Dance me to the End of OCD

Written on Janury 1st, 2024

When I was 18 I couldn’t listen to “Dance me to the end of love” from Leonard Cohen without crying. Or being in agonising fear of triggering certain “forbidden” thoughts.

We didn’t have spotify then, we had youtube and in one of the pictures in the lyric video, Leonard Cohen was young and in black and white. He reminded me of a boy I had had a crush on while in relationship with my then boyfriend. It had been months since I had thought of him last. If I think of it now, Leonard Cohen didn’t really look like him.

Still I couldn’t listen to the song and enjoy it. Even to me my fears sound trivial now. Back then they sucked out any joy or carelessness out of my life.

If I listened to the song long enough, I would think of him, for sure. It would be like cheating. In fact, even becoming so frustrated in the idea of thinking of him must have meant I was mentally already cheating.

The need to control myself, my feelings and my every- single – thought was so intense it was going to swallow me whole. I wished that I would die.

I wasn’t this ill every moment of my life. There were periods of time – weeks, sometimes even months, where my symptoms would either re-appear or get much worse, to the point I felt like I couldn’t escape. I couldn’t imagine a feature where I wouldn’t be tormented by these thoughts in my mind. I couldn’t imagine any future. I didn’t actively try to die, but I wished that I would and really didn’t mind it happening.

I only realised this wasn’t normal a few years later when I was finally medicated and was able to discover there were things in life that I wanted to live for. Before that, I hadn’t been scared of dying.

Weird thing about my obsessions was that their content would seem completely irrelevant to the situation that triggered them.

So the summer of my eighteenth birthday I had just graduated high school and sat the national exams. I hadn’t done well enough to get into medical school. I was very disappointed but felt like I was welcome to talk about it since I hadn’t told people that I had wanted to study medicine. I don’t even think I had made a decision about it myself. The day of my biology exam and knowing my grade wouldn’t be good enough, was the day I felt that there was no other option for me. It had to be medicine. But it was too late for it. My dream like a balloon had flown out of reach.

My time I spent on the couch, watching tv series from the moment I got up, to the moment I would sleep. I wanted to numb myself but the pain was always lurking under the surface. I did feel the pain and the loss of a dream I hadn’t even known I had.

In september, I would give another study a try. Long before medicine, when I had been fourteen, I was fascinated by the idea of the DNA and wanted to study Molecular Biology and Genetics. Word had it that the university in Crete, almost one day away by car and boat, was the best in Greece when it came to biology. So of course I had to go there. I told myself that it had probably been fate. I wasn’t very convincing.

My then boyfriend had already been studying in a city two hours away from home. That one had been the study city of my dream, although deep down I always suspected I wouldn’t end up there. It had been written – or subconsiously decided by me.

My parents would inform anyone who asked with pride that I would be studying in the biology department in Crete. I tried to stuff the empty space my dream of medicine had left in my heart with half – hearted hopes of a bright future in biology. But that was the dream of another, fourteen year old version of me.

Then there was my then boyfriend. Whom I’d dated since I’d been fifteen and whom I also considered my best friend. He was one who wasn’t particularly happy with my choice to study away. Many times he’d said our relationship wouldn’t work long distance. In all those conversations we’d had I had had to reassure him that it would be fine but I was hurt by his reaction. Getting to go to this modern university across the Agean sea, praised by many and holding a higher place than other greek universities in international rankings, seemed to be the only thing keeping me sane. I need to do something that would matter.

Not that anything could ever matter to me then more than getting to study medicine did.

In September, I went to Crete and my brain tried to push my grief about missing what then seemed like my only chance to study medicine away by subtituting it with the fear and guilt of the possibility of being unfaithfull to my then boyfriend.