28Interlude Three. The Patient’s Voice

This monologue is reconstructed from real stories; names and details have been changed.

Thirteen years — that’s what I figured out later. While you’re living inside it, you don’t count; time works differently in there. It isn’t measured in years, it’s measured in rituals.

For me it went like this: if I didn’t check the stove six times, the house would burn down, and it would be my fault. I knew the stove was off. Don’t think I didn’t know. That’s the torture of it — you know everything, and you still go check, because anxiety doesn’t ask what you know. Six times for the stove. Then my hands. Then the “right” thoughts before bed, and if a “wrong” one slipped in — start over.

Over thirteen years I saw four of them. The first one prescribed pills. Told me to come back in a month. The pills muffled things — like a pillow over an alarm clock: still ringing, but duller. The second one kept switching the pills. The third was private. Expensive. She “worked on my childhood” with me. For three years we worked on my childhood. I learned everything there was to know about my childhood. But I still checked the stove six times. I don’t want to talk about the fourth one. He’s already in this book anyway. I’ll say just one thing: when a doctor looks at your illness and offers you something like that — you’ll be washing your hands for a long time after, and not six times either.

And then — I was thirty-four — I ended up with a doctor who, at my very first appointment, said three letters I hadn’t heard once in thirteen years. He said: what you’ve been treated with is not what OCD is treated with; for OCD there’s a specific method that works, it’s called exposure with response prevention; it will be hard, I’ll be right there with you, we’ll start with something easy.

Do you know what “starting with something easy” looks like? You turn off the stove. You check it once. And you walk out of the kitchen. You don’t go back. You sit in the other room. And then it hits — the anxiety. Thick, warm, it rises through your body like black water in a flooded basement. Your heart pounds against your ribs. The doctor on the other end of the line says the password that breaks the system: “Don’t fight it. Just wait. Watch what it does.” And you wait, feeling on your skin how the wave reaches its peak, how it hesitates... and falls. On its own. Without a ritual. For the first time in thirteen years there was no spell between me and the anxiety — and I didn’t burn, and the house didn’t burn.

That first evening, when I checked the stove once, I remember the way people remember their wedding. I stood in the hallway and laughed out loud. Alone, like an idiot. Thirteen years — and it turns out there was a method. It had existed all along. It was in textbooks, in protocols, in those three letters — while I was working on my childhood and taking pillows for alarm clocks.

I’m not bitter, I don’t want to judge anyone. I just want this written somewhere in big letters: if you have OCD — ask your specialist what ERP is. And watch their face. Their face will tell you everything.

These days I check the stove once. Like everybody else. You can’t even imagine what a blessing it is — to check the stove like everybody else.