COLUMNIST – AMROU AL-KADHI
“In forcing myself to be spontaneous, I’ve learned to let go”
Living for the moment
My favourite thing to do is plan. Well, favourite? I’m not sure, but that’s what my chronic obsessive-compulsive disorder enjoys best.
Before I go to bed each night, I plan every minute of the following morning. Throughout the morning, I set aside time to organise what I’ll be doing every minute of that evening. I have a paper diary that I look at every day, with every week choreographed down to the millisecond. It’s a thing of beauty, ngl.
The source of my greatest existential anxiety is not knowing where I’ll be or what I’ll be doing in the future. My OCD means I am most comfortable when I have control over a situation (social, work, romantic – everything); even events that seem casual and improvised, like pre-drinks before a party, I’ve usually orchestrated weeks in advance. I’m that friend who gets a hard-on organising cabs from the airport on group holidays. You need one in the group, obvs, but we are annoying.
Surviving this pandemic, then, has been as much about seeing my OCD pushed to its limits as protecting my physical health. As a writer and performer, I usually take security in knowing that I’ll be doing certain shows months in advance, or that an episode of TV I’m writing is filming six months from now.
Like many others, my industry was severely handicapped by COVID. All performances were axed, many productions were canned or postponed, all career targets suddenly paralysed. Planning even one month in advance became a futile endeavour, and for the first time in a long while, I had no idea what my future would look like.
I had two options – have a full-on nervous breakdown, which I did, or try to live a little differently, which I did subsequently. One thing
I’ve trained myself to do is to be spontaneous when I have free time (which I have a lot of now); call friends I haven’t heard from in a while out of the blue, send random cards to people’s houses, talk to strangers on my dog walks and even invite them round for dinner (once they realise I’m not a total psycho). Such things were genuinely alien in my life before – the idea of doing something unplanned one evening felt stranger to me than science fiction.
But in forcing myself to be more spontaneous, I’ve learned to let go of worrying about a future which, in all honesty, looks precarious to all of us at present. Instead, I’ve figured out how to cherish the here and now.
In fact, it was down to impulse — I made a random decision to walk my dog in a park I never go to, with a friend I hadn’t seen in a while — that I met a beautiful boy who is currently enriching my life. Perhaps living for the moment isn’t so bad, after all.