I’ll have to do the introductions as she's not in the best of moods today...

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This is Olivia! She came into being about a year ago, personifying a big, black void

of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) that, at times, threatened to swallow

me whole. Olivia is: determined, loyal, imaginative, creative, sensitive and

protective. She’s also a big worrier, irrational, unnecessarily over-dramatic

and prone to the odd bout of nastiness, but more about that later...

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Olivia usually extends her somewhat unconventional hand of friendship

towards me and if I concentrate hard, like really, REALLY, hard, I can see that

she’s often trying to be a good friend. Ultimately, although misguided, her loyalties

are in the right place because most of her waking hours are spent trying to keep the most important people in my life safe from harm. 

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Olivia takes the things that go through my mind, the types of things that go through EVERYBODY’S mind, and turns them into something they really don’t need to be. She takes anything from thoughts, to images, to urges (for ease of writing in future I’ll refer to these under the umbrella term of ‘thoughts’) and runs with them. In fact, Olivia worries so much, that when she senses a thought she doesn’t like the look of, she investigates it straight away, and if she’s not sure about the findings of this investigation, she repeats it… and repeats it… and repeats it - she is nothing if not thorough!

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Olivia is incredibly stubborn and often resists my every attempt to quell her fussing: the more I try to push her away, the stronger she becomes; the more I try to shrink her, the larger she grows; and the more I try to silence her, the louder and more persistent her voice becomes until she starts to take over my every waking moment. Every thought, every experience, the creation of every new memory, becomes tarnished with Olivia’s latest obsession, until occasionally she has me in a ‘I can’t live like this anymore’ situation.

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Olivia doesn’t understand yet, that it is a brain’s ‘job’ to fire off randomly generated thoughts, that it’s evolved to do just that! Being aware of endless possibilities, in any given situation, is a skill that has kept human beings alive throughout history. Instead, she worries that ignoring these thoughts will lead to disaster and, much like a fog horn in the dark, she is very good at making herself heard. Olivia believes that it is my responsibility to work out why I’ve had a certain thought, what action is required because of it, and what it might indicate about my character.

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Although not a chatterbox in the conventional sense, Olivia has other ways of letting me know how she feels. She does this by communicating with me through thoughts, images and urges. If she thinks I’m getting a bit blasé about one approach she quickly mixes it up to keep me on my toes. She also likes to change the theme of her obsessions for that very reason too.

 

Below is a list of typical Olivia worries:

• You know what? I think you should check that again, just in case. Seriously… once more wouldn’t hurt.

• Remember that time you went back and checked, and it was STILL ON?

• Well, it’ll be your own fault, you didn’t act when you had the chance.

• I’m just saying, if I was you, I’d touch it/check it/turn it one more time.

• Only seven flicks of the switch? What’s happened to the other two? Thinking about it… did you do seven? Let’s start again, just in case.

• What if…? (Insert literally anything horrible here)

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This is the Olivia that I live with every single day - some days she’s in a quiet mood, others she’s very loud. She finds bedtime a challenge because she worries something bad might happen overnight if the checks aren’t completed properly. She also doesn’t like it when we are the last to leave the house, just in case we missed a potential hazard when getting ready to leave.

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Over the years, I’ve built up quite a collection of strategies to help me deal with Olivia when she is like this (I’ll talk about these in future posts) and although it’s uncomfortable, Olivia in this mood is bearable…

 

Occasionally, though, she turns on me. She becomes a particularly devastating and powerful version of my 'everyday' Olivia. She stalks me when I'm at my most vulnerable and, for now at least, has the power to terrify me.