Close and lock the front door.
Pull at the door’s handle for a count of eight, to make sure it is firmly closed.
Push against the door for a count of eight, to make sure it can’t be pushed open.
Pull the door for a count of eight.
Push the door for a count of eight.
Pull the door for a count of eight.
Push the door for a count of eight.
Pull the door for a count of eight.
Push the door for a count of eight.
Continue until I am satisfied it is closed.
Ritual must be completed very rapidly and quietly, to avoid arousing suspicion that I am either breaking into a house that isn’t mine or losing my marbles.
My mind is full of scorpions. Devious, nimble little beasts that have occupied my head for the best part of 30 years. A cerebral itch, impossible to scratch. They wield their own special power over my brain, shaping the architecture and rhythm of my thoughts. I know these creatures well, but they know me better. I am their dutiful puppet, stuck inside an endless loop of sleepless nights and watchful days. They answer to another name, this nest of scorpions: obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD).
It is leaving the house that presents me with the biggest challenge. In the midst of my obsessive thought cycles, I might send a quick message to my agent/friend/family member to say I am running late. Transport issues, I’ll say. Then I start my counting to eight routine again. The message will have broken my cycle of concentration and it is as if my short-term memory has been instantaneously erased. I’ll put my bag down defeatedly and start my mental count as I look at the various enemies occupying my kitchen: door, faucet, stove, fridge, light switch.
“I Take Photos—Doors, Ovens—to Calm My Anxious Future Self”
I have begun to rely on a fairly simple coping mechanism: taking photographs. I have an online photo album that is forever in a state of full capacity due to the excess of mundane domestic photography I insist on housing there. I take and keep photographs of doors, ovens, locks, fridges, windows, lamps, candles and plug sockets, with the sole purpose of calming my anxious future mind. I have more photographs of doors on my phone than I have of my friends.
I am constantly battling with my desire to be a valuable friend, partner or colleague, while keeping the most challenging sides of my OCD at bay. If a plan changes from what was originally agreed, I find it hard to accept. If a loved one is ill and they need to be taken care of, I am not there—for fear of catching something. If a friend is cooking me a meal and I am suspicious of the use-by date of one of the ingredients, I will interrogate them to the point of ruining their gesture of kindness. I hate these things about myself, but often feel powerless to change them.
Since I was very young I have awarded all inanimate objects with human feelings. If I drop a crisp on the floor by accident, rendering it too dirty to eat, I will either drop another, so that it is not on its own, or split the existing crisp into two so that there are an even number of crisps on the floor. I don’t want that crisp to feel lonely. Similarly, I once transformed a daily commute via the same familiar footpath into a fraught one, obsessed by the fact that I had dropped one of my hairclips on the ground without realizing. I would pass this dropped hairclip every day, wracked with guilt but unable to save it from a future of solitude and filth.
After my drama school training it became obvious that three years is not long enough to learn how to become an actor. Each year of my training I learnt new skills, new processes, but I also learnt how to pretend beyond the confines of acting. To pretend I was calm or composed. That there wasn’t a nest of scorpions living inside my brain. It is an exhausting way to function, to constantly hide a part of yourself that is so intrinsic and unappealing. I have no doubt that I am a better pretender than I am an actor, so adept at moving through life undetected that I can almost convince myself that the scorpions are not there. But they are there. Meddling, goading, rewarding.
“I Was 20 When I First Heard the Word ‘Emetophobia’”
Emetophobia is a fear of vomiting or of seeing others being sick. I first heard the word when I was 20 years old and was both relieved and shocked to learn that not only was I among other people in the world suffering from this phobia, but also that it was a “legitimized” fear. No one likes to vomit. But for a small proportion of people (an estimated 0.1 per cent of the population, women being four times more likely to suffer than men), the terror associated with catching a virus that might cause you to vomit can begin to influence the way in which you think and how you go about living your life. Traveling in enclosed spaces is an obvious trigger (I’d rather come on my period in a pair of white trousers live on national television than go on the floating petri dish of a holiday that is a cruise), but there are many other seemingly everyday experiences that can fuel the anxiety that rages inside the mind of an emetophobe.
I once succeeded in alienating my personal dresser on a theater production, by grilling her so extensively about her admission to having vomited until 3 a.m. the previous night, that she chose not to dress me for the remainder of the play and never made eye contact with me again.
