Fly Fishing for Sharks: A memoir of life with OCD
Chipmunka Publishing R344,95
Andrew Alexander
Eat soap, Mr Lamont! I was 13 years old. The school bell rang. I went outside and waited for a lift. My nose itched and just as I lifted a finger to scratch it Mr Lamont, a brute of a geography teacher, drove by. I thought nothing of it.
That night as I was drifting off to sleep I caught an image of myself scratching my nose. And then I had a strange thought: what if Mr Lamont thought I was flipping him the finger? I convinced myself that the next morning the headmaster - another frothing sadist - would stand up in assembly and, in front of the whole school, beat me. Of course, nothing happened.
Eat soap, Mr Lamont!
Most of us have obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) moments (you know, you've patted your pocket six times at the airport to check you didn't leave your passport at home) and we all have "what if" irrational thoughts occasionally.
We control these mad thoughts. But what happens when those thoughts control you? To find out read Andrew Alexander's Fly Fishing for Sharks.
His memoir is a quest to understand what was happening to him - and why - and look at ways he could treat it. Far from being a "misery memoir", it's a profoundly moving account of Andrew's life with OCD and in-between there's a smattering of psychology, a dash of philosophy, heaps of rage, dollops of humour, but most of all there's raw honesty.
Andrew has done a lifetime of battle with his thoughts. They terrorised him and eventually he believed the only way to escape them was to end his own life.
This is the thought process. Andrew drives past a cyclist. The thoughts start: what if I've knocked over and killed the cyclist? I'll be arrested and convicted of culpable homicide. I'll go to prison where I'll be raped. I'll get Aids. He'd be compelled to drive back to check that he hadn't killed someone.
Wherever Andrew walked he glanced over his shoulder to check he hadn't stepped on a baby. He also feared being contaminated by blood. Reading became a chore, because he struggled to convince himself that he hadn't turned over two pages instead of one. A ritual developed in which he would have to say the consecutive pages numbers out aloud while flipping the page over and back again.
Eighty-three. Flip page. Eighty-four. Flip page back. Eighty-three. Flip page. Eighty-four. Flip page back. Eighty-three. Flip page. Eighty-four. And so on and so on.
The first manifestation of OCD emerged when Andrew was 15 - and (surprise, surprise) - had to do with school. He'd finished his biology homework for Mrs Hacking, a terrifying teacher, when an inner voice asked: "What if, by mistake, you have written a swear word in your homework?"
Andrew didn't think much about it until the next biology assignment, when the same thing happened.
The checking developed into a more thorough exercise and got to the point where he was checking the blank spaces between the words. As soon as he checked self-doubt would kick in and he would have to check again.
Fly fishing for sharks is a metaphor for Andrew's incredibly difficult struggle with OCD. But, he says, hooking a shark on a fly rod is the ultimate angling experience.
"It's very satisfying if you triumph in difficult circumstances."
Fly Fishing for Sharks is a triumph. It should be prescribed reading for OCD sufferers, who will find comfort in what is a gruelling journey to recovery. But there are also important insights for non-OCD people who are negotiating their way through life.
I may have inadvertently written "Eat soap, Mr Lamont" in this review, but I'm not going to check. Besides, Mr Lamont, I'm now a grown man, so bring it on.
- Fly Fishing for Sharks launches at Exclusive, Hyde Park on August 13.