I sit on the train and play with the piece of curly hair behind my ear. Not exactly a distraction, but sometimes if I stop doing it I fear the world will become unhinged and my resting hands will be the cause of some sort of disaster. I look out the window as we come to a slow stop at Town Hall station and watch as children scuttle along near the windows and huffed women hurry up escalators.
Sudden, like a backfire, I imagine myself sliding in the tiny space between the train and the platform, my leg unable to budge, and the train slowly starting to move, taking me with it. I am jolted forward by my bottom half, calf rolling with the movement and my back hits the platform floor, head dragging, cheek bouncing on each one of the little protrusions in the yellow line, leaving the skin purple and black. My eyelid scrapes open, eyes mostly white, and my body continues to contort around itself in the crack as the train moves faster.
Then it’s over. I blink my eyes and fold my hands in my lap. After another moment I start playing with my hair again.
Five years before, I am standing near a beach cliffside with my seven year old cousin. I keep her a few metres from the edge, that shallow feeling opening in my stomach whenever I feel at a great height. I rest my hand on her head and I imagine her tripping and sliding down the escarpment, bouncing off the outcrops soundlessly and landing in a twisted heap at the foot where the water meets the earth. I shake my head, and we continue back to the park to play.
I’ve always had “intrusive” thoughts, and only found out they had a name once I was three years into (and out of) various therapies. When I google the phrase, I find pages of articles from OCD support organisations, mindfulness blogs, and the fearfully more than occasional Mamamia type entry denoting how normal it is to be worried that your husband is cheating on you, or that you left your door unlocked every time you leave the house. The muddy delineation between “it’s totally normal and everyone has them!” and the appearance of these thoughts as a symptom of clinical obsessive compulsive disorders makes my skin crawl — some of the thoughts I have about harming myself or things being destroyed in front of my very eyes disappear after an hour, and others become aged in my brain, as a permanent loop of an unreal memory, just a part of my mental baggage. When does the worry that a car will crash into the group of strangers next to me separate from normal survival instinct or the everyday background fear of death to something my brain births apparently for its own amusement?
Around the age of 13 or 14, for about a year, I could not stop looking at other women’s breasts. It was all I could think about when I was in a huge group of people or public space, how large they were, what the women looked like who owned them, how they felt about them, how big their nipples must be. I have a vivid memory of being in my local Westfield food court and becoming overwhelmed by how many pairs of boobs there were around me, my neck growing hot as I slammed my gaze to the floor, waiting for my Nonna to hand the cash over for the black bean stir fry I had ordered.
Then there was that prickly feeling in my belly whenever I saw something on television involving two women hugging or showing intimacy. I would test myself, making a mental note of the complete absence of hormonal reaction while watching a heterosexual couple kiss, or make out, or have sex, and berate myself internally afterwards for the reaction I didn’t even have as if it were something I could choose. Even if I was alone I felt furtive shame creep up on me and sit on my chest, weighty and seemingly impossible to relieve.
“When does the worry that a car will crash into the group of strangers next to me separate from normal survival instinct …to something my brain births apparently for its own amusement?”
The fear I felt was immense, and insidious. I was worried I was “growing into” being a lesbian, as if the metamorphosis had began and try as I might, at the back of my mind I knew there was no stopping it.
Running parallel to all of this angst and growth in the formative years of my youth was the suspect that my Mother was gay. I stored little clues here and there at the back of my mind, (a book of erotic lesbian poetry, female “friends” staying the night or days at a time, flyers for LGBTQI+ Narcotics Anonymous groups) similar to the memories of the more repetitive intrusive thoughts that I was having, letting them bubble away in a turbulent soup of emotions and images I never dealt with up front.
I decided if my mother was indeed gay, and if in turn I turned out to be gay, I would have to run away, or kill myself. What could be worse than living in that secret? As the cauldron of obsessive thoughts and images started to spit oil in my mind, I turned inward, and started cultivating a hatred toward myself that I would never really get out of, and still haven’t to this day.
