mindful
I wrote this about living with OCD. I write a lot of poetry-my insta is @erastesia if you’d like to follow. Just a warning that this poem discusses OCD (obviously) and related low mood, and there are implications of ending a life. Therapy is important-please seek it out if you need it.
I am so good at hating myself that it is second nature,
so I talk about the ways I waste the ground I walk on and all my friends are worried.
I forget that it is not normal to think about yourself like that.
If you give me love then I will chew it up and spit it out because I do not believe you mean it,
I am a bad waste of a body,
and love is torn to pieces in my bad wasted hands.
I am so good at fearing the worst that I think my mind might be a loaded gun; inside each chamber is the next obsession, the next intrusion, the next potentially life-altering catastrophe for which I am on red alert.
This is what it’s like to see life as a long series of unchecked ovens burning houses down, of contaminated dinners and doorknobs giving bacteria the room to fester and breed in my stomach.
I realise I am sick when I look down at my hands and they’re red from scrubbing at real or imagined germs. I realise I am sick when I confess every real or imagined sin to my mother, my boss, whoever is close enough to satisfy the urgency of the compulsion. I realise I am sick when I’m in the bathroom six times every hour staring at my shoes and willing the fear to find another corpse to feed on. As far as corpses go, I have been fed upon enough.
I am so good at running from my problems that I think maybe probably I should run away for good. It would take an inferno to burn me down so I bring lighted match and oil and get to work doing God’s work. When you think about me, I want you to imagine the growth on trees after wildfire season.
Imagine cities burnt down and starting over.
I want to burn down and start over.
