I wake up every morning with my brain alight — with household tasks, paid work and emails, books to write and books to read. Meals to cook and messages to send, socialising to attempt. If I am feeling well, I will try to go to the gym in the morning, or a short walk around Queens Park. Since I moved to Glasgow (four years ago! Which feels like one, which almost feels like none), I have been focusing on writing fiction, which means for me learning to plot and also to allow characters their own development. Another part of this which has been potentially the most transformative is allowing my imagination to move past myself and putting it down in Google docs, letting it contort outside of my brain. It was terrifying to me to admit I had an imagination because for most of my life, it has worked against me in some way.
This is not a post about OCD proper, but it is about OCD improper, about OCD lowercase and how it seeped into every area of my life and shaped my ambitions, my ideas of myself. For clarity, I have not received a formal diagnosis — I cannot work out the system here, two GPs have confirmed I have it but they do not diagnose — but I have received treatment and manage my life according to the guidelines given to those with OCD. I don’t think a formal diagnosis will help me massively now, but it would have when the symptoms first began, when I was a child.
What I am trying to write about here is the feeling I get, every morning, of something being unreachable, of a dark secret or ultimate clarity being potentially mine if I complete enough tasks and leave the house, going out looking for it. This drive is something I interpret as wanting to stretch my legs or not letting the walls close in on me and it is both of those things but also more. I thought about this today as I roamed Vicky Road and went into the new Oxfam in search of the one thing, the ultimate book that would satisfy the longing and dissatisfaction and utter nervous panic that was straining against my body. I came across Oracle Night by Paul Auster and felt a jump. This was it! An oracle for me, a book about a writer who has recovered from an illness and purchases a mysteriously compelling notebook. I read the back of it twice and flicked through it, a little underwhelmed, inevitably then recalling the books I am currently reading and the money I do not have and the fear of looking in another direction, another one, and finding nothing. I want more than a book. I want more than endless books, films, beauty on screen, other stories other places. I do not want any thing, I want Euphoria!
When I returned Auster to the shelf and browsed the other books, the line I go out every day to search for Euphoria came to me, which I then wrote in the Notes app. An image arrived: a dream that the narrator of this potential story about searching for Euphoria would have, a dream they could not distinguish from a portentous film they once saw called The Bright Blue Foal. In this film the inexpressible and unquantifiable joy and meaning of life was made apparent to its small audience through telepathic measures. This is expressed (in the story) through a series of hazy, surreal images that may or may not be in the film itself: a green plastic chair against a yellow wall, the paint several layers thick; a tall piebald horse galloping silently towards a cliff; a strange shower of comets piercing a coal-black sky as distorted voices speak somewhere; rain hammering away at a man as he cradles a placid baby; a woman cracking a pencil with her teeth and spitting the lead and strings of blood into a bag in her lap. Then, an image of a person’s lips, dehydrated and cherry red, and a hand moving up and down a shelf. A bright, poorly rendered blue foal would run across the screen (the story having turned into a film at some point) and a dreamy expression is revealed when the camera zooms out. There stands a moderately attractive young person, with long chestnut hair, silver jewellery and a great fear of intimacy and themself. The audience (or reader) will know this because the person will by then be crying and tearing deep grooves in their skin with their fingernails. The Bright Blue Foal will have given them the answer they seek, and taken it away just as quickly.
As I thought about this potential story/film I got the horrible feeling in my stomach that comes when my OCD defences are low and I am liable to believe that imagining something must mean that what I am thinking about has somehow happened to me, and that I am an evil person for generally wanting to capture the narrative at all. I have a great desire to seek Euphoria but I am also terrified of it, convinced somewhere in my organs that it would change me, that if I felt good for one moment I would be overcome by how bad I have felt up to that point.
It is a depressing thought. Some of my angst is certainly owing to the fact that I have been unwell for three weeks and unable to write, to write properly. So I am writing this instead, when what I really want is to work on my new novel, which is an old novel first started ten years ago. The youngest character in the novel has a strong will to acquire knowledge and relies on her trove of material facts when things are difficult. Because I am me, and I have a child’s eye for shiny things and a still-there belief in life being made up of fact but also aura and the unknown, I have decided her two comfort books will be a field guide to seashore life in Scotland, and a DK book on rocks and minerals. I kept thinking about this character and how small her life might appear to be, thinking too about how I go out every day and try really hard to let meaning in, to see the small and big things of my life and let them work in ways I do and do not understand. Sometimes I feel this may strike people as finding meaning in the dirt, or lowering my expectations, or just automatically finding a way to keep going with my life. Going to Oxfam, going to Greggs, buying a boiled egg after the gym. Little pleasures, large reasons. But it is more, again. My young character is doing what I want to be able to do, she is looking at beautiful colours and the strange items of her world and thinking, if this is all I get that is not okay but there remains something beyond the shit because I have kept these chosen things close, polished them and touched them so much as to furnish them with meaning. Meaning meaning hope.
My partner was saying to me last week when we were at the Stranraer Oyster Festival that their favourite piece of my writing was a nonfiction essay about visiting Howth. I was surprised by this because while I enjoy writing my impressions and untangling my thoughts, I find it largely… useless, or, more so placeless. I tend to devalue that which does not do something practical for me, for my life. But! Obviously these impressions are not devoid of value, and part of trying to let more of myself in and chase the demons out means giving a fuck about the things I give a fuck about. My impressions deeply affect and stick inside of me, be they of sitting miserably somewhere for physio or a gorgeous rush of light and good coffee when my partner and I are trawling the charity shops. There is much more to my life and my days than this, of course, but also this is literally what I do with my time. I struggle, I have terrible headaches, I live a life in search of Euphoria. So I am going to try to buff and shine my impressions, my thoughts and feelings of what my life is made up of so as to remember to keep them close.