The Fog: Digging Through the Cloudiness of an Obsessive Thought

An old trope of Scooby-Doo’s was the thick fog or smoke that would envelope a scene. A thick fog that could be cut by a knife. When deep in the thought spiral hell of an obsessive thought, this thick fog is what it feels like in my mind. Scoob could come right along and cut a doughnut out and take a nice bite of the thick obsessive fog.

It was 9:30am on the last day of an extended weekend for me. I was enjoying breakfast by myself while my spouse continued to sleep. We have not had the best night’s sleep recently and I wanted them to have as much opportunity to sleep as possible. Recently, my thought spirals have involved the ever expanding world of AI and robots and whether I could trust people were people and what I was seeing with my own eyes was true. This particular thought spiral got triggered off of an episode of Game Grumps where my favorite grump, Dan Avidan, mentions The Stepford Wives.

SPOILER ALERT: For those not in the know, The Stepford Wives is a movie about a community where all of the wives are perfect robots. 

As my obsessions have latched on to this fear recently, my mind instantly went, ‘What if my spouse is a robot? How could I know?’ And then proceeded to give me a frightening harm OCD thought about how to find out. I went into instant panic and damage control mode where my mind freaks out at the idea. ‘How could you think your spouse is a robot?’ ‘Is this what it’s like to go crazy?’ ‘You’re thinking harmful thoughts again, you must be crazy.’ ‘You were make such good progress, how could you think these things?’ ‘You’re going crazy.’ ‘How can you look at your spouse the same way again?’ ‘Can you trust your spouse?’ ‘Can you trust anyone?’ ‘You are a crazy person.’ ‘Maybe this is what it’s like in a person with schizophrenia.’ ‘You’re lucky insane asylums aren’t in fashion or you’d be in a straight jacket.’ ‘You. Are. Crazy.’

I then kiss and hug my spouse good bye and go about my day outside taking care of tasks, all the while stuck ruminating. ‘Am I slowly going crazy? This pandemic has done some terrible things to people. You saw that headline about the spouse who took a sword to their significant other. What’s to say you won’t?’ It’s debilitating mentally by a struggle through the day. I come home and I even make dinner and do chores like the dishes and laundry, anything to not be stuck in the thought. Nothing works though.

It’s now 8pm and this thought has been clogging my mind for 10 hours. I don’t know how to break free from it. I get in to bed with my spouse and they ask if I wanted to talk. While I fight an internal battle of ‘You are!’ ‘No I’m not!’, on the outside I have zero poker face whatsoever. I then open my arms for a hug and proceed to have a 25 minute sob session. It’s intense and a release. I reluctantly tell my spouse about my thought and they so graciously shrug it off that it’s just a thought and doesn’t mean anything. Boy I wish it were that easy. And then it happened…

An earworm.

An earworm, for the uninformed, is a song that gets stuck in one’s head. It’s the internal music player that blasts music for you, whether you want to hear music or not. Sometimes an earworm is great, sometimes it is not. I suspect for the OCD mind that sometimes earworms are just as miserable as a stuck thought as you have no control on it just playing. The track is soothing though. It’s not some obnoxious blasting track but rather the peaceful sounds of a violin crying out to be heard.

I play the song and continue to melt. I have struggled for two years with terrible OCD issues, with harm OCD being present for nearly the whole time. I have had OCD tendencies in the past, but this pandemic has sent my brain into overdrive. It was so nice to be able to have something else in my mind that wasn’t the stuck thought. And to have it be such a beautiful piece was like happiness and sadness pressed my emotional memory button together.

Ultimately, don’t lock people out of your lives and feel comfortable talking about what is killing you inside. Having it stew inside you is not going to help you. Talk to someone and may you experience the same relief.