Obsessive-Compulsive Dramatic: My Fight Against OCD, Borderline Personality Disorder, and Addiction

Table of Contents

The Severity of OCD

Before the OCD

The Beginning of my OCD

The Evolution

More on OCD

The Benevolence and Malevolence within Me

The OCD Conclusion

Part 2

Living on the Edge (Intro to My Borderline Personality Disorder)

Borderline, Narcissism and Impulsivity

The Beginning of the End

Saved by the One I Saved

Not Staying Clean and Sober

Suicide and Drugs

Lying and My First Spiritual Experience

The Insanity of Addiction

Processing the Devastation

Couch-Surfing and Suicide

The Last Time I Used

The Obsession

The End

The Cure

Dedication

To Mike Gilroy, the man who got me into reading. To my mother and father, for having to raise such a difficult child. And in the loving memory of Daniel Haze (1999-2016) and Gustav Ahr (1996-2017), you’ll both be loved and remembered forever.

Preface

My name is Jack Bingham, I’m twenty-one and a full-blown mental patient. This is going to be a look into my mind—the way I’ve learned to cope with my mental illnesses. I wish I could tell you that my story is going to be chock-full of amazing insight, but a lot of it is learning what not to do. You’ll get an idea of what it’s like to have extreme obsessive-compulsive disorder, borderline personality disorder, and an addiction. When I say extreme OCD, that isn’t hyperbole. I’m talking about me, a person who had to switch schools as a child because I felt everything and everyone had become contaminated.

There were times in my life that my OCD got so bad it drove me very close to suicide. There were a lot of tears, a lot of screaming, and a lot of pain over the years with this illness. People often misunderstand or underestimate the severity OCD can reach. But believe me, from personal experience, I can tell you it can easily ruin your life. It ruined mine and left me hopeless, trapped in a prison of my own mind.

There is good news, though. On top of already having such a debilitating mental illness, I went out and picked up a few more. I guess my brain didn’t think having OCD was enough, so it found some good deals out there and I ended up with borderline personality disorder as well as a wicked drug addiction. In all seriousness, it’s hard living with the emotional insanity that is borderline personality disorder. The constant, intense mood swings, the impulsivity, and the feelings of extreme hopelessness and chronic emptiness.

But I have found ways to cope. I used alcohol and drugs to cope for a long time and it led me down a painful road. It led me to the gates of hell. There is desperation and despair when realizing you’ve lost control of your life, that you’ve become insanely obsessed and dependent on drugs that are going to kill you. And even worse, not caring that what you’re doing is a one-way, no lay-overs ticket to an early grave. Die young and leave a good-looking corpse was my motto. I had completely lost my mind to the insanity of drug and alcohol addiction. Actually, I hadn’t just lost my mind, I had lost my self. I became a broken person.

If you’re wondering how a person with so many apparent issues was able to write a book, you’ll have to understand that I’m shocked as well. I wouldn’t have been able to do this without overcoming my addiction and staying clean, as well as regularly attending visits with multiple therapists and a psychiatrist. This book is about me, my illnesses, and what I’ve learned and discovered on this unorthodox journey.

Chapter 1

The Severity of OCD

Speaking very broadly, obsessive-compulsive disorder is something that is vastly misunderstood. I used to be bothered by this fact. It would drive me into rage hearing OCD be trivialized or be the subject of a joke. I’ve learned to come to terms with the fact that people can joke about, or misunderstand obsessive-compulsive disorder, and that’s okay. The only reason they are doing so is because they don’t understand the mental anguish it truly is capable of.

When obsessive-compulsive disorder progresses to severe or extreme degrees, it becomes your life. It controls every waking moment and decision. There’s no escape from it; there’s no break in the anxiety and fear of impending panic. You end up living in a constant cycle of intrusive thoughts leading to obsession, which inevitably lead to compulsions. The key to understanding obsessive-compulsive disorder if you don’t suffer from it, is understanding that we who suffer from OCD are well aware that we are behaving in an irrational manner.

For the benefit of insight, I’m going to explain to you what I have to do every time I go to the washroom. Even if it’s just urinating, what exactly is my routine and ritual?

First off, I can only go to the washroom in my house. I can’t go in public. And I can’t go at someone else’s house. It has to be my house (unless I have access to someone else’s shower). I have to sit while I pee, and try and make the stream as light as possible so nothing splashes. I then wash my hands profusely before going into the shower, and yes, I have to shower every time I urinate.

