We did the photo shoot outside the Austin OCD Center. The staff took pictures of me and Scott. They took pictures of us sitting in the garden and standing with the big house behind us. We went back inside and changed into different clothes, and they took more pictures. It was an exposure, and our SUDS (Subjective Units of Distress) went through the roof. The idea is that you make yourself anxious on purpose so you get used to it and realize you can take it. I got up to an eight. Scott was being hilarious and making faces and saying ignorant shit like, “These hos ain’t ready for Scottie Too Hottie.” The pictures were for our Tinder profiles.
Scott didn’t like how his turned out. He said he looked fat. He wasn’t fat; he had body dysmorphia, but we had put on some weight since we got to the program, no doubt. There was this cookie place that would deliver, and every night after treatment, Scott would say, “We deserve it, all the hard work we’re doing.” He was like the voice inside my head come to life. The Lexapro they had me on made me hungry all the time, and the place had these red velvet cookies.
For his profile, Scott used old pictures where he was skinnier. He said if he matched with someone hot, he would lose the weight really fast before they met for a date. I looked fat in my pictures too, but I didn’t care about that. That wasn’t why I couldn’t make my profile. I didn’t think I deserved a girlfriend and thought none of the girls would like me if they knew all the terrible things I’d done. I had memories of hurting people, hitting people with my car, etc. With OCD, you can’t tell if memories are real or not. I wasn’t allowed to watch the news or call the hospitals to check for hit-and-runs. The staff said I just had to live with the uncertainty and move forward. I had thoughts of killing my boxer, Ellis, and I’d gotten rid of all the knives in my house. The staff had me walk around with a butcher knife in my pocket.
After the treatment day ended at 4 p.m., Scott and I went outside to play basketball in the driveway. As an exposure, he had to play with his shirt off. I took mine off too to support him. He had a little belly, but mine was bigger. We played pig and around the world, and my fat bounced each time I took a jump shot. I think it helped Scott to see my body because he started joking around. He flexed and said he was Brock Lesnar, the professional wrestler. He grabbed the ball and tried to crush it in his hands. He couldn’t do it so he punted it over the fence into the neighbor’s yard. He laughed like a maniac.
That night Scott connected his iPhone to the living room TV. The staff and the other patients sat on the sectional, and we watched him go through his Tinder. One of the girls had a lot of makeup on and was obese. Her eyebrows looked like they were drawn on with a marker. “Look at this ghoul!” Scott said and laughed his crazy laugh. He didn’t know any better. He was about to turn twenty. He zoomed in on her face. “It’s a creature feature!”
“You’re terrible,” one of the staff said. She was laughing too. Everyone was laughing.
He turned to me and said, “That was really bad, wasn’t it?” He wasn’t smiling. “Oh my God.” He unplugged his phone and got up and walked up the stairs. We called for him to come back, but the staff told me not to go after him. He had to experience the shame and guilt and not do any rituals like getting reassurance. I knew his SUDS were out of control.
I wondered if it was bad to laugh at people on Tinder. I had moral scrupulosity OCD, and I wasn’t supposed to try to figure out if stuff was right or wrong. It would send me down an endless spiral. I made an uncertainty statement like they taught us. It may or may not be wrong to make fun of people on Tinder, and I’m okay with not knowing. It was getting easier. I could tell the Lexapro was helping.
I asked for my meds and started getting sleepy. I headed up to my room, and it was quiet upstairs. I knocked softly on Scott’s door. He hadn’t hurt anyone, I thought. There wasn’t an answer. We weren’t allowed in each other’s rooms, but I slipped in and shut the door behind me. The room was dark, but I could see that the bathroom light was on. “Scott,” I said. “What happened?”
“I can’t believe I said that. I’m disgusted with myself.”
“Which part?”
“That ghoul comment.”
“It’s okay. We know you were joking.”
“Is that sexist, you think?”
“I don’t know.”
“She was kinda ghoulish, huh?” He said and laughed. Then there was a pause. “You know how many matches I’ve gotten?”
“How many?”
He opened the door and stepped out. “Fucking zero.” He went to his bed and sat down. His face turned serious. “It’s honestly got me down.”
“You just gotta be patient.”
“I’ve never had sex,” he said. “I just want to have sex.”
He looked down at the floor, his hands pasted to his thighs, and asked me if I was nervous my first time. He asked what it felt like. He asked how many people I’d been with. He asked if I’d ever measured my penis.
