The Diary of Clare Green

By Clare Green

Life is a struggle for all of us, but for some can resemble an obstacle course one has to battle through, seemingly alone.  Told through a series of diary entries, Clare Green’s debut The Diary of Clare Green describes the difficulties she has faced throughout her life dealing with her, often crippling, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD). 

Perhaps because the affliction is so common with varying degrees, OCD is often thought of as easy to deal with. As Clare takes us through her day-to-day life, it is eminently clear what a toll this condition has on her well-being. From paranoia to her belief she would turn into a psychopath, the accounts are raw, honest and compelling. A must-read for anyone suffering with OCD or for anyone interested in how the condition can affect a person’s life, taking them to the brink. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Troubador Publishing Ltd
• Release date: Aug 28, 2020
• ISBN: 9781800467125

Clare Green

Clare Green has obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) and spent many years worrying about how the condition would affect her. Having discovered mindfulness can help her manage, she has published her debut memoir in the hope that other sufferers may find a way through. She is based in Perthshire.

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Copyright © 2020 Clare Green

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

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ISBN 978 1800467 125

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For the world; in kindness, health and healing.

Contents

Introduction

The Lost Diary

The Incident: Jumping Out Of My Living Room Window

Hospital Diaries

The Lost Diary

Past Jottings From Notebooks (From The Year Before The Incident)

The Week Before The Incident

The Lost Diary

On The Train To London

In London, At Eilidh’s

Writing the New!

Conclusion

Afterword

Introduction

My name is Clare Green and I’ve been writing all my life. I’m 44 and lucky to be alive. There are many times at which I might have died, but instead I stayed alive. Alive to be writing here now. Alive in this diary, in these words which make me up.

I’m conscious and I believe the universe is conscious, my soul is attuned to the stars. The universe is conscious and physics can still be true. Why are any of us alive? That’s what I’m always wondering. When I have a quiet moment to myself, I think ‘Why am I alive?’ ‘Why is anyone alive?’

What do you believe? Do you think the universe is conscious? Do you care?

I’m alive at a time when humanity’s problems seem insurmountable. We’re in the depths of an ecological and environmental crisis. The forecast is dire, climate change will render large parts of the globe uninhabitable, the biodiversity loss caused by humans is catastrophic, we’re in the throes of a sixth mass extinction.

So I often wonder, ‘Why am I alive? Why am I alive to be writing here? What value does my life have? Is there anything of importance I have to say?’ These may be jottings of glorious inconsequence. A meaningless life in the early years of the millennium.

So I transcribe my diaries, my plethora of words, describing a life and trying to find the value. Even if my life is meaningless, I’m grateful to be alive, to have had the chance to live. Do I live in this diary, this word-wrapped consciousness? Always writing to stay alive, writing to make sense of life, make sense of myself.

So I give you my diaries, my musings and amusings, to light your own path and perhaps lend some moral support. What is it that each of us can do to save the planet? Become a better person, perhaps, rediscover what it means to be human.

Each of us is conscious; we share a common humanity. Let’s unite while we still can, bury our differences and reach out to each other across the immensities of space. We’re all alive, living and breathing on the same planet, thinking and feeling, experiencing the joy it is to be human.

Let’s celebrate in the face of disaster, find hope when all seems lost, and touch each other’s hearts in these twilight days of our possible demise. How can we be destroying the planet, this bountiful life, when the universe appears to have evolved with some intention of creating a conscious observer? Is the universe a self-regulating system that creates the conditions favourable to maintain consciousness? What is the point of humans? How come we’re here? Are humans the universe knowing itself? How come there are so many of us? The world becomes dizzying in its complexity, the myriad of lives lived now.

Here then is one such life, a girl who kept writing, who lived through many deaths and kept writing to leave this diary here for you. The Diary of Clare Green, I call it. It covers the past year or so of my life, my life since April 2018, when I jumped out my living room window believing I was about to turn into a psychopath. I have obsessive compulsive disorder, and when I can I try and make sense of my condition by writing this diary. It’s been my sanctuary and prison all these years.

So I leave this text, these notes and jottings, of a life lived with OCD, yet not constrained by it, not limited in any way. My wild-springing soul escapes the body’s snare. I enjoyed writing this diary and I hope you enjoy reading it as much. Take care and good luck!

The Lost Diary

Wednesday 11 July 2018

I think my dad may have thrown away my most recent diary: I’m preparing my courage to ask him, non-accusingly. It may, of course, be justified – it’s the one I clutched to my chest during a recent psychotic incident, when I somehow persuaded myself that I was a contemporary Jesus, and that I had to save human life on earth by projecting our consciousness into space. While I had the diary my thoughts somehow seemed to make sense. Now I’m bereft, my ideas all break apart and seem to be those of a crazy girl, a hurt consciousness trying to assign itself some significance, some good reason for being alive at this time, on this planet.

Anyway, I think my dad has thrown away my diary. In this family it’s himself and my sister who are the thrower-outers; Mum and I are the irredeemable hoarders.

It was my dad who had to tidy up in my flat after ‘the incident’. Sort through the piles of paper in my living room and scribbled notes. I’d even gone so far as to write some illegible nonsensical equations on the white project board that protects my living room table. I’d also burned some pages of my diary, so Dad can be forgiven for thinking it may have been something I wanted destroyed.

So what did I do? I jumped out of my living room window. A Wednesday morning, about 7.00am. I was worried (again) about turning into a psychopath (yes, I really could), and I wanted to stop myself before it happened. I wasn’t thinking clearly (obviously) and I don’t think I had the conscious intention to kill myself, just I wanted to switch off or to alter my trajectory in some way. I remember I had to do it fast else there would come a point when I morphed, and after that I wouldn’t be able to do it at all – I’d be in a living hell.