I then spend a ludicrous amount of time in the shower, washing in a certain ritualized order. The first thing I have to do when I enter the shower is brush my teeth. Ideally, I would have a new toothbrush every day, but it’s usually more like every three days. Then I have to wash my hands two or three times. I use my foot to turn on the shower and close the shower curtain. Even when I’m in the shower—about to wash my entire body for upwards of an hour, and at times closer to three hours—I still have the need to avoid contact with faucets and other things in the shower/bath area. I have to intensely rinse my nether regions, and this phase alone can last twenty minutes. After I feel satisfied that my private parts are clean, I have to wash my body in stages. In between each stage, I have to rinse my hands, and then wash them before moving on. For example, I will wash my hair, then rinse my hands, wash them, and then reapply soap before moving on to wash my torso.

When I’m in the shower I’m constantly paranoid that urine is still leaking out of me. Sometimes I will be completely done showering, and then I’ll get a sensation that some urine has dribbled out, and I have to restart the entire process.

As you can imagine, not only is this insanely time-consuming, it is also financially taxing. Not only do I go through copious amounts of soap (something all my friends and relatives point out to me after I stay at their house for a few days), but I also use an absurd amount of water. My mother tells me that when I’m at home the water bill doubles or even triples. Of course, this isn’t just due to excessive showering and hand-washing, but also the amount of laundry I do. It is not uncommon for me to have to change my shirt two or three times in a given day. And it’s truly a miracle when I don’t have to change my bed sheets every single day.

My OCD is severe, but we have only scratched the surface of what I live with every day. There are other things I do, thoughts that I have, that are so insanely irrational, and that lead to such mental hell, that it will truly boggle your mind.

So, as you can imagine, I can’t help but get a little annoyed when people make trite comments like Oh my God, I’m so OCD after doing something like evening out the drawstrings on their hoodie. Because the thing I fear people often fail to understand about severely debilitating OCD, is how much I loathe it. I despise every single time I have to wash my hands. When you’re washing your hands until they bleed (my hands literally crack and bleed because they are so dried out from all the soap I use), you can only imagine how frustrating and painful it is. There are times when I’m stuck in a compulsive cycle, and I’ve been doing the same ritual for hours straight without stopping. When this occurs I often plead out loud for this hell to end; I beg to be able to stop, but I’m not able to.

I remember when I was in my final year of high school, I ended up failing my first-period class because I could never make it on time. I would wake up hours before school started, but at the time my OCD was so severe, that even when I would enter the washroom at 7:30 a.m., I wasn’t able to leave the washroom until noon. I would be in there for four-and-a-half hours, just washing my body over and over again. Changing my clothes over and over again. Sometimes exiting the shower, and then having to re-enter and repeat the long process from the beginning. I didn’t want to do this. I wanted to be normal. It wasn’t uncommon for me to break down into tears after I entered the second or third hour of ritualistic compulsion. Tears would be streaming down my face as I entered the shower for the third time that morning, or had to change out yet another shirt or pair of pants.

Now something I hear a lot, and something that I don’t let bother me anymore, is people who say, Why don’t you just stop? or Can’t you just stop? And believe me, I wish the answer was that simple. But it seems as though these habits and thought patterns haven’t just been ingrained in me, they have been branded into my brain and my very being. I’m aware I’m not going to die if I don’t engage these compulsions. I’m aware that I won’t be in a life-and-death situation if I don’t submit to these behaviours. I’m not insane (well, I am but I’m aware of it). I can observe other people and realize none of them live like me. None of them are this concerned with being contaminated or infected, and yet they seem to be okay. And in fact, they have a much higher quality of life than I do. But in order to understand why I can’t stop, you have to understand what happens in my brain when I try to.

The best analogy I’ve been able to come up with is drowning. When obsessive-compulsive disorder grips me, and gives me the intense need to act on one of my compulsions, I truly get so overwhelmed I have trouble conveying the severity.

Let’s just use hand-washing as an example. Suppose I touch a doorknob I perceive to be contaminated and the urge to wash my hands enters my mind. That thought completely consumes me. When I say completely, I’m saying that in absence of hyperbole or aggrandizement. The anxiety starts to build and my brain hyper-focuses on only one thought: the thought of washing my hands. There is absolutely no way to distract myself. I’ve had to stop having sex as a seventeen-year-old boy to engage a compulsion. Not even the act of sex was enough to distract me. (Keep in mind, this was in my teenage years when sex is the primary thought in most boys’ heads, and they will masturbate themselves into dehydration.) Not even sexual intercourse at the height of puberty was a sufficient distraction from the obsession. And if you’re wondering, I can’t really have sex anymore because of my OCD.

