Hannah Levine-Drizin

Again

Again. This is the word that comes to mind when I think about OCD. Here we go again. The DSM 5, the 5th edition of the diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders, defines obsessions as “recurrent and persistent thoughts, impulses, or images that are experienced that cause marked anxiety or distress.” Recurrent and persistent are two words that I associate with my own experience with OCD. I’ve had intrusive thoughts for as long as I can remember. I would try to shake it off but in college they got worse and more persistent. I often found myself making pieces that used a repetitive process and I oddly started to find comfort in repetition. Repetition, something that I always found evil when it came to my thoughts, became something beautiful in my art. When I sit there repeating the same movements over and over again, it is like I am symbolically taking control from my OCD, saying “I don’t have to be doing this, I want to be.” Through this project I am trying to take back control over the repetitive obsessions. The piece also bears resemblance to fungi and parasites, which is a great metaphor for uncontrollable thoughts. They may start small, but start rapidly growing.