At the age of 32, I managed to derail my own book club by drafting a militant set of ground rules and insisting upon impossible levels of commitment from the members (a lovely, free-spirited group of women), resulting in the club ultimately disbanding and my attempts to create the larger friendship group I’d always felt I was supposed to have failing spectacularly.
When my panic attacks, driven by a blanket anxiety I couldn’t temper, began to overwhelm me, I was referred by my doctor for a course of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), often the first port of call for OCD treatment. I did a fair amount of research about this type of therapy and, somewhere along the way, I read that “exposure therapy” can be an element of the CBT plan, and consequently that one small element became my total obsession.
As you can imagine, the sessions did not go as planned. I arrived utterly convinced that before the course was finished I would be forced to place both hands on the inside of a toilet bowl and made to lick them clean in order to expose myself to a level of bacteria so high that I would become violently sick and in turn address my fear of vomiting. None of this subsequently happened, of course, due to the fact that, first, exposure therapy was never mentioned in our sessions and, second, because I did everything in my power to convince my therapist from day one that I was recovering at a rate of knots.
I was shooting a film in Los Angeles during the winter of 2019 when news first began to circulate about a virus wreaking havoc in Wuhan, China. But when the Covid-19 pandemic happened I was surprised, and perhaps even a little ashamed, to find that I was struck almost immediately by an awful sense of calm. Lockdown for me was spent alone in a two-bedroom flat in north London, with only my little grey cat for company. My partner and I spent most of it apart, due to our being in separate countries at the time, and so I settled into a routine of comforting invariability.
“No Social Contact in Lockdown—I’d Tried to Engineer This for Years”
The now enforced lack of social contact was something I had been trying to engineer in my own life for years. The anxiety of avoiding gatherings, dodging messages and unexpectedly bumping into people I knew (shudder) was eradicated without any effort on my part. When weaving a web of lies to avoid a meeting, a person or an event, the chances are you will get caught up in it. Stripped of the need to agonise over ways in which to excuse myself, I felt a renewed strength take hold. A calm ease with myself and the space around me permeated the atmosphere, the furniture; even the cat was more agreeable than ever.
Leaving the house less frequently meant that my routines became fewer. Not only were they performed less often, but the reduced periods for which we were permitted to “take the air,” like prisoners enjoying yard time, allowed for a smaller window in which catastrophic disasters could occur inside my apartment while I was elsewhere.
If I had somehow unknowingly laid the foundations for a mistake that would cause any number of things to burst into flames while I was gone, then surely only having left the house for a brief 15-minute stroll would afford me the chance to salvage the last of my most treasured belongings and put a stop to the raging inferno before it completely obliterated my home? The final and perhaps most satisfying occurrence to emerge from our pandemic-induced discipline was that all of a sudden everyone was washing their hands properly. Hallelujah.
The months of fear, death and uncertainty that the pandemic thrust upon us gave me an unprecedented glimpse into the mind of someone living without OCD. A freedom. A clarity of mind. I could turn off a faucet without going back to check it. I could go for a walk without photographing the contents of my apartment first. I could even get a decent night’s sleep for once. Now that a highly contagious disease was spreading rapidly around the world, feasting on anyone and everyone no matter their walk of life, what else was there to legitimately worry about?
“Can I Raise a Child Without Ever Visiting a Soft Play?”
A rogue blob of tomato sauce has fallen from my pizza onto the bed. I should probably clean it up but I don’t really have the energy after the marathon I have just endured, and there’s so much blood saturating the sheets I’m not sure there is any point. I have just given birth.
I keep looking at my daughter, disbelieving. She is more perfect than perfect. I am swimming in endorphins and bursting with love for everyone and everything around me: my partner with a grin the size of Antarctica, the woman who has been diligently sewing my perineum for the last 45 minutes, the terrible slice of pizza I am inhaling. I think about all the things that had scared me about having a child previously. What if I get severe morning sickness and I vomit every day for nine months? What will happen when my child gets sick? Can I raise a child without ever visiting a soft play and entrenching myself in other people’s germs? Here in the birth center, flushed with love and exhaustion, I cannot imagine ever feeling anxious again.
Several weeks later, we are going for a walk on a hot afternoon in late summer. Around half a mile from our house my partner turns to me and says, “Hey, you know you didn’t check the door when you left?” “What?” I answer, my brain not quite catching up. “The door. You didn’t check the door after you locked it. You didn’t do your routine. I noticed it as soon as we left the house, but I didn’t want to say anything.” He smiles.
