It’s the middle of the night. I’ve just woken from a bad dream. In it, three lynxes in the garden of my childhood home are chasing my parents’ scrawny runt of a cat. He makes it to the safety of the kitchen, where I’m sitting cross-legged on the floor, and leaps onto my lap. The lynxes paw at the cat flap, but can’t get through.

Back in the real world, I reach for my phone and search for ‘dream interpretation’ on the Internet. I discover I should be weary of enemies and false friends, and can expect hostility from someone close. I should perhaps be less secretive myself.

I think of a particular situation and the worst case scenario and begin to feel anxious. My jaw tightens, my palms become sweaty and I start to fidget. Then, I tap my head, my headboard and the exposed boards of the floor lightly five times and my anxiety dissipates. I am soon asleep again.

I’ve lived with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) since my early teens. Currently, it’s very mild. In fact, I don’t think it’s ever really peaked above moderate, at least by comparison with some of the horrendous testimonies of acute sufferers that I’ve read.

Touching wood is my current squeeze and has been since a holiday to Corfu for my eighteenth birthday, when a friend introduced me to this particular ritual unaware of my tendencies. I’m now 32 and it’s graduated from touching my head once, to having to touch three different wooden surfaces (the head counts as one) five times in quick succession when I think about something bad happening. This imagined catastrophe always concerns my immediate world: getting sick or the death of a loved one for instance. I don’t envisage natural disasters. Sorry world, I’m selfish like that.

In all fairness to my holiday friend, I don’t remember telling anyone about my compulsions at the time. It’s estimated that 12 in every 1000 people in the UK suffer from OCD, roughly 1.2% of the population, with half of cases classified as severe. It’s characterised by intrusive thoughts that produce anxiety (obsessions) and engaging in repetitive actions to alleviate it (compulsions). Many sufferers are reluctant to share their experiences or seek help for fear of embarrassment.

I had a thing for syllables throughout most of my teenage years, before that fateful trip to Greece. On reading or hearing a sentence spoken, I would recite it back to myself in my head, bouncing each syllable off alternate sides of my body. It was barely perceptible apart from the odd shoulder shimmy. If the final syllable landed on my right hand side I was okay, if not I’d have to start the process again from the opposite side to produce the right result. If I messed it up and had to do it again, I would feel a well of anxiety building up, to the point that I expected the imminent eruption of a violent geyser of brain matter and cerebrospinal fluid from the top of my head. I liked to count the number of syllables too: odd numbers were, of course, bad. Can you blame a teenage boy for keeping this to himself?

As I’ve said, I’d class my OCD then as relatively moderate. It didn’t stop me leaving the house, affect my schoolwork or stop me doing the things boys of that age do. But it was distressing. At its peak I could experience dozens of incidents a day. I would often drift off in conversations to complete my counting and bouncing rituals, which probably made me seem quite aloof or unfriendly. If disturbed or questioned during an anxiety attack I would sometimes lash out verbally at the person responsible. Overall it made those confusing, exhilarating teenage years, when friendships and personalities are forged and tension crackles in the air like electricity, that bit more challenging.

The exact cause of OCD is unclear, in all likelihood it differs from person to person, though it often emerges around puberty, as mine did. Some studies point towards serotonin deficiencies in the brains of sufferers. There is evidence it may be hereditary in some cases, or even a learned behaviour. My parents deny ever having suffered with it, though my dad is a sucker for order, and is a former maths teacher – a dead giveaway.

I was asked recently whether my chosen career of a writer was in any way related to my experience of OCD, a way of regaining control of the syllables, so to speak. I guess the short answer is no: my own writing or speech never troubled me because I was already in control of it. Hence, my schoolwork didn’t suffer. I do like a certain rhythm to my writing, for it to have an almost imperceptible, even feel, but then which writer doesn’t?

Now, whenever I find myself bouncing those syllables from left to right and back again, which is rarely, it’s like bumping into the best friend that you no longer see because he stole your girlfriend – you want to hate the guy, but for a moment there’s warmth there. I’m thankfully able to limit my compulsions to one or two wood-related counting rituals per pay, or night, and haven’t had to seek professional help. I feel like I inhabit the moderate, boring suburbia of the condition, whilst a few stops down the line in the big city things are infinitely more hectic and ruthless. The disorder has become just another undesirable part of my personality I try to suppress, but I do wonder if I’d miss it, were it to disappear completely.

Of course, those traits you hate rarely remain hidden forever. So I’d like to apologise in advance to anyone unfortunate enough to have to share a bed with me, should I wake you up in the middle of the night with my incessant tapping. Everybody has his or her rituals, I’m just that bit more ritualistic than most.

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Photograph by Creative Commons

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