I’m pretty sure now that this seems an idea, a storyline, used ad infinitum in fantasy TV and films. Yes, my favourite – Game of Thrones – the fates worse than death, for example turning into a ‘white walker’ or contracting ‘grey-scale’ like Ser Jorah Mormont. Anyway, whatever the bubbling subconscious seeping through my waking thoughts (perhaps with the aid of Zopiclone), I threw myself out the window.

‘Luckily she only lives on the first floor,’ my sister said to my mum. And the outcome could have been a whole lot worse.

Tuesday 17 July 2018

Who cares what I think? I’m just one flashpoint of consciousness in our myriad world. Just because I write, have spent so much of my life writing, doesn’t mean I’m special. Who indeed is special in this crazy world of ours? I’m not; are you? What about your kids? Why should we think we’re so special, our kids are so special? Aren’t we just a teeming multitude, one in which the individual becomes lost? A billion voices screaming their lives to the sky. A cacophony of human noise in which we drown out each other, drown out the rest of the planet.

Unfortunately history gives no discounts. If the future of humanity is decided in your absence, because you are feeding and clothing your kids – you and they will not be exempt from the consequences.

Yuval Noah Harari

Tuesday 7 August 2018

When it all comes down to it, I’m just a girl alone who enjoys the promise and threat of a blank page open in front of her.

Sunday 19 August 2018

West Burnbank Cottage, Brodick, Arran

So many wishes whispering by me on the wind.

Catch a wish, to be well again, to be healed. For my back to be unbroken, no fractures to my foot. For my brain to let me breathe, for the fog of self-doubt to lift. For me to like myself again. For me to be myself again.

The Incident: Jumping Out Of My Living Room Window

Wednesday 18 April 2018

taken to Ninewells, Dundee

then moved to the National Spine Injuries

Unit at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital

in Glasgow on Friday 20 April 2018

I’m not dead, simply transformed. But if I die, I’d like to be cremated although I fear the pain greatly. Unable to breathe, unable to speak, unable to move. Yet not brain dead, still conscious, still able to feel pain. Perhaps I’m a witch, with my fear of burning. Else scientist/subject in my study of consciousness. This is so crazy yet seems true: that I will die tonight, but that is all I will do for death – other than kick him in the balls one last time!

My intimate death, his light-fingered touch, how expertly he steals.

Hospital Diaries

Sunday 22 April 2018

This white noise in my head is life!

All the million million people, there’s no way we could each listen to one another’s stories and keep on going. So our attention is usually only ever partial; it has to be. We can’t be in deep flow absolutely all of the time. But in this internet age we have to make sure our partiality does not ossify into indifference: that we only follow celebrities, or those in our own tribe/social network, and forget teeming humanity, the majority world.

Indifference is our greatest sin, always and forever. We don’t feel it all the time, but it grows inside each one of us… or maybe only me?

Do I really think I can change the world without doing anything? I can’t even change myself consciously, although change I do.

If we lose our common reference points, shared understandings, then we lose our humanity, our human consciousness. We become like goo all over the internet. We lose our souls. We’re lost.

There’s been two things going on in my head all my life, but perhaps that’s so I can leave this message for people:

Stay connected but not through computers!

We lose our common humanity if we’re

Plugged in too long or too often.

Beware IT!

It has the potential to be evil.

why do I write what I write

how do I know

why do my thoughts go where they go?

I’m beyond all difference, we’re all beyond all difference. I = you.

I’m number. I’m symbol.

Computer = Clare = human = DNA = God = dog.

I = animal = life.

Life = xx.

x = y = x = O = .

I could be angel or demon or life itself! Whatever, I know my symbols, my equations are right!

Wednesday 25 April 2018

Deciding not to have surgery feels like the right decision, later confirmed by:

Mum coming to visit in an emerald mac and apple scarf.

Meg’s hamster of hope arriving, forwarded from Ninewells.

Mum and Dad bringing me a lovely yellow card which reads ‘let the sun shine’.

It’s now Wednesday evening. Working back:

MONDAY evening

felt I needed to leave the hospital

that I was the miraculous seagull

that I needed to escape from possible experimentation

TUESDAY evening

MRI scan

thinking perhaps the machines could speak to me

that we were communicating in machine code

that the man in the bed opposite me was Mammon on his mobile to the devil.

WEDNESDAY evening

I have a waking nightmare where I begin to believe I’m to be used for some nefarious purpose of a higher being, or beings: either the devil or aliens. I worry that I will take the anaesthetic, and it will stop me from being able to speak or move, but not from feeling pain. The pain will act as some kind of purifier, either turning me wholly good or fully evil, but I’m not sure which and I’m not sure which is which.

I refuse surgery and it feels right. Afterwards a nurse, Brian, comes up to speak to me, to be companionable as I’m alone.

Friday 27 April 2018

Coincidence, coincidence.

Jo suggests I try and listen to a podcast to try and help me sleep. I pick up where I left off only eight minutes into Simone de Beauvoir. Another fascinating woman and at least the equal of Sartre. Exploring her ideas through novels, all of us responsible for each other, for everything. Could this equate to a lifelong sense of guilt? Sense of failure? That happens to so many of us. When we have to accept our limitations, the limitations of life: we are in no way limitless.

Everything I use, everything in my life, all the material goods but also what I think and write, it’s all been touched by others, all made possible by others – reused, recycled, possibly reduced. We rely so