Watch Your Thoughts

Every morning I think about life and death. I remember awakening to worries about work, or what to have for dinner, or an argument with Steve, or an extra five pounds I wanted to lose.  Now, I walk to the bathroom and only thoughts of death assail me. They begin before I can even pee. His dying. My living. Here we go. The weight descends. The day begins. Only it is always the same day, with the same thoughts. Dead, dead, dead. It is coming close to eight years. I say this to note the irrefutable horror that despite the time that has passed--every day begins with his death.  

Another thing. I am so tired of reading about how learning to tolerate one’s emotions is the key to initiating and maintaining mental health. It is the inability to tolerate one’s most painful, frightening sensations that leads to avoidance, continuing fear, anxiety and addiction. So advise the experts. Well, I can honestly say that I have not only been tolerating these feelings for most of my life, living with, trying to manage and accept various and sundry frights, but since Maxx died been subject to the worst storms of sorrow imaginable. In my 62 years of life, and in particular the last 8, I have lived bowed with loss, desperation and incalculable loneliness to the extent that I can’t even begin to understand any longer what is meant by the need to “integrate” this grief in some alchemical way that will allow me to ever again feel any sense of purpose or peace. This is simply not possible. It is what we used to call 30 years ago, psychobabble.

I did not become addicted to drugs. I did not become dependant upon alcohol. I never attempted suicide. I have simply continued.  I felt everything. I feel everything. I saw everything, I see it now. The memories do not fade. In fact, it may be that they become more clearly etched against the backdrop of passing time. My heart is heavy, freighted with the dregs of grief. The wash of pain, back and forth, never ends. Is this neurochemical habit, or tolerance?

I am reading a book called The Man Who Couldn’t Stop: And The True Story of a Life Lost in Thought--a book about OCD. The author, David Adam, writes: that “psychologists have identified three types of dysfunctional belief important in the development of OCD. The first is an inflated sense of threat and personal responsibility. The second is perfectionism and intolerance of uncertainty. The third is a belief in the over-importance of thoughts and the need to control them.”   

Further: “Inflated responsibility is probably the most important dysfunctional belief in OCD. Obsessive-Compulsives often feel responsible for having thoughts and for the negative consequence of their thoughts on themselves and others-and (this is what knocks me down)AND FOR NOT ACTING TO PREVENT THOSE CONSEQUENCES.They believe that if they have any influence over an outcome then THEY ARE RESPONSIBLE for it. This triggers a cascade of twisted secondary ideas--’having this thought means I want to do it’ or ‘if I fail to prevent harm then it is as BAD AS DIRECTLY CAUSING HARM.’ “ (Caps, mine.)

With these as qualifying characteristics, is this grief-stricken life in which I live not defined by OCD-the obsessive thinking that I caused my son’s death by not doing enough, or knowing enough to prevent it?

He also discusses the phenomenon of the disorder that results in disordered thinking that leads to mistrust, nay, disbelief in one’s memories of events. Am I misremembering because I cannot trust my own mind to play back either a realistic chronology, or more crucially, the interpretation of events that mirror that chronology? What really happened and when? Did I think this and then that? Did I do that based upon what I perceived to be real? Was what I believed to be true flawed at the outset because my thinking, my perceptions were skewed as a result of mental illness? An “illness” I never even realized I had?

I am not laying claim to suffering from OCD. Nor do I think, strictly speaking, that I have PTSD. But I do firmly believe there are striking elements of both disorders that have become lodged in my brain--so much so as to define who I am now in a way that feels to be permanent. A distinction of a particular sorrow. Branded onto my heart, burned forever into the synapses of my neurochemistry--inescapable.

In the facing page is this quote by “Unknown’

Watch your thoughts, for they become words.

Watch your words, for they become actions.

Watch your actions, for they become habits.

Watch your habits, for they become character.

Watch your character, for it becomes your destiny.