“Have I Really Killed My Demons?”
I start to retrace my steps and realize he’s right. I have no memory of leaving the house whatsoever, I was so focused on our daughter. He can see the cogs begin to turn as I try my hardest to remember if I did lock the door, or even close it, then grabs both of my arms tightly and says, “No, don’t think about it. This is great!”
Can I really have killed my demons? It would be wonderful if that were the end of it. Not only the end of my story, but of my whole journey with OCD, gone as quickly as it arrived—never to be seen again. Confirmation to the contrary comes in the dairy aisle at Sainsbury’s eight months later. I’m on my way over to the cheeses, our daughter strapped to my body, when I hear a strange sound bubbling below my chin. She laughs in the adorable way babies do, then makes a short, sharp sound like a computer game avatar powering up for a blow, and projectile vomits all over my chest. It is a flawless shot, carried out at extreme close range, and as each millisecond passes I can feel the liquid running down my body, into my bra, down the back of my neck, collecting inside my belly button.
I jog frantically between the aisles looking for my partner, whom I find a few minutes later by the noodles. Prior to this, her being sick has always been chalked up to her developing stomach being too full of milk or following through on an enthusiastic burp. I know immediately that this is illness-related: the sheer amount that came out of her mouth, the force at which it ejected itself from her little body, the smell of it.
“Quick! Help! She’s just thrown up on me!” He reaches out his hands and takes her from the carrier. I marvel silently at the lack of flinch or grimace when a little pool of vomit that has been trapped between her and my body drips down onto his fingers.
We get to the car. “I don’t have a mask with me,” I blurt out. I have got into the habit of hiding masks about the house and in several of my bags in case I’m surprised by a vomiting incident—the only souvenir from the days of Covid-19 that I’ve been compelled to keep. And then it happens, as I knew it would. An almighty retch from the back seat and Happy Larry vomits forcefully onto the chair in front of her. Twice.
I panic and, without thinking, pull haphazardly over to the curb, the car partially blocking the road with its aggressive angle, and eject myself, leaving the door wide open with the engine still running. I know I look like a madwoman, but I don’t care. The passenger door swings open and out jumps my partner.
“OhGodshe’sbeensickshemusthaveavirusthere’snowaywewon’tcatchitwhatdowedo?” My words come out in one long stream of consciousness.
“I Need a Vomit Box, to Defend Myself Against Vomit”
“Just stay calm. I’ll get her.” I hear a double splash of vomit hitting the gravel and I try my hardest not to breathe. “Whoa, that’s a lot of puke,” my partner observes. He takes her in his arms and begins walking. I can see strings of vomit dribbling from her mouth as she bounces along on his hip. “I’ll walk the rest of the way home; you drive the car back.”
The lesson I take from it, however, is this: I need a vomit box. Not a box to vomit into, but a box with which to defend myself against vomit. After further research and an online shopping stint, I put together the following kit:
One giant plastic box (labeled vomit);
Six pairs of extra-strong rubber gloves;
Two boxes of FFP2 surgical-grade masks;
Six bottles thick bleach;
Four bottles bleach spray.
The kit lives in my bathroom, hidden from sight but within instant reach for the emergency event of any stomach bugs invading our home. Not quite the rebirth I was counting on. How can something as momentous as birthing a child not demote my mental health to far below the average worry on my priority list? It is a tough pill to swallow, admitting the shame of letting a disorder hijack your ability to care for your own sick child.
The question that has often confronted me since the birth of my scorpions remains at the forefront of my mind: is it nature or nurture that coaxed them into existence? There is evidence to suggest that obsessive compulsive disorder does run in families, but there is also an environmental factor to consider. It can be said that while the genes “load the gun”, one’s environment “pulls the trigger.”
Looking toward the future, I consider what I will tell our daughter about my little companions. Their presence in our home will be difficult to hide, as hard as I might try, and although they are creatures of the dark, she will be watching. Always watching, whether I see it or not. Will those same scorpions one day, when I am distracted or elsewhere, move to set up home in her own unspoiled mind?
Perhaps they are already there.
Tuppence Middleton is an English actress and the author of Scorpions: A Memoir, from which this essay is extracted
