Amrou Al-Kadhi on the painful truth of OCD and why it can be a truly debilitating disease

I don’t like it when people flippantly use the phrase, “Oh, I was a bit OCD the other night!” You hear it in conversation: “Oh, I was a bit of a clean freak the other week; I washed my hands a lot — was getting a bit OCD!”  

Like a lot of psychological terms that get bandied about on Instagram wellness graphics, the term has woven its way into colloquial conversation when, in fact, it has quite a specific and profound meaning. 

The reason it frustrates me is that I have suffered with severe OCD — Obsessive Compulsive Disorder — since the age of seven. I’ve been in every kind of therapy and taken every kind of medication to help battle what is an exhausting and often debilitating disease. It all started when I was a kid and learnt to count sin.  

I was taught in Islam class that every time I committed a sin, I accrued sin points on my left shoulder, and every time I did a good deed, good points would be added to my right shoulder. We were taught that if the sins on our left shoulder outnumbered the good deeds by the time we died, we would be destined to face an eternity in hell. And so, I spent my childhood counting, over and over, to make sure I wouldn’t end up incinerating in the afterlife. A perfect incubus for a condition like OCD, which is driven by obsessions and compulsions as a means of control. 

My sin-counting was so extreme that I could barely talk as a child. Instead, I lived in my brain, obsessively monitoring the ways that I had sinned, perpetually estimating how many sins had landed on my left shoulder. This transformed into a compulsion to count everything. I was so enslaved to the condition that I used to track the number of syllables people were using in every sentence they spoke. During every conversation, I would be mentally counting syllables on my fingers, trapped in this mental labyrinth. 

OCD is fundamentally about control — it’s your brain’s way of stopping you from feeling deep fears and traumas. My core fears — of being sent to hell because I was a sinner and being rejected by family because of my queerness — were kept at bay by my brain’s manic compulsions. 

“Thankfully, medication helps to mellow things out, and I can get on with my life” – Amrou

Later in life, this turned into an unhealthy perfectionism — I simply had to achieve 100 per cent in every single piece of homework, because anything less would mean I was a failure (i.e., going to hell). I got into the habit of proofreading every single piece of homework 32 times, for instance, and once I couldn’t eat for a week because of a misplaced comma in pieces of GCSE coursework I had already handed in (i.e., the end of the world). 

Thankfully, medication helps to mellow things out, and I can get on with my life. For various reasons, I had to switch medication recently. This led to an acute period of withdrawal from one set of meds, which meant that my OCD came roaring back in a way I hadn’t experienced in years. 

I want to give an example of what a day in the life of someone with OCD feels like. Waking up begins with a mental rumination, usually about a script I’m working on, or an important script meeting I’ve already had. The watchtower in my brain finds a sentence I tripped up on during the meeting, and I cannot get out of bed until I replay the situation in my head 32 times, literally unable to start my day until the moment I convince myself that the sentence I tripped up on wasn’t a life-altering disaster. This can take a couple of hours. 

I try to eat breakfast, turning on my phone in the process. The boy I’m dating hasn’t responded to last night’s text — OCD forces me to read our entire WhatsApp conversation 32 times, until I can locate the way in which I’ve fucked up and been responsible for my own rejection. This takes hours. 

I have work to do. I start writing a sentence in my script, which has missed its important deadline, when an intrusive thought appears: my friend is mad at me, and I need to call them over and over until they pick up and convince me that they don’t hate me. 

This goes on and on, all day, until it’s time for bed. Nothing has been achieved. I’ve been in agony, and throughout I’ve been convinced that I’ve failed in this world. 

Without meds and intense therapy, every day would be like this. Living in a mental loop of self-punishment and obsession makes even having a conversation a near impossibility. 

OCD isn’t a condition that appears and disappears. It’s a constant, gruelling disease that makes every day a treacherous marathon, and deserves everyone’s utmost understanding and compassion. 

This article originally appeared in Attitude issue 361, which is available to download and order in print now and via our app.