“Mine is four and a half inches. Is that bad?” he said and looked up at me.
I told him I wasn’t sure that it mattered. He stood up and said he wasn’t sure he could be naked in front of another person. I knew I’d already given him too much reassurance.
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They had me do a driving exposure in the staff van. I drove around Hyde Park, and every time I hit a bump, I wasn’t allowed to look in my mirrors to make sure I hadn’t hit anybody. Maybe I did, maybe I didn’t. Afterwards, I had to sit on the couch and stew in the uncertainty. They made sure I didn’t turn on the news.
Scott sat down on the other couch and took his phone out even though we were supposed to turn them in every morning before treatment started. He said he’d upgraded to Tinder Platinum. “It’s twenty bucks a month, but I already got a match.” He showed her to me. She went to UT, and she had a picture with a Lab mix. It triggered my harm OCD about Ellis.
“She’s cute,” I said. Her name was Georgia.
That night we gathered on the sectional, and he put his Tinder back on the TV. We talked about what his first message to Georgia should be. We agreed he should compliment her dog. I said he should write, “Somehow you’re even cuter than your dog.” I wasn’t serious but he loved it and I couldn’t talk him out of using it. The staff encouraged him.
It worked somehow and Georgia wrote back, aw thanks. I felt jealous and knew I had to get my profile ready. The staff had been asking if I’d done it yet. I wanted to have sex too.
“She likes you, Scott!” one of the staff said.
“She’s thirsty,” another said.
Scott suddenly got shy and disconnected his phone from the TV. “You guys are making fun of me,” he said and stomped up the stairs. We let him be.
◆
The next morning they served us eggs and bacon. Scott took his fork and pushed his onto my plate. He said Georgia didn’t like texting back and forth and wanted to meet up soon. He had to get skinny quick. “To buy some time, I told her I was going to be really busy with school for the next couple weeks,” he said. He wasn’t in college anymore. He’d told me he failed out because the OCD had gotten so bad he never left his dorm room, couldn’t risk saying the wrong thing to someone. I think there was other stuff going on too though. We all had other stuff going on. I was depressed. I was a financial advisor at a credit union, and I told them it was about mental health. They told me to take all the time I needed. They were so scared of discrimination lawsuits.
We had morning group in the garden, and the leader guy talked about how everyone has intrusive thoughts. Everyone has wild sexual and violent thoughts that pop up and leave, but with OCD people get stuck on them and an emergency signal gets fired from the amygdala. I was next to Scott on the bench, and he whispered that he was having intrusive thoughts about stabbing me and setting my body on fire. I told him I was thinking of castrating him and putting his genitals in the garbage disposal.
When group let out, they had me print out pictures of Ellis and post them all over the house—pictures of him as a puppy, sleeping and rolling around on the ground. It was a constant exposure. I put one on my bathroom mirror, one by the TV. When I walked past them, I didn’t ruminate, and I repeated out loud, “I may or may not kill my dog. There’s no way to be sure.” It was crazy but it started to work. The rumination started feeling not so automatic. It would be a new start for me and Ellis, and I decided to rename him Lexapro, Lex for short. He was only two, and I read online that it’s more about the tone you use than the name itself. He was still young and would catch on fast.
They were pushing Scott with his exposures too. They added stuff to his behavior plan like getting naked in front of someone. They said getting naked in front of a friend was a good way to build up to eventually being naked in front of a sexual partner.
One day after lunch, we went up to his room. I sat on his bed, and he stood with his back to the wall. He took his shoes and socks off and then his shirt. He barely had a belly at all. The crash diet was working, but his face looked gaunt and sucked in. I asked him where his SUDS were, and he said an eight. He undid his belt and slowly pulled down the zipper of his jeans. He slid them down to his feet and kicked them off. He let out a deep sigh. He was in just his boxers. “I can’t,” he said.
“It’s okay. Good job,” I said. He was progressing.
He set up a coffee date with Georgia, and on the day of, he was a mess. He’d already had too much coffee that morning and it was hot out. He was sweating through his polo shirt. “I’m so horny,” he said. “She’s so hot.” He was looking at her Tinder profile again. I got him to eat a bowl of cereal just to have something in his stomach. The place was walking distance from the Center, and we wished him good luck. He started to walk off but then turned around and asked if he looked fat, but we didn’t answer.
