One of my favorite definitions of scrupulosity comes from DefendingTheFaith:
"Scrupulosity is characterized by pathological guilt about moral or religious issues. It is personally distressing, objectively dysfunctional, and often accompanied by significant impairment in social functioning. It is typically conceptualized as a moral or religious form of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD)...It's a plaguing sense of feeling that one is 'bad', 'guilty', or 'unforgiven.'" - DefendingTheFaith
I experience scrupulosity as a sensation more-so than a thought. I experience it all throughout my body and brain. My scrupulosity (spiritual anxiety) is quite honestly affected not only by the activities I engage in but by the food I put in my body and how much I exercise.
General Feelings Of Guilt
On a day-to-day basis, I usually experience a sense of being a bad and selfish person. I spend hours on youtube when I know I could be praying. (I spend time on social media to escape anxious thoughts, and yet my time on social media increases my feeling of discontent and "dirtiness.") I don't even set aside time to pray everyday, and I feel dirty knowing this. I am actually sometimes afraid of prayer, because I feel like I will be more susceptible to my anxiety when I open myself up in prayer.
I also feel that my choice to be a YouTuber and my desire for followers and success in that realm is incompatible with a prayer life. They truly seem incompatible. I feel two-faced if I say yes to both of them, because I come into each of them with completely different mindsets. I don't want to pray one thing and live another way.
If I pray, I will feel guilty for these desires and for acting on them. If I act on them and make youtube videos simply for the thrill of filming and editing and with my (main?) goal being to get subscribers, whilst doing this I must separate from that deep prayer life or I will feel too guilty to go on and will be pulled in half. My guilt will be if I act on my impulses and desires. My guilt will sit before my eyes if I pray.
An "Episode"
I have described above the general way in which I experience scrupulosity on a daily basis. But this is my "normal." This is my baseline more of less. Unless I go into weeks of detachment from social media and attachment to prayer and spiritual readings, this is typically how I feel.
When I say I want to describe scrupulosity "from the inside," however, I mean I want to describe it from inside an "episode." I don't know if people typically talk about scrupulosity as having "episodes." Anxiety disorders have episodes that we call anxiety attacks, as do panic disorders (panic attacks).
People with OCD are stereotypically known to go through sorts of "episodes" where they have to repeat an action a certain number of times or say a word or trace and un-trace something to be okay. That said, while I have never heard the term "scrupulosity episode" used before, it seems the most accurate way I can describe my "scrupulosity attacks." These are attacks of feelings inadequacy, of guilt, of dirtiness... and they present themselves in a very specific way through physical sensations.
These episodes don't necessarily happen after I have done something particularly "terrible." I have noticed that I am far more susceptible to them when I eat a lot of junk food, when I am a sloth on the couch for long periods of a time, when I sit in front of screens (worse yet when I sit in front of screens working on perfecting my own social media accounts)...
What I want to do here is simply describe what an episode FEELS like, because the FEELING in one of these episodes is so strong and overwhelming that I can barely get any words to go through my head. The general words or sentences my brain typically has the most access to are "NOT okay," "I want out," or "I'm disgusting."
I don't usually write poems, but perhaps the sensations are best described in poetry...
I feel like I ought to put a (STOMACH) TRIGGER WARNING here.
Don't read this while you're eating or in the middle of an anxiety episode. If your stomach is sensitive (or you are not so drawn to the words "stringy" "slimy" and "regurgitate"), you may want to pass on this as well, because the sensations I describe are through brutally honest analogies.
My mouth is dry. My tongue is parched.
The back of my throat is sensitive
As if my finger were touching it.
Worst of all are my head, stomach, and arms.
My arms feel heavy, SO heavy by my side.
They don't feel wet but there is
a clammy sensation of disgustingness to them.
It's like there are lead pipes weighing them down
instead of bones.
My fingers and eyes feel dry too.
If I look closely at my hands,
my fingers might be shaking.
If they're not shaking,
then the nervous energy is rapped up inside.
Most of that energy is in my arms,
tugging at them and wanting to explode outward
as if I were The Doctor about to regenerate.
My legs feel heavy.
There is lead in them, just like in my arms,
but the lead in both these places TINGLES.
A TERRIBLE tingling sensation
of nervous energy that cannot escape.
A heavy, WEIGHED DOWN tingling:
incongruent with the lead,
worse because of its lightness
like fingers touching the surface of the lead.
I'm trapped in my own body.
My eyes and arms may feel dead, but...
Worse yet. There is my stomach.
It's hard to picture anything worse than the dead parts,
but my stomach is the most wrenching part of all.
My intestines are worms.
I can feel the worms wrapped tightly around each other.
They are trying to wriggle about.
They aren't just in my stomach.
They are in my heart.
My heart is made of wriggly worms, intertwined.
My soul is just like my heart, only more translucent.
Translucent, but showing my true colors...
brown worms wriggling about:
stringy, slimy worms... just like my soul.
I am NOT okay. I am disgusting and dirty.
I will not be okay until I flush all this junk food out of my system and go to confession.
Then I will be fine. But only then.
I'm not going to regurgitate this food up.
It could take hours to be okay.
No use filling myself with good stuff
until the gross "foods" are gone.
The energy in the dead arms has nowhere to go.
My brain is unsettled.
It runs in circles.
Of course it runs in circles,
because "I want to be good but I make bad choices."
I bring this on myself.
I'm trapped. My breaths are shallow and shaky.
I try for deep breaths, but the tingling is still there.
It won't go away.
(My tear sockets are in my brain and throat, not my eyes.)
I need to be flushed out:
physically and spiritually.
I need to be flushed clean.
But don't pity me.
This is all my fault.
I chose this.
I brought this on myself,
because I am dirty.
No comments:
Post a Comment