Several years ago, I wrote about how my Memory Hoarding OCD manifests: by compulsively writing, filling notebook after notebook with the details of every single day, every single event, every single feeling. I could easily fill a normal A5 sized notebook in under a fortnight. Journaling this way allowed me to document my life and provided me with a safe space to store all of my memories so I didn’t feel like I was constantly trying to carry them all. It also gave me a space to process everything that was happening and work out how I felt about it all. But the amount I needed to write down only seemed to grow, no matter how hard I tried to reduce it: I once wrote about fifty pages about a single concert, partly to document the show (a huge stadium tour date on a world tour with multiple sets, talking breaks, costumes, dancers, etc) and partly to try and process all of the feelings that were being brought up throughout the show. Trying to document every event began overwhelming the event itself; instead of being excited, I would dread them because I would already be anxious about the writing afterwards, calculating how much time it was going to take and how much further behind it would put me in my writing backlog.

I’d just about managed to keep up during my Bachelor’s degree but by the time I started my Master’s a couple of years later, I was writing so much that I was often days or weeks or even months ‘behind’ and I’d be writing all day everyday, just trying to catch up to the present moment. I’d managed to cut out a lot of ‘irrelevant’ detail but I was still writing for hours every day. It was already at this extreme level when I started my Master’s and my anxiety immediately increased as I tried to balance the courseload with the compulsive writing. I kept trying to make it work, make it manageable, but I just couldn’t and so, for months, I was pushing myself to the limit as I tried to do all of my coursework (and I found the jump from BA to MA brutal) and then spending every spare second filling notebook after notebook. I felt so much pressure to ‘succeed’ at both and the worse I felt about it all, the more I had to write; the anxiety was creating more for me to write about. I felt caught in the middle of a tug of war; the problem was just snowballing and I had no idea how to stop it.