OCD can be the most mind-boggling existence and, at that, utterly, utterly against every will on earth that a person – the sufferer – holds closest to their heart. It is, put plain and simply, which, of course, it is anything but, a major imbalance of the brain. And with that imbalance a mind begins with time and tremendous strain to grasp at anything and everything to pick itself back up again. It becomes so agonisingly personal and will take the person away from feeling like their true self to an unexplainable extent. OCD is hell on earth, no two ways about it, and holds you entirely captive within your very own mind, causing an overwhelming degree of anxiety heaped atop a futile yet no less hopeful attempt at trying to answer the onslaught of captivating ruminations which it brings with it. The roller-coaster ride to outdo all other roller-coaster rides. Any sufferer and their family members will completely attest to this. You are told not to hope to answer these questions, but why would you not try to answer the questions which have interrupted you and become the only ones that you know of? To call it an upside-down disorder would be to let it off with a light slap to the wrist, it is all kinds of unfathomably twisted and shameful. Again, the sufferer is so opposed to all of this that it removes their real feelings and replaces them with full-blown ruminations which leads to a very surreal existence indeed. When you are simply fighting to breathe upright upon having a nice Christmas meal with your family because you just cannot understand nor comprehend what is happening to you it is so unruly. You are left distastefully lonesome and entirely imprisoned by an ugly-little-big-fat imbalance, the undeniable driving-force. The fallout is supreme and something which a person would not wish upon their worst enemy. Truly. Their worst enemy, mark any such sufferer’s words, would never want to sin again if this was what they were told was going to happen to them, even for one lousy day if they did sin. It is the imbalance that needs to be rectified and nothing else. Yes, you can push against the want to stay in bed and dodge the things you are fearful of as a result but, all in all, when the OCD is so ridiculously severe it is only then when a sufferer, who has done pretty much everything they can in facing every single fear, has to rely wholeheartedly upon either the right medications or the right holistic approach. It is a sort of life that you are forced to watch with your very own eyes while it all unravels either before you regards your lifestyle or in your mind even before this visual unraveling has occurred which, as a result, of course it will. It is all out war with your very own beloved mind, a mind that you know is capable and more often than not more capable than most as it has been widely stated that the more intelligent a suffer of OCD the more intricate the dive into what has to be called a level of insanity in many ways, only you are also left with that logical side of you trying to unearth itself one putrefying moment per time. Just to state, a severe OCD sufferer does not go even close to relishing being told how intelligent they might be. If a sufferer wanted even an inch of an element of this pain then they may as well have enrolled themselves in an early-pass to hell even before their death. Because that is exactly how it feels. Against EVERY SINGLE WILL … on earth. When someone tells an OCD sufferer to simply relax it is utmost frustrating because, minus the unasked for disorder, and neither are they actually in any way truly all that sensitive, they would be just about as carefree and rational as anyone could ever imagine being. You have been handed a Jekyll & Hyde existence. Begging for a moment of no thoughts, no nothing, just the things that might come to mind for those people who you hold dear and near to you without OCD. You will often find yourself looking at a person and longing to wonder what it might actually be like to not have OCD. A humongous dream of any sufferer’s is underpinned by this question. Really, the only known dream that they can ever wish to realise. The rest can take care of itself on they hopefully, finally, reaching that incredible place, a place that will have been an out-and-out impossibility for a sufferer for the most part of their life. And all that they will ever hear as they go forward with their days, weeks, months, years and its aforementioned fallout is this: “You’re just being irrational! It’s the OCD.” Try and imagine the angst of that. One simple imagining, if you will, because OCD sufferer’s imagine EVERYTHING, every possible outcome, every single thing that they must make sure will not go wrong (convinced by an ungodly imbalance) … miles into the future and at breakneck speed. A speed that, if it were in fact settled to a balanced extent, they have to ask themselves just how well they could function. How do they still appear to succeed in many endeavours that they achieve with all of that heartache going on while the better parts of their being is being constantly pummeled, you might well ask? Nothing but pure, honest-to-goodness heart aside unmatched resilience and a resolute belief as to who they truly are. Minus the OCD – minus a life harassed by all-of-nothing, really. What you might imagine in a full week, this writer, at his most pummeled worst, will have managed to unwillingly imagine as well as carry with it all of the possible disastrous scenario outcomes and his said futile yet inescapable attempts to pointlessly and detrimentally rectify them in, say, five minutes. OCD is the prison-sentence that can even make you forget to breathe. A sufferer does not experience ‘a day off’. A sufferer