Worry Dolls

I know what you’re thinking…what sort of weird voodoo shit is this? Well sports fans, I won’t pretend to try and explain paganism but settle in for another whistle stop tour of my mind.

I was diagnosed with OCD at the tender age of 12; meaning that my family had been putting up with my shit for quite some time before there was a “rational” explanation.

Like no kids that age, I was a worrier. And I mean a worrier (I remember having a panic attack of sorts in the bath at about five years old, petrified of dying at the tender age of ten, as that was the highest I could count to); and so in a bid to calm her nervous wreck of a son, my mother purchased a pack of worry dolls from some ippy, dippy hippy gift store in the local village.

The thinking was simple enough, assign a worry to each wooden stick doll, pop it under your pillow of a night time and hey presto, the worry would be gone by the morning. A primitive thoughts journal in every which way.

Things seemed to be working a treat until two mates came round after school one night — I say mates, one’s still a good friend but the other’s a cunt. Anyways, whilst I was downstairs getting bottles of panda pop and rocky bars, the bastards were left unattended in my bedroom, turning the place upside down.

In what must have seemed like a perfectly acceptable thing to do at ten years old, my two “friends” ransacked my bed and in doing so, found my poor, innocent, worry filled dolls.

And just as I turned the corner of my room, ready to play fucking gracious host, what am I met by out of the corner of my eye but each of the poor bastard dolls being flushed down the toilet. One. Two. Three. Gone. To this day, I can’t shake the sound of their maniacal laughter as they unashamedly sent my worries to a watery grave.

Irrational fears are the bread and butter to an OCD sufferer so worries eb and flow like piss down a urinal. I’m still a worrier to this day and always will be and that unfortunately means that I have a tendency to always view things in a negative manner. 10 seconds of joy will be followed by an elaborate spider-diagram in my mind of how something could go wrong. But that’s the way the cookie crumbles. We march on.

The Bald Eagle.