I was still struggling with the dating stuff, and the staff was losing patience with me. They’d give us our phones back in the afternoon after therapy ended, and one day I noticed that Tinder had been downloaded. I’d gotten even bigger since we had the photo shoot in the garden and needed new pictures. I didn’t want to be a catfish. It’s just I felt the need to confess my thoughts. It was a compulsion, and when I started confessing to staff, they’d just walk away or ignore me. I thought it was wrong to not tell the women what kind of person they were dealing with. I felt like I should put it on my profile: I may or may not kill my dog, but they wouldn’t let me.
We rushed up to Scott when he came through the door a few hours later, asking him how it went. He said it was great. “It was like we knew each other from before,” he said. “There weren’t, like, any awkward pauses or anything.” They were gonna hang out again soon. We were all happy for him, and it made me feel like I could do it too.
That was the final test for Scott. The next day they told him he was ready for discharge. I knew it had been coming. He’d been getting better faster than me. On his last night we ordered cookies one last time. We sat on the couch and ate them with tall glasses of milk. The sugar made him hyper, and he said he wondered what it was like to give a blowjob. “Not like I’m gay, but I wonder how it feels.” He got a banana from the kitchen and tried to deep throat it. He got it about halfway in then gagged. I knew I was gonna be so bored without him.
It was almost 11 p.m. when we had to go upstairs, and we were crashing from the sugar. He said, “I wanna tell you something, but I’m not sure if it’s a confession.” I knew that if you weren’t sure, it probably was. That’s what I told him.
“Whatever. I don’t care. I gotta tell you. I didn’t meet Georgia.”
“Really? Where did you go?”
“I went in the coffee shop and saw her. I couldn’t go up to her so I just went to the bathroom. I don’t think she saw me. I hid in a stall for thirty minutes and jerked off looking at her profile pictures.”
“Christ. Did she message you?”
“Yeah, but I didn’t read it. I deleted my Tinder after.”
I told him it was still a step in the right direction. At least he’d set up a date. I still hadn’t set my profile up.
◆
The next morning Scott’s parents came to pick him up. I gave him a hug, and he blew me a kiss from the car as they drove away. We joked about how it was going to be quiet and boring without him, and it was. We felt it immediately. Morning group had no energy, and I had nothing to distract me from the intrusive thoughts.
After the treatment day, there was no one to play basketball with, so I sat on the couch and opened Tinder. I had to own that I wanted a girlfriend and not get lost in whether I deserved one or not. I only had a few pictures of myself on my phone, and they were a few years old. I didn’t know what to put for the bio so I asked one of the staff for help. She sat down next to me.
“What do you like to do for fun?” she asked.
I sat there and thought. I liked to watch TV, well, I liked to have the TV on. It was hard for me to focus.
“Do you like to go outside, like hiking?”
“Not really. I walk around the neighborhood sometimes.”
“That counts as hiking, I think.” She told me to put it down even though it wasn’t totally honest. It was for my therapy–doing morally grey things and then not ruminating about them. I went with it and also wrote that I liked to read. I saved my profile, and the staff wouldn’t leave until I started swiping.
◆
With Scott gone, I focused harder on treatment. I wanted to get out of there. I spent my evenings on Tinder. I started just swiping right on every girl, and I got some matches. We talked and they said my dog in the picture was cute. It triggered me but I kept talking. The staff started bringing in their dogs from home. I had to hang out with them while I went about my day. I walked them around Hyde Park and wondered if I was strangling them with the leash. My SUDS stopped spiking and rarely got over a six. They told me I was good to go. I’d been there just under six weeks.
Before I left, we had cupcakes, and staff went around the room and each said something about me. They said they’d seen me grow so much since I first got there. I wasn’t sure. I thought maybe it was just the Lexapro.
I went straight from the Center to the boarder to pick up Lex. He was excited to see me, and the bad thoughts came and hung out. Would he still love me if he knew I thought about putting him in the oven? I called him Ellis by accident, and I felt bad because I know it confused him.
That night I made a stir fry. I cut up the steak and heard Lex’s nails clack on the kitchen tile. I squeezed the knife and felt its weight. He pawed at my leg. I cut the excess fat off the slices and set the knife down. I told Lex it wasn’t for him and to get out of the kitchen, but he kept coming back to my feet, hoping a piece might fall.