I happen to be a person who believes in the destination and not the journey. It is part of my OCD, I am obsessed with making things right, with the endgame of—well—everything being right. This, of course, is an impossible destination for the travels my brain takes through the fog of life. However, there are times when calm descends in a very awkward way. There are these small pockets of time in my life when everything in my range of observation seems pretty ok. But from that, I do not assume a feeling that would be considered… good. Oxymoronic, almost, this state.

I would estimate that about ninety-nine percent of my life is consumed with the following:

1. Making things right that I feel are wrong.

2. Twitching in a fog of anxiety because I have no control over my thoughts.

3. Wishing to rewind life to correct actions I took, mostly out of fear of the reaction to said actions.

4. Dwelling on how life should be balanced, fair, and organized but how it is most certainly not.

5. In a positive OCD episode where I am organizing, cleaning, and similar actions—and feeding very upbeat and good energy from that.

That leaves one percent of my life in a very strange state where nothing I see is wrong, I don’t feel want, where things are ok. But they don’t feel ok. Because I have OCD and my brain feels the need to be obsessing over something. This is a completely true and real feeling, as absurd as it sounds. It is as if the compulsive side of me is a wild dog ready to attack obsessions, and I am holding it back trying to convey there are no obsessions at the current moment and to please calm down!

It is in these moments that I face the pure absence that is life. An absence of what? I don’t know. I just feel the absence. I know my OCD is a condition, and it is an illness. Thus, it goes into remission—often at seemingly random times. Oh, there is certainly some level of predictability to it—no one is causing me problems. The world outside my brain is moving along and I am not finding problems. I certainly hold on to my long-term life problems, that’s just being human. But for the time being, there is nothing to fix.

However, my brain is still throbbing a figurative muscle to fix… something, anything. It is the most unnerving dichotomy—and those opposing forces, I do not know which is real and which is not. I could easily try and see the muscle memory flailing about with nothing to attach to as not real. But that is me! The rest of the world, outside my brain, I am so used to being far more suspect. So I’m not about to give that space in my universe the benefit of being considered more real¹.

Here’s one thing that is true—this dichotomy is tiring from the get-go. It hits me. It is not the product of being tired. I am generally well awake. Not hyper, not tired. But it is the epitome of the figurative statement of grinding gears. Which is naturally a waste of energy. In fact, all of this is a waste of energy. However, I must live it.

Is this what “nothing” is? Am I sitting here writing about “nothing?” That concept would assume none of this has a basis in reality. But OCD is a reality that persists everything to someone afflicted by it. So it seems that even when things are ok, that OCD cannot be escaped from.

It is certainly an odd feeling. It is both hellish and definitely not hellish- and those two things cancel each other out, leaving me numb.

I’d rather a problem come up if my belief in omens didn’t stop me from wishing such things.

So that’s it. This has no conclusion, and therefore I don’t feel like trying to reach one in this description.

It just is. Or isn’t.