...the Trees For the Forest

There have been good days and there have been bad days.  Many days I have thought I needed to go back on medication, but usually when I start feeling that way a resolve is also stirred within me to persevere.  That resolve has so far been able to carry me through the bad days.

I feel more of an honesty sans medication.  Somehow medication felt more like hiding from a problem, rather than dealing with it.  The trouble with OCD is that, for the foreseeable future, there is no cure.  Only endurance.  Medication seems to hide that fact and, though it makes the days more easily bearable, makes acceptance of the need for endurance more difficult.

The lack of medication does cloud my thoughts, however, as racing thoughts return unbridled by pharmacology.  This becomes most unmanageable in instances when I am completely unaware of how racing the thoughts have become.  Particularly when I am enjoying the racing thoughts.  Not all of OCD is a torture.  The ability to hyper-focus on irrelevant subjects can be enjoyable and even profitable when focused correctly.  However I find myself often unable to distinguish between obsessions that have potential to become beneficial and those that are a waste of everyone's time.  Like sobering up from alcohol, it is usually only after the obsession passes that I am able to make a fair assessment of my thought's worth.

Yet, to a degree, I find myself able to simulate the benefits of medication in their absence.  While on medication I learned a great deal about how a "normal" person views the world which, at the very least, has allowed me to sympathize with people's inability to understand my limitations when I am unable to cope.  This understanding has also allowed me to untangle my obsessions from reality, allowing me to logically understand that my fear of social settings, for example, is an irrational feeling and that it's not people that I am afraid of.  The fear is really my faulty brain inventing panic from within and then assuming an external cause.  Even if I cannot control my fear I do not need to, I simply need to understand it's source.

Having seen the world through the two-dimensional eyes of OCD and medication suppressed OCD has given me a greater perspective with which I can understand a more three-dimensional world.  Even with medication it was easy for me to fall back on the crutches of imagination when the real world seemed (or was) too overwhelming.  Since childhood I had constructed a realm of daydreams in which I could hide, or imagine to fulfill what I could not fill from actual experiences.  It was a great and not uncommon coping skill when I was four.  Not so much at thirty-four.  Our imaginations serve us well as a testing ground for ideas before they become action.  But as with all things OCD it has been too easy to allow useful tactics to become self-defeating obsessions.

Coming off medication, I believe, caused a relapse of secluding myself in my forest of imagination and fantasy.  But this time there was a difference.  I'd been outside of the forest.  I knew what the forest really looked like.  This time, despite the many trees of racing and obsessive thoughts, I could see where in the forest I had lost myself.  This was something I could not see where I outside the forest looking in, as I was with medication.  The outside perspective of the forest was helpful for mapping it out, but it's impossible to navigate the forest from outside of it, anymore than we could successfully drive a car by observing it from an airplane.  Only being in the forest, with the knowledge of what the outside of the forest looked like, could I then begin to navigate through it.