cannot even bring themselves to understand what people mean when they might say such a thing. You have the ability to make your wishes come through and you may well do so while the OCD still persists yet you aren’t really feeling any of it at face-value. You are lost in a world of discombobulation that no-one else seems to be able to see nor understand in helping you. Even doctors don’t know what to say to you. Doctors – your last port of call! Those who are supposed to be your saving grace. Every single error about to occur is going to be your fault. All we have ever wanted is to feel like ourselves, that is the bottom-bottom line with this unnatural and lousy bombardment. It is the bottom line with any such chemical bombardment that brings any person’s mental health into serious question as to its well-being. How do I write as well as I do, because my mind – the unaltered side, I’d have to call it – has somehow pushed itself to find a way to make the words sit, whichever words I do choose to use. Trust me, that is a full-time job like no other for me. And yes, these words are like my insurance and some sort of bankable proof to myself and to others who may perhaps one day decide to read them as to just how capable and honest I am if ever I do get ‘lost’ again. So this website is my undoubted vault of misshapen brilliance, I hope, which carries with it all of the things that I can be, or could have been … even so far have been amidst painstaking interruption. It is undeniably me. ‘Undeniably Brian’, however artsy-fartsy and sentimental it may well prove to be, is a poem of sorts which I wrote a while ago, a poem sellotaped inside of the mirror in my room that I will remember to read to myself now and then whenever it is too frightening … to try and simply realise all of the unfairness occurring. That it IS irrational. Ha, to mirror it back upon me. Sorry, that’s crap. The ‘elephant in your peculiar room’ is bigger than the whole existence standing right there in front of you at any given time. You can’t even make out nor make sense of what is happening for its wonderful worth. To say that I have never really felt like myself – at the age of thirty-three – would be no kind of an over-embellishment whatsoever. All of my memories are empty because I was so severely under stress all of that time. I fabricate them because my mind is at least being kind enough in that manner of speaking in that it won’t let me feel the pain of my past atop everything else all over again. I fight with it hammer ‘n’ tong Every Single Day … not to fight it!!? Yeah, I think it is fair to say that an OCD sufferer probably does deserve a pardon from any future pain in this world more than most people might deserve it … if that kind of a thing could maybe be delightfully arranged. OCD cannot be out-smarted, yet you can rest-assure yourself that it out-smarted a smart, smart and extremely funny lad. One last word – exhausting. And another last word because, well … I’m a motor-mouth, and this particular word should portray exactly just how hard it is even for me to begin to understand my OCD in so far as how it manages to render me – speechless. Am I tearful, God no. Because OCD tells me I don’t have time to cry, that there are in fact a million things that need doing with my day, my week, my year, my life … things that don’t actually need doing but try your damnedest to tell the utter discombobulation that. Please, try. Because I’ve tried a billion times over ever since I was eleven-years-old. Think Mandela had it hard being imprisoned for something he blatantly didn’t do? I’ll genuinely take that over this all over again, for another … twenty-two years!! And people simply ask me why I don’t work-work. That would be the simplest existence going for me and the exact reason I won’t allow myself to opt out and why I am trying while fixing this ‘thing’ to actually slowly but surely build some kind of a literary career to fall back on regards any kind of a living, and all of this throughout a tremendous amount of distortion regards your decisions, etcetera. And yes, I can absolutely create a literary living, no two ways about that either, there never was a doubt at all … in fact I’m pretty sure I’d be there already but for this. Go figure, because I sure a shit can’t. A phenomenon, maybe? Feckit, surely I can give myself that last, last, LAST word, and not referring to me as a phenomenon but rather the process of getting to here against all of the odds either away. Because the odds are, and always perhaps will get to be, outlandishly stacked. I just wish I could feel it all. The three-thousand poems, the inundated amount of poems I have written and perfectly landed for people, people who constantly message me in telling me that there has never quite been a writer like this. Only for one or another person to tilt their head and tell me that I’ll get there one day – I am there, was there the moment I began to write … at thirty-years-of-age, don’t forget, because I couldn’t before that, only really able to finally bring all of these imaginative stories to the top of my mind for a long enough time so that I could push myself to pen the shit out of them. Like I said before the awards will come in their droves, just to grab them and get rid of that randomly given to me ‘Player of the Year’ trophy for soccer with Bandon all those years ago, a time when I was even then all over the shop regards the OCD. That trophy doesn’t even feel like mine either. Sure why would it, it was hardly the Premier League, let alone beyond locality level and an OCD mind wants the top or nothing but that. Yup, another feckin’ last word to land it, like I always will manage to do with the scribbles – determination  😉