Last summer, I ran into an old friend who was working at the Shaw Festival in Niagara-on-the-Lake, which is about a 40-minute drive from our shared hometown of Fonthill. Maybe old friend is stretching the truth. After attending the same kindergarten, I don’t think we crossed paths again until a brief encounter following our undergraduate graduation ceremony at Brock University, where we had overlapped only chronologically, given that her degree was in English and mine was in math. It was about a year later when we had another quick confab at The Shaw, after which I—as one does—poked around Google and LinkedIn for a few minutes to see if I could glean any further intel on what she had been up to since undergrad—or kindergarten for that matter. That’s when I began looking through a list of blog posts she had written in recent years, pausing on one titled My Eating Disorder. It was a courageous piece to write and a deeply discomforting one to read; in recounting her descent, she recalled eating a lunch of three carrot sticks and three snap peas, then seeing her reflection in the mirror—dull-eyed, gaunt-faced, stick-figure thin—and thinking, What the hell am I doing to myself?
Facing up to a mental illness is a scary, difficult thing. I’m not sure when exactly I realized that I had one. There is one night I can recall from my second year of undergrad—the year that was totally online due to COVID-19—when, perhaps driven by the anxiety of an exam the next day, I was taking a particularly long time to get through the compulsions that had become part of my nightly routine. I had finished studying, but I couldn’t leave the room without feeling like everything was “set right” in my mind. I flipped the light switch on and off, on and off, waiting for the right feeling and the right number to coincide. I walked out, then back in, and tried again, and circled back again. I multiplied numbers together in my head to assure myself that I was still able to do it. Over…and over…and over. In all, it must have taken…30 minutes? Or 60? At some point time fails to really sink in.
However long it was, it prompted me to type “OCD symptoms” into Google and take a gander at the first couple of links. Uh-oh, I thought to myself, as it dawned on me that nearly every one of these symptoms accurately described my day-to-day existence. That’s a bit worrying. Let’s just forget I ever saw this!
It is hard to see yourself as having a problem over which you have lost control. It is much easier to say to yourself, I am choosing to perform these compulsions and rituals because doing so allows me to be mentally sharp and to do my best work. And it can seem like a plausible story when you’re getting good marks in undergrad. But you are really just creating a permission structure to justify increasingly insane and irrational behaviour, to gradually cede more and more control to the OCD demons until they have metastasized into virtually every moment and aspect of your life. Until you are staring at a single paragraph for 20 minutes, breaking into a nervous sweat because the words just won’t click into your mind in the right way. Until speaking or writing a few sentences begins to feel like a desperate struggle to find the right words that keep eluding you. Until you are spending much of your day doing things you don’t actually want or need to be doing, a prisoner to the next compulsive urge that takes hold of your unruly brain.
Until you have so thoroughly eroded your own confidence and capabilities that you are forced to look in the mirror and say, What the hell am I doing to myself? Or to borrow from one of my favourite Blue Rodeo songs…
I want to know where my confidence went. One day it all disappeared.
I knew by last year that I needed to start getting treatment; I knew by this year that I couldn’t go any further like this, and I had to step away and actually commit to getting my mental health in order. There are many topics I would have liked to write columns on this school year; my own life was not among them, but in the last couple years I have come to truly understand the value of speaking openly about these kinds of issues, and recognizing that you are not alone in dealing with them.
The author of the piece I referenced in the opening is named Julia. Her story is ultimately an uplifting one; she speaks about the beauty of recovery, of taking her life back and of having “looked my monster straight in the eyes and told him he doesn’t scare me anymore.” When the OCD has gotten so deep in your head, and so embedded in your daily activities, it is hard to imagine a future without it. I sometimes think about an Ernie Els quote at the 2016 Masters, when he was asked what he would do about his crippling battle with the putting yips: “I don’t know, give me a brain transplant.” But Ernie came back the next week and was the third-best putter in the field.I am quite certain that these issues are not irreparable, and that I am not the only one here who has gone through something like this at some point (which is to say, don’t hold back if you have any useful tips/ideas to share!). I have felt so lucky to be in this program, and especially to write in these pages, and I cannot wait until I am healthy and ready to get back to the grind—or, perhaps more appropriately, ‘til I am myself again.