Ruminations on OCD

in

By Riya Balachandran ‘24

Illustration by Kelly Song ‘24.

Crouched naked on the ground, my hands and knees are digging into the rug I can never clean right. I’m sitting in front of a small fan with tears in my eyes and lingering traces of isopropyl on my fingertips. A stink bug crawls out of my window, tripping on crumbling paint. Lungs full of fumes, sights set on my ceiling, the bug loses its footing and falls. I sit on my wet floor and think about shame. 

When my first eye has gone numb, I slowly pull my body up and glance at the dirty mirror that I can never clean right. Still, it’s easy to make out the bloodshot white. At least the contact stuck this time. Intuitively, I reach for my other eye and pull apart the lids with my pointer and thumb, reaching for a contact with the opposite hand. As soon as I touch it, I can feel the burning once more. My hand starts to shake, my eye starts to stream, and I hate myself again. I drop to my knees, crawl back to the fan, and think about shame. 

At 3 a.m. that morning, I slammed my back into the hardwood floor. Now my naked spine is dotted with blues and purples; I am transformed into a beautiful art project. At 2 a.m. that morning, you walked into my room, half sober, to say you valued me as I stared at your heels on my hardwood floor and thought about the demarcation line between your foreign shoes and my bare feet. Half sober, I poured one out; here’s to my value, isopropyl pooling at my toes until they blush and burn. 

Tonight, I’ll tell you about my naked feet and isopropyl floors; the way my brain pulsates when I don’t Lysol down a spot of dust in the corner of my room, on my hands and knees with my camera off during a Zoom meeting for class. You’ll laugh and say you won’t do it again (you will), and I’ll be red-eyed in bed later, stressing about when I can pencil in some time to buy more Purell.

There’s a stray hair lying on the edge of my wardrobe. I fixate on it, my body stiffening like hardened concrete until I eventually pass out. Tomorrow, I’ll be on my hands and knees again, head bent as though praying to a God I no longer believe in, wondering what it’s like to not feel so ashamed.

Riya Balachandran ‘24 (rb103) reflects on the impact OCD has on parts of her everyday life. From the October 2021 issue.