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    OCD Interrupted: A Girl You Haven't Seen Before
    OCD Interrupted: A Girl You Haven't Seen Before
    OCD Interrupted: A Girl You Haven't Seen Before
    Ebook82 pages2 hours

    OCD Interrupted: A Girl You Haven't Seen Before

    By Ilianthe Kalloniatis and Rob de Kok

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    About this ebook

    Ilianthe's upbringing was eccentric, her life journey never followed a straight line. Follow Ilianthe from her hippy childhood to her life as a struggling film maker on low budget film sets to cut price television commercials. Follow her from Adelaide to Tasmania, from therapist to therapist, obsession to obsession and back again. Just when she was beginning to accept her Obsessive Compulsive Disorder she was diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder and the roller coaster ride began again.
    This book follows ilianthe's train of thought as she travels through her everyday life. Her life is as unusual as her thought processes. Join her on her roller coaster ride. Laugh and cry as you read your way through this compact little memoir.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBookBaby
    Release dateApr 1, 2015
    ISBN9781543947175
    OCD Interrupted: A Girl You Haven't Seen Before

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      Book preview

      OCD Interrupted - Ilianthe Kalloniatis

      OCD INTERRUPTED

      ILIANTHE KALLONIATIS

      Copyright © 2014 by Ilianthe Kalloniatis

      All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission.

      ISBN: 9781543947175

      OCD INTERRUPTED

      ILIANTHE KALLONIATIS Forword by Rob de Kok

      This Book Won’t Change Your Life

      OCD INTERRUPTED is an astounding little book, a direct through-line to heart and a mind unlike your own, but like your own in so many ways. It’s a well-written, candid insight into a mentality you suspect has been teasing at the periphery of you in the day-after-day of just being human, a mentality which, when fully unleashed, invites inner turmoil; an altered life, hard to recover.

      In OCD INTERRUPTED you’ll find a girl you haven’t seen before, a girl kept from you by her own coping devices and the quiet desperation of a moment-by-moment life. In this memoir, outlined here brilliantly, with honesty and humour, Ilianthe creates her world for you in a manner both entertaining and enlightening. In doing so she introduces you to details of an existence which are heart-wrenching at times and heart-warming always, details you vaguely know but the core of which you hope never to experience.

      This is a story of strange connections, the disconnect between people, and a peculiar gap between one person and the understood planet. Recognised by none, supported by few and accepted by no- one for years, Ilianthe lived out her OCD from pre-teen to a variety of high schools and onto tertiary study and work using a number of coping mechanisms. At all times she never lost sight of her inner self, entrusting it to her craft, her film-making and her writing. What has emerged from the latter shows the sheer talent which was bound up in this troubled person - at its core, a unique individual.

      In reading OCD INTERRUPTED, what became immediately obvious for the first time is what was happening inside the girl who turned up for my English and Drama classes twenty five years ago. Page by page, I became aware of what I was totally unaware of at the time. In middle school the known about Ilianthe was her meticulous, precise handwriting. Underneath this affectation lay all-night re-drafting, totally unreasonable concern, days lost to time-destroying routines, a young person left unattended with an unfettered, troubled mind. How we, caring teachers in a small school, missed this is unbelievable. How Ilianthe carried on is heroic.

      Teacher, parent, or purely someone with compassion and a wish to broaden your understanding of us all, read this little book. Take a new look at those three letters, grasp how all-pervasive this misunderstood condition is, how early it can first infest the creative psyche and be left wondering how many others struggle in silence with this crippling mind-state.

      Above all, be uplifted by the voice here, not that of a survivor but of a full participant in life. This book won’t change your life, but it’ll change your view of another life - a life too well-hidden by its owners and too often ignored by those who can help.

      OCD INTERRUPTED

      I am sitting at my kitchen table slumped over a can of cold canned soup. Intermittently I stab my soup with a fork and manage to spear a pea. I wonder does everybody find feeding and bathing themselves this hard. It’s embarrassing to admit that I’d rather eat icy soup directly out of a ring pull can, with a fork, rather than have to wash a spoon or dirty a saucepan.

      I’m not lazy. I have a phobia of dirty dishes and water coupled with a fear of contamination. I have a near crippling case of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, a chemical imbalance of the brain, that sends my synapses crazy and upturns my life.

      I hate having a mental illness! If I had asthma and I started to cough people would rush at me with inhalers and kind words. If I had diabetes, I could prove I was sick by testing my blood sugar. Mental illness is invisible and that’s something that other people don’t always understand.

      OCD has driven my collecting desires, my cleaning rituals and sometimes lack of cleaning routine. OCD has given me obsessive drive to complete tasks, save money for world travel and has at times taken away my will to leave my bed. OCD can be a blessing and a curse, it can lead to humorous and dreadful situations. The eventual combined diagnoses of both OCD and Bipolar Disorder have shaped my unconventional life in myriad ways. While it’s hard to say who I would be without these chemical imbalances in my brain, what I do know is that they are not the sum of my parts. My life experiences, my alternative hippy childhood, my education and my quirky family background all add to the complex and creative individual that I have become. Obsessed with video making, photography, knitting and street art, writing, blogging and cats, I am my own worst enemy and my own best ally all rolled into one.

      There are some schools of thought that say that OCD and hoarding are related disorders. There was a time when I felt a painful urge to amass collections of items that I almost desperately did not want to own. I was never an indiscriminate hoarder. I’ve never hoarded empty milk bottles, beer caps or stray cats. I have hoarded empty toilet rolls and mouldy fruit on many occasions but those hoards were born from an inability to handle cleaning. I had no attachment to used cardboard rolls or fermenting fruit, they were just not on my radar system because I was too busy obsessing over my important collections. Alternatively I was so zoned out on a bipolar low that, cleaning the house, cleaning myself and getting out of bed were just too much for me to contemplate. The bipolar lows are accompanied by aching joint and muscle pain and often stomach and head pain.

      The first thing that I ever remember collecting were dried peppercorns when I was a little girl. I used to pick them out of food, wipe them with a tissue and put them in an old vitamin jar. My mother was very understanding and she made a special spot on a low shelf in the kitchen cupboard for my peppercorns. Later on in life after I discovered that you could buy jars of shiny new peppercorns at the supermarket they lost their appeal and I gave up my peppercorn collection and today I live a peppercorn free lifestyle.

      One of the biggest crazes of my collecting or hoarding history was my Christmas crack, I mean cracker hoard. My obsession began with two yellow plastic chickens from a couple of 1970s Christmas crackers. The Christmas I cracked open my crackers and found those new born plastic chickens with their little pink plastic hats was the day I became hooked on the thrill of the Christmas cracker. As a child my access to crackers was limited and thus my collection remained small and it was not until my late 20s when I discovered mass marketed family sized boxes of Christmas crackers that my obsessional cracker behavior really took hold.

      My obsession with crackers became my quirky little secret. Every year when the festive season hit I would drive to the store every few days and buy family sized boxes of Christmas crackers. I could

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