Lily Bailey's OCD Story

01 Lily's intrusive thoughts began in early childhood. She is now a mental health advocate, author, and model living in the UK.

02 Her book "Because We Are Bad: OCD And A Girl Lost In Thought" tells the story of her OCD experiences.

03 In this extract, Lily talks about one of her earliest intrusive thoughts. Lily speaks as 'we' rather than 'I', because from a young age her OCD manifested itself as an imaginary friend.

It's during half term that we meet with the thought that changes everything.

Uninvited and entirely dark, it arrives on the back of some very bad news. Mum tells us her best friend Gemma has cancer, and that the doctors have said it is probably terminal.

This is what we say out loud: ‘Oh no. That’s awful. I’m so sorry Mum. You must be really sad... But Gemma is so full of life. She’s got more energy and fight in her than anyone I know. If anyone can make it, it’s her.’

But in our head this is what is said:

I want Gemma to die. 

This thought stops our world; makes us shake; demands we acknowledge that nothing will be the same again.

I want Gemma to die. I want Gemma to die.

'Are you OK, darling?’ asks Mum. ‘I know, I know. It’s awful. I feel the same.’

I want Gemma to die. 

The thought bounces from one corner of our brain to the other, like a teenage miscreant who is too old to be on a bouncy castle but who won’t get off. The thought that this is wrong is like the castle’s furious owner forced to clamber onto it to remove the adolescent, stumbling and swearing. The delinquent squeals: ‘Catch me if you can, old fucker, catch me if you can!’

It would be comical, if it wasn’t horrific.

A few days later, Gemma comes over to see Mum for a cup of tea. Normally we like seeing Gemma, but this is torture.

The bad thought has been booming around our head, swelling to an indefinite magnitude. We’ve accidentally added it to certain things like pens, radiators and trainers, so that every time we see those, the thought instantly returns. We’ve hidden all our pens and our trainers so that they won’t trigger the thought — but we can’t pull the radiators off the walls. We try to think of anything else but it doesn’t work.

I want her to die. I want her to die. 

We make an excuse and leave the room, running up the stairs two at a time to our bathroom. We curl up in a ball and rock back and forward. Normally the cold tiles make us feel better, but today they don’t.

We hear Mum asking Gemma how she’s holding up. Their voices drift up the staircase.

Those are the voices of honest, good-hearted people. They are the voices of people who are fundamentally different to us.

Reproduced with permission of Canbury Press. ‘Because We Are Bad: OCD and a Girl Lost in Thought’ is available in the UK in hardback (ISBN: 9780993040726, priced ￡14.99) and ebook (ISBN: 9780993040733, priced ￡4.99) and hardback book and Kindle ebook ($3.99) overseas at Amazon.com.