It’s not about the candles

A look at stupid obsessions

Hello! I signed up to this site after thinking about all the things I’d like to write down that don’t just fit on Instagram or Twitter - tonally or size wise. Perhaps I just need a diary. But I’ve always thought writing needs an audience, even if it’s just a tiny one (I already know my mum signed up for this). So here I am, sending you mail. Let me know whether this ramble is entertaining, helpful or merely self-indulgent (if it’s the latter, my mum will tell me straight).

I’ve been thinking a lot about something specific recently. Normally when I’ve spent this amount of time with one thing whirring around my brain the only way to make the whirring shut up is to write it down. So today I want to write about obsessions in the hope that I will stop obsessing about them (this newsletter experiment is showing me more than ever why we need editors. By now a good one would have cut all this preamble).

The past few weeks I have found myself becoming slightly fixated on candles. I’ve spent far too many minutes perusing websites looking for tapered ones, coloured twirly ones, scented ones. I don’t buy them, they never seem to hit the mark. I just scroll and search and think about them until I get furious with myself. I don’t want to think about fucking candles. There’s a lot going on in the world and life is short and I don’t care about wax this much. Plus I HAVE candles. It’s privileged nonsense to the nth degree.

Except, except. I can also see that my brain is just desperately trying to pull me away from other, more serious issues. “Look! This is all frankly terrifying, we really should be looking for warm and soothing soft focus lighting.” It’s an incredibly basic tactic, part of my long experience with OCD. A bait and switch - “No not that, that’s too hard. Look at this.”

OCD is a fucking nightmare of an illness, and it’s so different for everyone who experiences it that I will not attempt to broad brush the common traits. For me, the obsessional element has always outweighed the compulsion part. Sure I’ve turned light switches on and off repeatedly to ensure that my parents won’t die (standard stuff), but really these pale in in comparison to the time I have spent in my life obsessing. Usual OCD obsessions like numbers, signs, time, but also about anything else my mind latches onto.

I think I can divide my obsessions into three rough strands -

1) Obsessing about really dull plans, however small. What I will eat on a long journey, what time do I have to leave to get to a meeting, packing my bag two days before a big event just to soothe my brain a bit. Commitment, however small, freaks me out and my tiny brain can only cope with it by going over and over the planning of said commitment until I feel ok with how it’ll pan out. Useless of course, since mostly things don’t go exactly the way you envisage. And even more so because I often obsess about stuff that I still put off for weeks (if not months), thereby making the whole process worse.

2) Fixating on candles. We’ve established it’s not about the candles right? More that it’s about zoning in on something you think will make things better, make you better. If I have this candle I will be the person I want to be. If the party next Saturday is good I’ll somehow have levelled up in life. If the house is tidy then I will be a complete person. These tiny things I zero in on, wasting time thinking about because the smallness seems manageable. Yet still I obsess, no matter how obtainable. I put great emphasis on these things and the result is never the triumph or clean ending I hope for. A tidy house doesn’t mean my life is complete, it doesn’t even mean my house is ACTUALLY tidy (normally it means I’ve stuffed things into drawers so I can’t see it). The time I spend obsessing about these banal things I hope will enrich my life could be spent actually making my life bigger. I could read, or volunteer, or call a friend. And I do those things too. But still I obsess about the fripperies. Because candles feel more manageable. It is so stupid.

3) The third level of obsession is the darkest. It’s a signal that anxiety has taken hold and you’ve spiralled down to a bad place. The hardcore vicious cycle of unwanted (and so often completely bizarre) thoughts you cannot break out of. “What if I’m going mad? What if I start to think my parents are aliens? Wait, what if my parents are aliens? I’ve followed these obsessional thoughts down various rabbit holes, whole months taken up entertaining (ha!) ridiculous thoughts which terrify me and leave me frozen on the spot. I’ve been told by many experts when this happens that I am not delusional (if you have to ask, the theory goes, then you’re sane) but it feels pretty fucking out there on a sliding scale of what is healthy. This level of obsessional thought is the one that I get asked about the most via private messages, whispered in shame. “I keep thinking I’ve cheated on my partner when I am completely faithful,” or “I keep thinking I’ve run someone over but I know I haven’t.” These thoughts seemingly spring from nowhere and can be about anything, but for many people these obsessions centre around health (not surprising during this year of PANDEMIC). “I cannot stop thinking I’m dying” wrote one woman, who was spending almost every waking minute obsessing about her health. She was not dying, but that didn’t matter a bit. Unlike the first two strands of obsession I mention, I find it almost impossible to get off this section of the Merry Go Round without some help. There are too many “what if” thoughts to keep your head spinning. Infinitely worse than worrying about a looming deadline or thinking about candles, but those first two paths can lead me here if I don’t get them in check.

This last strand is incredibly common in people with OCD, but I think that irrational obsessions are something anyone in a place of extreme stress can relate to experiencing (maybe not the alien bit I grant you). The brain can take you to very strange places when you’re under the cosh of anxiety, and this year has meant even the sanest among us have experienced some level of panic. But they bubble and fester because it’s so hard to explain to other people that you’re worrying that you’ve got a tropical disease when you’ve never left the UK or you’re deathly afraid that you want to hurt your dog (you don’t, I promise). It feels shameful.

A few years ago, I had a stalker who was convinced we were in love. I’d never met him nor spoken to him, but his obsession was relentless and irrational. The court heard he was under immense stress at the time, and it seemed liked the best thing was for him to get psychiatric help, but he ended up in prison. I was angry for such a long time, furious that he put me and my family through such a scary and stressful experience. I worried for months that it would start up again when he was released. He didn’t, thank the Lord. The obsession faded away. Maybe he got help and was able to find some happiness in his real life. I don’t feel angry any more, just sad that things got so bad that his brain created an imaginary situation which only ended up hurting him.

I suspect that my wildest obsessions, even left unchecked, would probably not lead me to a place where I was unable to see the briefest glimmer of reality. Psychosis and neurosis are very different things. But it probably also has something (a lot) to do with my good fortune. Access to mental health services is not equal, and without the kind eyed psychiatrist who calmly refuted every single one of my hysterical obsessions for weeks and weeks (thank you Dr R, yes I know you are not reading this), I can’t imagine I’d be here openly discussing them without hyperventilating.

Sometimes the only way to break the cycle of fixation is to say it out loud. Telling my dad I couldn’t stop thinking he might be a robot made the thought smaller, tarred it with a sense of absurdity that I didn’t feel when it was just bouncing around my brain. It lost some of its potency and gradually slipped out of my head.

I have been writing this for three days . I haven’t googled candles once. But because this isn’t a 800 word magazine article which cries out for a neat conclusion, I promise you that my brain will attach to something else within days. It feels nice not to have to wrap it all up in an uplifting bow actually.

If you got this far, thank you. Have some recommendations as a reward:

To read: ‘No one will tell you this but me” by Bess Kalb

To cook: Torte Della Nonna

To buy: Fuck it, get some candles