OCD – Craft

Kerry Cullen

I started writing a character with OCD in July 2018. For over a year, I’d been plagued by graphic intrusive thoughts about doing horrible things to people I loved, or innocent strangers, or children. The thoughts were so distressing that I couldn’t bear to write about them at first, but after a diagnosis and a few months of therapy I was finally ready to try. I’d been interested in writing an ambivalent 20something stepmother since reading Leslie Jamison’s excellent essay on stepmotherhood, “In the Shadow of a Fairytale.” I’m lucky to have a kind and loving stepmother, but I’d also experienced a few more temporary stepmother-ish figures in my teen years: women who dated my mom, many of whom hadn’t planned to have children at all. And then they were responsible for me: a moody teenage Christian and a deeply closeted bisexual, seething with internalized homophobia. What had that been like for them? What would I do if I fell in love with someone who already had kids? How would a person like me, haunted by intrusive thoughts, frightened to be around children, handle stepmotherhood? Not well, I knew. And Cassie was born.

Cassie isn’t me. We don’t have the same exact thoughts. While I was in exposure and response prevention (ERP) therapy, a highly effective treatment for OCD, one exercise involved me writing down my own intrusive thoughts in detail. This process was grueling and painful. It was also not quite possible, since the thoughts never appeared on the page the way they did in my brain. It was like trying to write down a dream—the characters changed in flashes; the logistics didn’t work. My brain was trying to terrify me, not to create a coherent narrative. So when I wrote Cassie, I gave her a slant rhyme on my thoughts. My OCD made it very easy to reach for horrors, even if they weren’t precisely my horrors, and I focused on portraying the way that intrusive thoughts bloom too quickly, the sensations that I feel when I’m in a spiral. I found that I could feel sympathy for Cassie, something I was almost never able to do for myself. I got comfortable with Cassie’s brain, with her physicality and her reactions. Once she felt predictable, I started building a story around her. And I found that her fears made the story feel gothic, a little haunted, which eventually led to the novel’s other voice: Beth’s.

I wanted this novel to accurately depict OCD in this novel, but I also wanted it to function as a novel, with page-turning pacing and an interesting plot. In moments, I had to cut down some of Cassie’s thoughts because they were starting to feel too repetitive, distracting from the plot unfolding around her. Other times, her constant state of panicked distraction allowed me to plant plot elements right in front of her without her seeing them. John Green, author of the beloved OCD novel Turtles All the Way Down, has discussed how, contrary to plenty of fictional-character representation, OCD does not give him superpowers, or the ability to solve crimes. In my experience, OCD can make me more meticulous. It certainly encourages me to double check things—even the spelling of names of close friends, or the phrasing in a two-line email I’ve rewritten so many times that when I do finally send it, words are missing.

So Cassie’s OCD is a devastating characteristic, the heart of the book, and also a useful plot device. It felt strange letting her ruminations become a flaw in her attention rather than the correct focus of her attention. It helped me see more clearly the ways in which my own OCD does not deserve the urgency I give it; rather, it can take me away from actual urgent moments. Of course, if I worry about this too much, I could get compulsive about it, too, so I try to hold it lightly. I try to find humor in it. It was important to me that this book, while holding panic at its core, also be funny and sexy and sweet. People with OCD are often panicked, yet ideally this doesn’t stop us from being funny and sexy and sweet. 

I’ve worried—dare I say I’ve obsessed—about the negativity that this book could bring into the world. I knew that for some, it might function as a sort of long, hard-to-bear exposure. While exposures are a useful OCD treatment for many, a novel is not a professional therapeutic exercise and should not be treated as such. And even professionally facilitated exposures aren’t fun. I also know that obsessive thinking can be a bit contagious. I can’t control every reader’s response to my novel (if only!) but writing about OCD is a responsibility I take seriously. Because of this, I assigned myself a few requirements. First, I needed to depict the disorder itself as clearly as I could. I needed to mention exposure therapy, and while I couldn’t let Cassie be in therapy during the events of the book—otherwise she would have made less bad decisions—I felt obliged to keep the door open to Cassie returning to therapy after the book’s end. Last, I felt urgently that I had to give Cassie an ending that she would consider happy, or freeing. I refused to imagine a person, saddle them with my worst terrors, and not give them any help. In later drafts, this was where Beth really began to shine.

One known tactic for handling OCD is to name the voice in your head, the bad brain, the puppet master of intrusive thoughts who tells you that you’re inviting the horrors and you need to take them seriously. I love this idea, but it hasn’t quite worked for me. So instead, during a moment of deterioration, I named the shrunken, exhausted part of my brain that could still sympathize with me. I create fictional characters all the time, I reasoned. Couldn’t I make one up just for myself? This character is not the embodiment of my OCD. Instead, she’s the voice of reason when that voice terrorizes me. She can look at my bad brain lovingly and tell me not to listen. She isn’t me, so she doesn’t have to pay attention to whatever it hurls my way. She’s a nice idea, and like most of my ideas about how to fix my brain, she is not a solution. She’s made up, first of all, and I know that, whether I want to or not. She’s a thought exercise, not an entity. She was a sweet idea, helpful for a moment, and these days I don’t think of her much.

But what if in a world with slightly different rules, I was able to invite a loving entity into my head to console me and watch out for me? Someone like the God I was raised believing in, who could see all my thoughts—but without the authority, the all-knowingness? Someone who was just a person, once. Someone I could love, who could love me back. This is, ideally, what Beth brings to the book. She makes Cassie’s story something more than a fatal flaw and a plot that I built around that flaw. She makes it, I hope, something more haunting.