Fused: A memoir of OCD and adult obsession

Chapter 2 - Blinking Hell

On one occasion I was playing in the school playground when I came face to face with a boy a few years younger than me. He seemed different to the other children somehow. He appeared to have a problem with his eyes and he was making controlled and deliberate blinking movements with his eyelids. I asked myself: 'What must it be like for him doing that all of the time?' A little while later, after I had gone back to class, my attention was drawn to my eyes and I noticed that my eyelids had stopped blinking automatically. My eyes felt dry and for some reason I wasn't blinking. Waves of anxiety ran through my body as I asked myself, 'Why aren't my eyelids blinking: they should have blinked by now?' I felt that I needed to hurry my eyelids a bit so I made a deliberate blink. My eyes felt better immediately. I waited for the next blink, but it didn't come. My eyes had started to become dry and sore once more. I thought to myself, 'Somehow I've turned off my blinking'. I then felt that I needed to blink consciously and in a controlled manner. I didn't trust my eyelids to do their job any more, as they didn't seem to be blinking when they were supposed to. 'Was I now a 'blinker' just like the boy in the playground?' I started to panic. 'What if I've caught my problem with blinking from that young lad? Is this how it happens? If so, how can I fix it? What if I have this problem forever?' Thoughts like these ran alongside my controlled blinking for the rest of the day.

The next day I woke up and thought to myself, 'I wonder if this is going to be another day when I have this problem with blinking?' I immediately wished I hadn't asked that question as I again went into a pattern of controlled blinking. The same thing went on for a few days. I was beginning to get worried, but not worried enough to go to my mother with it. Luckily, the weekend soon came, and somehow I forgot all about my problem with controlled blinking. It just disappeared.

A number of weeks later, I bumped into the same boy in the playground once more. As before, I became fixated with his eyes and the way that he blinked. I immediately fell into a pattern of controlled blinking. I was in my classroom doing controlled blinking for about an hour or so, and asked myself, 'How did I get rid of this last time?' I thought back to when it had happened before and I recognised that I must have simply forgotten about it, because it just seemed to go away by itself. I realised that the more I focused on blinking, the worse it got, so I figured that this must be part of the solution. I decided that what I needed to do was focus on something else and my problem with blinking would somehow go away. I immediately tried doing some work, which happened to be a range of puzzles that our new class teacher, Mrs Williams, had set for us. These puzzles were quite interesting and took a lot of mental focus, so I found that I was able to distract myself with them for a while. I noticed that my method of distraction was working in patches, and I felt waves of relief. But, every so often a worry about whether or not the problem with blinking was still there would pop into my mind. Each time I had this thought it drove me back to monitoring my eyelids and I found that I needed to do more controlled blinking. I persisted with distracting myself, while being bothered every so often by these intrusive thoughts until eventually it somehow clicked in my mind that my blinking would just take care of itself automatically if I didn't get involved. After about an hour or so I was able to let go of controlled blinking.

I recognised the problem was still around however. The boy in the playground was still there. I thought that if I avoided him, if I didn't let the thought of him come into my mind, or if I didn't look at him, then somehow it would be OK – that is, I wouldn't fall back into controlled blinking. But, from time to time while running around playing I would somehow bump into him, and there he was, right in front of my face, doing his blinking. Each time this happened it immediately brought my focus back to my own blinking. I then needed to follow the same routine of distraction, although I noticed the amount of time that I was doing controlled blinking for was getting shorter and shorter. As time progressed, I found that I could detach myself from controlled blinking in under a minute, so I became less and less anxious about the problem occurring. I went through a type of routine in my mind about just letting my blinking take care of itself, which was usually accompanied by a feeling of relief. If I met 'a blinker' I knew I could handle it. I felt that I had successfully dealt with the problem – or so I thought anyway. Back then, I didn't realise that once I had dealt with a problem like this, it would simply reinvent itself and come back as something else.