Ocd Love Story Quotes

Torture: knowing something makes no sense, but doing it anyways.

It's like, I'm scared and there're a lot of ugly things, but I'd rather be shipwrecked on this lovely island than safe in a sad, gray cell.

...The human mind is a complicated place...We hold on to things, images, words, ideas, histories that we don't even know we're holding on to.

I guess I wonder what it would be like, to be living their live instead of mine.

Carrying all of these thoughts is downright heavy.

Feelings are like blankets, covering you up so you can't see clearly, or like mazes you can too easily get lost inside. I am terrified of getting lost.

Therapists. Always asking the same questions over and over in slightly different ways. They are, like, the Ultimate Thesauruses.

It feels like giving up. It feels like falling into bed after an all-night rave. It feels that right. It's surrender. It's that thing I have been searching for.

I think of everything and I'm pretty sure if I could use my organizational skills for something else, like wildlife survival kits or preparing people for nuclear warfare, I'd be a millionaire. Or at the very least actually a useful human being.

I try Dr. Pat's breathing exercises but they're not working because my entire mind is focused on keeping myself glued to the couch. I don't want to move any closer to the bathroom just in case. But I hate myself for the thought. I know it's not right or normal. I know I'm not simply some cute quirky girl like Beck says, and every moment I can't get off the couch is a moment that makes me one level crazier. That heavy, pre-crying feeling floods my sinuses and I drop my head from the weight of it. Cover my face with my hands long enough to get out a cry or two. Because there is nothing, nothing worse than not being able to undo the crazy thoughts. I ask them to leave, but they won't. I try to ignore them, but the only thing that works is giving in to them. Torture: knowing something makes no sense, doing it anyway.

Torture: knowing something makes no sense, doing it anyway.

If I didn't know better, I'd think I suffer from some sort of Tourette's-autism hybrid, but Dr. Pat insists I can control the impulse to say whatever pops into my head. That it's, like, a defensive mechanism, not a biological imperative. Therapists think everything is a defense mechanism. Just my thinking that in my head, right now, is a defense mechanism.

That's the thing about anxiety: It's a real time suck.

How could you live somewhere so icy cold and imposing, so clearly in conflict with the rest of the city, the rest of the human population, and stay in love? As far as I can tell, love takes place in townhouses and cozy cottages and cramped studio apartments and rundown guest houses. This place might as well be an office building or a spaceship.

I like to say the idea of Phantasma came to me all at once, hitting me like a ton of bricks one cloudy afternoon in November 2021, but truly, my experience with obsessive-compulsive disorder has been building to this story for a very long time. During the process of brainstorming the sort of adult romance I wanted to debut with, I was going through a period where my obsessive-compulsive tendencies were flaring up more than usual and the voices in my head were getting a little too bold. To my friends, these compulsions were alarming little anecdotes over lunch—‘that sounds like a horror movie’ one of them said (affectionately)—which is funny because, to me, someone who has lived with OCD my entire life, it was just another day of being unfazed by the increasingly creative scenarios my mind likes to conjure. OCD has such a wide range of symptoms that it makes every person’s experience with it different. Unfortunately, it has also become a commonly misused term conflated with the idea of being overly neat and clean, when in reality a lot of people with OCD have much darker symptoms. In my experience this has made explaining the real effects of OCD very hard as well as making it more difficult for people to regard the condition seriously. It’s so important to me to convey, with the utmost sincerity, that I know people are not doing this to be malicious! Because of the misuse of the term, however, some of the ways this disorder is shown in this book may come off as exaggerated or dramatic—but the details of Ophelia’s OCD are drawn directly from experiences that I, or someone I know who shares my condition, have had first-hand. And it’s still only a fraction of the symptoms we live with daily. Ophelia’s story is a love letter to my journey of getting comfortable being in my own head (as well as my adoration for Gothic aesthetics and hot ghosts). And while her experience with OCD, my experience with OCD, might look a lot different to someone else’s, I hope that the same message rings clear: struggling with your mental health does not make you unworthy of love. And I hope the people you surround yourself with are the sort of people who know that, too.

Then I’m thinking about shipwrecks on Caribbean islands, which I’m sure never happen. But I think about them anyway, as if they could. There’s this horrible situation, and about a million very real things that could happen, and you’re not exactly happy to be shipwrecked and you’ve got a lot of problems to solve and shit to work out. But you’re on this island, and in the middle of building your hut and hunting for fish and, like, doing basic first aid on your injured friend, you take a break and lie in the sand and look at the way the palm trees swing a little in the warm wind. And the sound of the ocean hitting the shore is lovely, and you’re in maybe the most beautiful place you’ve ever been. So in the same moment you’re terrified and amazed at the sobering reality of the world around you and the purity of the beauty. Would you trade in that moment? Would you risk being shipwrecked, to be able to see the most beautiful section of the human world? I guess that’s just a long way of saying I’m happy to be here.

I completely understand where our instilled belief that “true” love should be hard comes from. You don’t need to look any further than whatever program is currently on your TV. It makes for a better narrative when someone has to jump through fiery hoops and disown their family in order to be with their one and only. The problem is that these stories are always framed as romantic instead of unhealthy and/or traumatizing.