Is it Life, or Just to Play My Worries Away?

There's this scene in every child of the eighties' favorite music video that illustrates so well how I feel. A-ha dude's trying to break out of his comic strip box, and he's slamming himself against the walls until he smacks the comic out of himself and becomes a real boy. I feel like I'm slamming against the walls, but I just can't seem to break out of the box, shake off the black and white, and get back to the real me. There are few things that are better in black and white. Once I bought a DVD of It's a Wonderful Life, not realizing it was colorized. It was awful. I couldn't even watch it, and I love that movie. Black and white has its place, but black and white is no way to view the world. It's not black and white. It's full of color and nuance, and if you try to reduce it to black and white, you'll be missing something. My take on germs right now is black and white, and it's not working. The fact that 99% of germs are not harmful and are often helpful should get me to relax and settle for washing hands after using the restroom or after taking out the trash, but instead I'm trying to sanitize every.single.thing that comes into my home, and it's a losing battle. My kids go to school. (I have fleeting thoughts of home schooling, but I'm still sane enough to know that wouldn't be a step in the right direction.) My husband goes to work. So I do what I can. They usually shower or at least change clothes after school/work, and then I try to sanitize their stuff---cell phones, keys, glasses, wallets, credit cards, bottoms of shoes, the floor where the shoes have been, etc.

I try not to keep my family from living life, so we go places, yes (though a large amount of hand sanitizer is employed throughout). We go to the movies and to Gettysburg and to church, but it's hugely stressful to me, because when we get home, it's time for me to sanitize stuff. You don't even want to know what an ordeal shopping has become for me. All of this attempting to sanitize is a time consuming nightmare, and it isn't possible anyway. I try to tell myself that it's a done deal, so there's no point. If there's some horrible germ on the stuff, it's probably already in the kid. Besides, I won't, nor could I, bar friends and family from ever visiting (though it is a much more stressful occurrence for me than it should be as I try not to think about all their non-sanitized stuff). I'm tilting at windmills, so why can't I just knock it off? I keep trying to logic myself back to normalcy, but so far, logic hasn't fixed crazy for me. I feel like I have to do as much as I can to keep my family's environment safe, but in a cost benefit analysis, are my efforts increasing our safety enough to be worth it? I'm pretty sure that's a no. Maybe the song's got it right, and it really is "no better to be safe than sorry." Now go get your A-ha on. I know you want to. (Has the synthesizer ever been better employed?)

And let's face it, even if I ever do shake off the black and white, I'll still never look this cool. 

Hallelujah!

I have not had a great couple of days on the response prevention front. I have not prevented my responses. I have been both obsessive and compulsive.
Check out my hands:

Scarlett O'Hara would say those are not the hands of a lady. That's what too much hand washing, hand sanitizer, and cleaning with bleach (without the proper use of gloves) looks like. I know my behavior is really probably worse for my physical (let alone mental) health than coexisting with the germs, but that's not how it feels. So I keep thrashing my hands and loading on the lotion. The lotion is losing.

See, those cracks kinda hurt, and they are really the least of it, so I have decided I need to look into therapy and medication again. Can't someone just give me a pill to cure my crazy? Okay, probably not. But I'm hoping to bring the anxiety down enough to help me not to engage in the compulsions, thus allowing me to deal with exposure therapy sans having a panic attack every five minutes. Finding a therapist is really a lot more work than I thought it would be. I figured there'd be therapists aplenty wanting to cash in, but it seems there is no shortage of crazy. All week I've been playing phone tag, being told my insurance isn't accepted, being told my particular brand of crazy isn't really this or that therapist's focus (depression people, you are in the money, by the way; they all seem to specialize in that), and being told "not accepting new patients" (this happens a lot---I suspect an above average ratio of crazy people to mental health specialists in the DC area).

My first therapy session was a trip. It was a huge step for me at the time, and I was pretty sure it would show up on some document to any possible future employer in bold letters reading, "CRAZY PERSON ALERT," but I was desperate enough to live with that stigma. I went to my first therapist before we moved. At first she seemed kinda like what I expected. She told me she's really into brain science. She told me that my serotonin levels are probably off. Okay, seems reasonable. Then she told me we needed to get to the root causes of my anxiety, the real issue being fear. That all seemed properly Freudian. So we played a question and answer game.

What are you afraid of? 

Hantavirus. (I was still mostly stuck on one germ then; mouse poop kinda triggered my germophobia going OTT.)

Why?

BECAUSE I COULD DIE! MY CHILDREN COULD DIE!

So the root cause of your issue is fear of death? 

Duh. Mice would just be cute if not for the fact that THEY CAN FRIGGIN' KILL YOU. Sure, getting sick isn't fantastic either, but what really bothers me is the whole death thing.

So you need to stop being afraid of death.

Yeah, not gonna happen. I don't have any plans to discontinue death avoidance.
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Then things got weird. My therapist, maybe figuring we were the same religion, it being St. George, UT, started bearing her testimony to me. For real. She had been in a car accident and had a near death experience, she explained. And she had seen the light, so you see, there's no reason to fear death; she saw Jesus. And where would we Utah Mormons be if the pioneers had feared death? (I don't know. New York? Personally, I've never been sure dragging your children across the country with a handcart is the best plan.) I hope she did see Jesus (but if so, which version?), but one more near stranger's near death experience probably isn't the cure for me. Also, I wanted to ask about brain science, to ask if maybe getting hit on the head had caused her brain to fire off some chemicals that made her think she'd seen Jesus. Instead, I nodded my head and wondered if maybe I should look into a more traditional therapist. But there you have it, folks, never fear. My therapist saw Jesus. So it's all good.

Ain't it Great?

There's this song my mom used to sing that often runs through my head, "Boom, Boom! Ain't it great to be crazy? Boom, boom! Ain't it great to be nuts?" Turns out, not so much. When I was a kid, I imagined insanity as sort of throwing aside all of the acceptable behavior and doing whatever the heck you want. Seemed almost like the ultimate freedom. But my experience is that the opposite is true. Crazy is like living in a box that just keeps getting smaller. Sometimes it feels suffocating or like I'm treading water, trying not to drown. Or maybe I just got the wrong kind of crazy. It's a strange thing, having your whole world view take a dramatic shift. And not in a good way. I can't tell you how much I miss me and the way I used to live. It's the freedom that I miss. It's the looking at the world without thinking about all the germs. It's the not having to spend hours of my day disinfecting things. It's the not feeling like I need to monitor everyone and everything that comes into my home. It's like "germ" is always shoving aside everything else in my head. If you find yourself looking for a phobia, don't choose germs. They're everywhere, you can't see them, and they're on people. And you like people, right? No, go for a phobia of elevators or something that doesn't inhibit and bleed into everything all the time because it's everywhere. But, heck, maybe the elevatorphobes feel differently. My 2nd therapist was mentioning some kind of exposure therapy she used on a snake-o-phobe (herpetophobe, if you want to be fancy), and I expressed the opinion that it would be so much easier to be afraid of snakes than germs. She said, "Tell that to the snake people." So I don't know, any elevatorphobes out there, feel free to dispute me, but can't you just take the stairs? I mean, for me, it's sixes. There are the buttons on the elevator and the the dreaded handrails on the stairs. Boom, boom.