From there, the anxiety grows. The entire world seems to disappear to the point that not even finding out I just won the lottery would be enough to pull my mind away from the thought that I still need to wash my hands. The anxiety continues to grow to a never-ending degree. Not only do I need to wash my hands, but I can’t let my hands touch anything, because then that touched object will become contaminated. And then there’s the truly insane thought: I can’t even breathe near my hands, or move my hands too quickly, or let them come in contact with wind or air in motion, because that moving air will carry the contaminants and spread them to other things. The longer I wait to wash my hands, the more I feel I am exposing myself to contamination. I feel as though I’m perpetuating the contamination. It feels that the longer I resist, the more I’m spreading the contamination, and the more I’m putting myself in danger.

Now, back to the drowning analogy. When I try to resist, the only thought I have is the contamination. Then I feel as though the contamination is growing and spreading, which further reinforces this intrusive and ridiculous notion that I need to wash my hands. The anxiety subsequently evolves into full-blown panic and hysteria. In certain cases, I will experience intense hot flashes throughout my body. My vision will blur and I will become dizzy. I will begin coughing in an attempt to avoid inhaling any contaminants. I will also hold my breath as a substitute for coughing in certain situations. At this juncture it feels as though I’m drowning. Imagine the panic of drowning—the intense fear that would wash over you when you first slip below the water and realize you can’t bring yourself back up. The overwhelming fear you would experience as your lungs involuntarily start inhaling water. You can feel your lungs filling up with water. Maybe you’re trapped under ice and you look up as water fills your mouth and you realize you’re fully trapped. There is no escape. That fear, that panic, is very similar to how severe the anxiety caused by OCD can be.

I can understand people’s skepticism. Because drowning will kill you and not washing your hands won’t. I understand and I’m fully aware of how ridiculous and melodramatic this appears to be. But that’s why it’s such a cunning and baffling disorder. Even though I’m fully aware that this is insane, that there is no way these situations should invoke such panic and distress in me, I can’t stop. I can’t seem to help it at all. And as ludicrous as this sounds, I would rather be in the lake drowning facing certain death, than be forced to be contaminated and completely prohibited from engaging in my compulsions. I would pick the punishment of irreversible and permanent death over living with the anxiety of feeling the need to do a compulsion and not being able to. I suppose the reason for my feeling that way is that at least drowning will end. It will cease eventually and I will be at peace. The OCD is never-ending. I never get a break from it. Even in my dreams I have OCD.

I’ve spent years torturing myself in an attempt to understand why I can’t be normal. Why I have to do all these compulsions in order to attain some degree of calmness. I remember when I was fifteen, my OCD was at one of its peaks. I had come to fear airborne contaminants for the first time. Developing this new obsession changed my life forever, in a very negative way.

I seemed to get the distorted idea that contaminants could pass through the air and infect me, and as a result, I would cough and shake my entire body, whilst holding my breath, to keep the perceived contaminants out of my body. The day I started having these compulsions, I knew that my OCD had reached a new level. That this was not only going to negatively impact me mentally, but also physically. I would sometimes spend upwards of fifteen minutes coughing, then holding my breath and shaking my body, while standing under the ceiling fan in my bedroom, in an attempt to try to blow the contaminants away. This coughing and holding my breath would lead to light-headedness and extremely painful headaches. I was being stressed physically as well as mentally, and it was really taking a toll on me.

When I was walking through the house, I would duck at certain places to avoid the contamination I thought was in the air. Entering the washroom was absolute hell for me. Any time I entered I would have to take a shower. When leaving the washroom I would have to engross myself in the coughing/shaking ritual aforementioned.

I suppose that after all this rambling, I should briefly delve into what exactly contamination is for me. Quite simply, for me, contamination means contact with urine and fecal matter. I have an immense fear of those particular bodily fluids. Of course, other bodily fluids like saliva, blood, and semen also distress me, but urine and fecal matter are the main culprits.

So, if a person uses the washroom and then washes their hands, but uses their hands to touch the tap to turn it off (I would always use a fresh towel or paper towel to turn off the tap, and if neither of those were available, I would find an inanimate object to use in replacement), and they touched something else after, in my mind that new thing is contaminated as well as their hands. And with my new obsession with airborne contaminates, if that person even came near me and moved their hands, I would think that little particles of contaminants would travel through the air and infect me or other things around me. This would provoke in me an inability to breathe, or a necessity to cough or move my body to keep the contaminants at bay. As you can envision, this type of thinking wouldn’t have to exist for a long duration of time before it spiralled out of control. And, indeed, that is precisely what happened.

If I was with a person who had touched a tap, and then we went outside together, if the wind blew in a direction that passed through them before me, I would feel as though the contaminants that were on their hands had transferred onto me. I would feel an intense anxiety that could only be alleviated by engaging in the coughing and shaking.

Washing my hands excessively was something I could very easily hide. It didn’t take much of an effort to conceal, and even if certain astute people did become