The anger started small and insidious; scolding myself for seeming homophobic, berating myself for an as yet unmanifested cruel judgement of my parents that I would surely be punished for by some sort of higher power in one way or another (thank you, Catholic schooling). Eventually the thoughts wore on me more than I could bear, and the tics I would use to control them became the most frequent they ever had been. I would wash my hands seven times in a row and splash hot water all over my legs until my hands were ruddy and cracked with friction. I had a terrifying aversion to cleaning products, detergent, various “poisons” that I believed would somehow make their way into my mouth and kill me slowly overnight. I would watch myself outside my body making the sign of the cross however many times would satisfy my dread as if through a surveillance camera, facing a mirror or corner and quickly doing the action, actually believing no one could see me so desperate was I to get the job done and stop being scared. When my family therapist finally brought it up I felt foiled, broken, as if someone had seen me naked in public. If I did not carry out each tic to completion, I was sure my brothers would be taken from me. My mother would be in a car accident. I would drop dead on a sidewalk for no reason.
It was a terrible way of living, and to this day I am unsure how I survived it.
With therapy the tics became easier to resist and the thoughts quietened down a little. My mother was in a happy and healthy relationship with a woman whom I learned to love very much. As I grew older I began to worry about other things, namely why I had to endure school, why my face was covered in acne, why I was so ugly and fat, etcetera etcetera.
I white knuckled through various mental illnesses in my adolescence and young adulthood — OCD, Anxiety Disorder, Panic Disorder, comorbid Eating Disorders etcetera again ad finitum. While I would like to say I am mostly fine now — (whatever that means, the no-mans land you straddle as someone who deals with mental illness, neither full well nor as sick as usual, the ‘OK’ place) I still have intrusive thoughts almost every day of my life.
With the blessing of retrospective and the little tools I cared to pick up from therapy, I can analyse tween Cara and wonder what went wrong. I wonder if my almost backbending aversion to homosexuality in my family and myself is a kind of circumstance or mindset unique to queer children of queer parents, a prejudice of the lifestyle ingrained in us by growing up in a society where the generations before us were still struggling to accept their own sexualities.
Another reason could be that (and this one is probably the more upsetting option) this is just proving the idea that all of us in one way in another do not want to become our parents. It wasn’t until I was a young adult that I found out that in fact, both my parents were gay. Neither of these was through their own confession, might I add. Looking back, I knew somewhat that my parents outward hang ups involving alcoholism and drugs meant that they were more fighting to stay alive and keep us kids somewhat sane than wanting to whittle another notch in the theoretical belt of dysfunction my brothers and I were roped up in. I had to know, as a child, that my parents were not destined to be together. Though I know they loved each other very much, it was a different kind of love, one that drove them to cruelty and divorce. This made no sense to me, and I was scared of the mostly unknown reasons they had for acting as if they did not love each other. As a result, I beefed up the security in my brain, and tried as hard as I could to be normal.
I am not trying to find an intrinsic link or infer that violence is inherent in homosexuality, but this learned defense mechanism, neurological reflex, brain fart or whatever you would like to call it seems to mean I have come to associate intrusive thoughts with violence no matter their content. When I believed I was “turning into” a lesbian as a teenager, or my anxiety about my family dying as a result of my actions became more frequent, I would repress the idea to the point of panic attacks as my brain literally chugged to a stop under the weight of too many things that didn’t make sense and my body responded by going into fight or flight mode. I was having the same reaction to invisible forces charring my insides as someone who is being mugged has, only I was sitting quietly in my bedroom staring at the ceiling wrapped in a doona, sweat gathering in my armpits.
How does this manifest in my emotions to my own (and by proxy, others) sexuality?
In the timeline of my mind, where do I find the space to analyse these feelings of disgust, of shame, of anger toward myself, to differentiate them from how I should truly see myself; as a person who deserves love, and kindness and warmth, and not to spend her life counting pavement tiles so the world doesn’t fall down around her?
I have since found a freedom in knowing my sexuality is fluid, however resting on ‘bisexual’ as a general term when someone asks. I no longer feel that puzzling, crackling upset in my stomach when I think about sex, about the person I will love one day, about the people who love me. Sometimes a label can be good, caging (similar to a tic or mental restriction) but comforting at the same time. I do not know yet whether this will help or hinder me in the future, but we can only use the tools offered to us. I have to find comfort in the cage.
I suppose all of the questions I have proffered do not have any tangible answers, that as with many mental illnesses, my OCD will always be a part of my life, an insatiable scratch. That I will always feel somewhat at odds with my sexuality, with my parents sexuality, with which mirror to hold up to myself, of the few society hands me. I ask them to relieve some of their weight, to see if others have experienced the confusion that I have, the impatient doom. As long as I am in the “OK” place, I can notice these thoughts and try to release them. In the “OK” place, I sit on the train and play with my hair, and try not to let the world become unhinged around me.