To Be Certain With The Uncertainty

Dr. Allan peered at me with his chin tilted down, his gold-brimmed glasses threatening to fall off of the hook of his nose. I really did it this time: I said that I felt like I was going insane even though I was progressing and that I couldn't live with OCD forever and now surely this was the last straw. He was going to send me to the psychiatric ward.

"It doesn't count if you're already planning your defeat, Darren."

He had that same look in his face that he had when I told him that thinking makes me upset. My memories are constantly changing and I can't tell between what was real and what was fake. I question events that I knew happened, but I'm uncertain and I don't trust myself even though I know the truth. But what is the truth if I don't know if I can really remember everything? I'd rather be brainwashed than taunted with faulty memories. For fucks sake, I'd rather just not be around at all.

Dr. Allan told me that I filled my time with so many confession boards that I began to believe that other people's memories were my own. But how does he know? He can't think what I'm thinking. He's just telling me things based on what I say, but what if I'm unknowingly feeding him lies? Dr. Allan leaned towards me, his eyes narrowing as he studied the blank expression riddled in my face. He knew this look all too well: I was ruminating again. The thoughts are my obsessions and the confessing is my compulsions. Let it pass, Darren, he was telling me, let it pass.

I shook my head, pushing my hands further between my thighs. "You said it yourself, Dr. Allan. Progress is progress."

I was being a smart-ass and the newly-old creases in his forehead were only making me worry more. Did he think that I was a terrible person too? He leaned back into his seat while I crossed my leg over the other.

I've given up on thinking about the past events. My brain is tired. I'm blocking it out. I fear that I'm pushing it away because I know that my worse fears about the memories are true. But I know that they aren't and now I'm stuck on the fact that I'll never know if it really happened. Dr. Allan would tell me to be certain with the uncertainty but how the fuck do I do that when I can't tell the true from the false. Everything is going to shit.

"It's not progress if you're pretending to be fine," he shook his thick neck, and the more that he told me the truth the more that I couldn't stand to look at him. I can't handle the truth. I'm terrible. "You make your life out to be some... never-ending trapeze act with you jumping between the highs of feeling no guilt and the lows of suddenly being guilty of everything you're afraid of."

I tried my best to hold eye contact with him but the puddling of tears in my eyes made me blink away. Each time they closed I had flashes of the questionable memories I was trying to forget about, and Dr. Allan snagged a tissue from his desk drawer to place in my hands. I crumpled it within my fist, opening my eyes wider to dry them out.

"When you're able to forget, you're excited and relieved. You know that you're not some horrible person who hasn't got caught. But then you try so hard to forget, so the thoughts and the compulsions catch up to you. Trying to get control. They want you to believe that you are this horrible person that you make yourself out to be." I curled my lips into my mouth, biting on the bottom one. Dr. Allan folded his hands over his stomach, "frankly, Darren, you know how OCD works. You can't just push things away and hope for the best."

"I'll accept something, move on, but then I feel like there's more," I said, "my brain's like, there's got to be more, dig deeper. So I dig, and then I'm making up all these things that I know I'd never do but it's gotta' be real because I believe that I'm this horrible human being,"

"I think that it's a good sign you recognize these thoughts as something you would never do,"

"You're just gonna' encourage me to have more of them." I sighed, and Dr. Allan laughed. He always laughed when I depreciated myself. "It feels like I'm constantly being tested. By myself. The standards I set for myself are ridiculous and I'm scared to do anything wrong because I know that it'll keep me up at night."

"Making mistakes are what makes you human, Darren, not a horrible human. And don't take this as me giving you reassurance because God forbid I help you feed your compulsions, but you are not capable of being this terrible person your thoughts want you to believe that you are."

I furrowed my eyebrows, "everyone's capable."

"Not you," Dr. Allan shook his head, "you just told me yourself -- you're scared to do anything wrong because you know that it'll keep you up at night."

I was silent, averting my gaze to the framed degrees that laid tilted on the wall between Dr. Allan's shiny head. I studied psychology in university too. Until I switched to business.

"If you allow yourself to ruminate, your brain will try to twist memories or in your case, these made-up scenarios, to make you seem like the bad guy. Telling yourself to stop doing that won't help, either. You have to let them pass. Say to yourself, I didn't do that, I'm a good person, and move on. Don't engage with the thought. But you have to be honest with yourself too."

My eyes snapped back to his. "How do you tell being honest from being in-denial? You can make yourself feel guilty about whatever, you know. I know. I stepped on an ant this morning and my brain won't shut up."

"I can't tell you how to distinguish between the two; you have to be certain with the uncertainty."

And he seemed rather satisfied with himself for having coined that phrase; still I was more uncertain about why he thought that made so much sense than I was my own thoughts. My thumbs began to fidget in my lap.

"You can't ask the other people in the memory if it was real -- you would risk implanting a false memory in their mind because realize that, most of these memories you come up with are false too. Each time you think about it, it gets rewritten."

"Shouldn't I just be able to remember? If it was real?"

Why couldn't I just know? My brain felt like it was frozen, constantly. The second it begins to thaw itss tossed back into the freezer of false memories again and I anticipate the frostbite that's sure to set in. Dr. Allan shook his head as slowly as he usually did.

"See, usually when someone gets an intrusive thought like you do, they just brush it off." Dr. Allan leaned back in his seat again, but this time the chair squeaked. "But you, with your OCD, you ruminate. You expand the thought and try to apply it to yourself. You need a conclusion so you keep asking questions. Then when you get this conclusion you confess, you get your reassurance, but no -- you got off too easy. The cycle repeats again. You think it's progress, but it's not." I nodded slowly, the pressure in my chest running in circles, probably to catch up to the storm swirling in Dr. Allan's eyes. He probably wanted to say something else. "It doesn't count if you're already planning your defeat."