hit my twenties and my moods balanced out - the roar of my lunatic hormones quieting down to a soft buzzing. By my mid-twenties I'd balanced out, my neuroses kept carefully in check, so much so that much of the time I could pretend that there wasn't something in me - something strange and, I felt at the time, somehow shameful.

Now my OCD manifests in a very narrow and specific way. Perhaps fittingly for a music junkie (or music guru, if you prefer) I'm excruciatingly particular about the storage and handling of my discs. I grip them only by the edges of the disc. I never touch the playing surface. I keep the jewel cases in resealable plastic sleeves that I import from Japan because those ones are of a much higher quality (thicker plastic) than the US-made ones. I use compressed air to remove dust from the discs and the player. I do my best to protect them from humidity, mildew and bugs (I litter my CD storage drawers with those moisture-absorbing sachets you get in medicine bottles and new shoe-boxes). This is a legitimate concern in New Zealand; a country only recently embracing such 20th Century technological advances as air-conditioning and insulation. Thus humidity and damp are genuine issues here. I don't lend my CDs out to anyone...hell, I doubt I'd let anyone else touch them.

I really put the CD back into OCD.

Actually most of this just makes me sound like one of those really pedantic collectors (comics and original-release action figures see the same level of reverence applied to them by other fanatic dudes). I treat CDs like holy items, which isn't really surprising (and for the record, quite a few are out-of-print or otherwise irreplaceable) and perhaps that's really all this is now, not a symptom of OCD but a sign that I'm a bit of a fanatic and a fusspot. Actually, I do have a few graphic novels and such too. I'm quite protective of those as well - hell, they were expensive, man. All of this is relatively new. As a teenager and in my very early twenties I'd happily lend discs, would tote them around to other people's places and throw them on their stereos. Scratches and finger-prints didn't bother me so long as the discs kept playing. It was the music that was important, not the ephemera.

Anxiety is a moving target.

Sometimes it's an overheating fridge, a leaking washing machine, a landlord that suddenly decides they need to sell the property you've been inhabiting at a very reasonable weekly cost, or an infestation of fleas left over from a cat that doesn't live with you any more.

These things are all fixable and can be remedied either by hard-work, a lot of phone-calls, financial expense or, in the case of the fleas: a lot of vacuuming, insecticides and a trip to a laundromat to wash all the bedding. My response to these kind of stress-ors is to deal with them as rapidly and productively as possible. Being able to do nothing or being delayed from taking action is torturous for me.

This is partially a positive thing in that it makes me extremely motivated to fix things and means that I can be really quite productive at times (although it has also led to some rash decisions in the past as well). But with these anxieties there is no need for rituals of compulsive behaviour, because this is all stuff that can be worked through and sorted out: it is something concrete and real and identifiable.

In truth it is probably just perfectly normal anxiety; the kind everyone faces at some point.

A far worse kind of anxiety is the nameless dread that grows in all the empty spaces: in the feeling that something is going wrong. The anxiety that lies behind every unspoken word, every unvoiced concern. Knowing that something is wrong and being unable to talk about it or address it in any real form is terrible. That anxiety is a shapeless, amorphous thing and from my experience, it just pushes you (and by 'you', I mean 'me') deeper into the rituals and deeper into myself.

So where am I now?

I've tried different things: focused breathing techniques, relaxation methods, meditation, and recently hypnotherapy. The hypnotherapy thing was brilliant, man. I must write more about it at some point - it was hands-down one of the strangest experiences of my recent past. And it's not like just falling asleep and remembering nothing of what took place while you were in a hypnotic state. I remember everything. It was fascinating and deeply strange.

And it might actually have helped.

That same week I finally sat down with a GP and described the experience of being me. He prescribed me fluoxetine and lorazepam. Those little foil sheets of pills are sitting inside an ice-cream container in the cupboard. I haven't started taking them yet.

But they're waiting. They're waiting for if the maggot comes back. They're there in case it gets really bad.

For now, I'm okay. Good even. I currently have no rituals and no compulsions. I don't feel anxious. I've cut down on my alcohol intake. I'm walking a lot: the rhythm, the motion and the exercise all help to untangle my thoughts.

I've had an easy time of it, comparatively. My symptoms have always been at the milder, more controllable end of the spectrum, and I've never experienced true depression. I've never had to have everything in a certain imposed order, in a certain regimented place. I've never had to spend hours counting and recounting words or page numbers. I am, in truth, a fairly laid-back guy who just happens to have a few symptoms of OCD. For others, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder is a crippling thing; something that impacts deeply and constantly on their day to day life.