I Can Blame Boys for Every Problem I’ve Ever Had

I have OCD because of a twelve-year-old boy

TW: mention of suicide

Opposite my childhood home there was a church. One of those strange, new-build churches that have none of the Lana Del Rey romance those old chapels have. Hollow as it was, and as godless as I was, I spent a lot of time there as a kid (mainly due to proximity), and when I was ten or eleven I joined the church youth club with a few friends.

Like coquettish disciples, very Tuesday night we gathered at the church. It smelled of tuck shop sweets and Vimto. We didn’t ever do much, apart from unknowingly revel in the freedom that comes in childhood. We played Stardoll on the old PC, we gossiped about the popular kids at school, we clung to the light summer evenings.

On a night such as this, my best friend Fran and I had holed ourselves up in the bathroom, away from the club leaders. I had just discovered that the boy at our school who was flirting with me over Blackberry Messenger, was also chatting up Fran. Scandalous.

Of course, we found this hilarious. Giggling, we both text the accused that we had realised his cheek, and that we were both finished with him, ‘screw you!’ Feeling very satisfied that we had taught him a good lesson in girl code, and about to leave the bathroom to tell everyone the gossip, he messaged me.

And told me he was going to kill himself.

And then switched off his phone.

I think that moment was when my childhood died. My stomach dropped 6 foot into the ground and my innocence with it. I began to sob like I had never sobbed before. I had my first panic attack surrounded by the youth club leaders as I explained what had happened, my sweet small world whirling around me under the cross in the pulpit. I had killed someone. Someone had died. And it was my fault.

A half hour later I got a text. It was the boy. ‘Just joking’, he said. And although the relief I felt was nothing short of euphoric, I knew that I had been changed forever by those thirty minutes of terror. Somewhere in my brain a switch was flipped, and it has never ever gone back.

The promise I made myself right then and there was this:

“I will never do anything ever again that might upset anybody in any way.”

Which is easier said than done. In fact, it’s pretty much impossible. But boy did I try!

Laughing was the first to go. I decided that I would never again laugh at anyone else’s expense. Of course, when you’re in high school, it’s hard to avoid. When my friends would gossip I would make any excuse to walk away, which was weird, but not so bad, I guess. The trouble came when I stopped being able to differentiate between a laugh of any kind and a laugh that might make someone sad. So soon enough, I stopped laughing all together. I remember one night being sat on our old blue corduroy sofa with my mum, watching some stand-up show on the TV. And damn it, it was really funny. Mum was in stitches, and my shoulders shook with suppressed laughter. I tried so hard to keep it in. Somebody might see me, somebody might be hurt, somebody might threaten to take their own life because I laughed when I shouldn’t have. Just like when I laughed with Fran in the church bathroom.

It was around that time that my OCD really started to bloom. I had no idea that that was what was happening to me, of course. I had learnt about OCD from Glee. It was that weird thing where you have all your pencils in a row and freak out if you have chewing gum stuck to your shoe. And my teenage bedroom was always messy. No one had ever mentioned in Glee that OCD is also when you start believing that if you don’t touch the light switch a certain way all the people you’ve ever cared about will die and it will be your fault. No one mentioned that part.

We never entered through the front door of my childhood home. And the only way to get into the house was by going through the side gate and through the back garden. The garden was always pristine with evergreens lining the fences and bleeding heart flowers blossoming in the summertime. My brother and I had four rabbits over the course of our teenage years and they would hop around the yard freely during the day.

Making sure that I had closed the side gate became such an ordeal that I started to dread going home. Once, twice, three times I would check that the latch fit the groove in the metal hinge perfectly. But as soon as I turned away, something in my mind told me it wasn’t closed. I’d go back and check, and check again, and again. But I could never truly convince myself that my bunnies weren’t going to escape and it would all be my fault.

There were many things I believed over the years, and many strange habits I adopted to try and counteract those beliefs (touching the floor, recounting my steps, moving my neck to the side in a certain way, repeating words in my head or out loud over and over again, blinking excessively - to name a few). And everything I did was in a desperate attempt to keep safe the people that I loved.

And I think the most frustrating thing about OCD is that you know that none of your actions make the tiniest bit of sense. Of course I knew that twisting my neck until it hurt wasn’t going to, let’s say, stop my dad from getting in a car crash on the way home from work.

But… just in case.

I’m twenty-seven now. I got married last year. I live with my wife and our dog in a small house in the English countryside. Church bells ring at twilight and the apple tree in our neighbour’s garden drops fruit by our front door in August. And every night I check the door three times. To make sure that my family is safe.

And I know. I know! I know that if a boy in school never told me that he was going to hurt himself because of my words that something else would have triggered this thing inside of me.

But I can’t help but blame boys for every problem I’ve ever had.