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On Some Days, I've Killed Myself At Least Twice Before Breakfast
An Autobiography in Verse
63 pages, Paperback
Published February 7, 2024
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
May 19, 2024
This slim volume is much bigger than the count of its words or the number of its pages.
A collection of essays and fragments by the South African poet Shiksha Dheda, it documents in clear and unforgiving language her struggle with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and the strictures OCD has placed on her life since her teens.
In 'Measured Breaths' we read of the author's daily routine, the elaborate rituals she has negotiated with her disorder to allow her to function in society –performing routine tasks, going out to work, shopping – while maintaining the 'sterile balloon' of her existence.
'Seeing Myself Through a Camera Lens …' concerns the struggle with a sense of self, the author's dissociation from her image and 'the flesh cage that imprisoned my mind' and how the enforced isolation of COVID lockdown fed into her self-loathing.
'The Ghosts of the Living' was for me perhaps the hardest read emotionally: the author's inability to help a family member who has fallen and lies unconscious is a brutal expression of the isolation of her position. 'I feel like a stranger in this skin case.'
In 'A Lesser Person; Washed Away' the author describes her hand-washing compulsion morphed into strict physical isolation from the outside world, to the extent that she became 'stuck in a snow globe', unable to venture outside even to comfort her dying dog.
Reading this collection gave me an insight into the reality of living with severe OCD. I would like to think that it made me a more compassionate human being, or at least, a slightly better informed one.
A collection of essays and fragments by the South African poet Shiksha Dheda, it documents in clear and unforgiving language her struggle with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and the strictures OCD has placed on her life since her teens.
In 'Measured Breaths' we read of the author's daily routine, the elaborate rituals she has negotiated with her disorder to allow her to function in society –performing routine tasks, going out to work, shopping – while maintaining the 'sterile balloon' of her existence.
'Seeing Myself Through a Camera Lens …' concerns the struggle with a sense of self, the author's dissociation from her image and 'the flesh cage that imprisoned my mind' and how the enforced isolation of COVID lockdown fed into her self-loathing.
'The Ghosts of the Living' was for me perhaps the hardest read emotionally: the author's inability to help a family member who has fallen and lies unconscious is a brutal expression of the isolation of her position. 'I feel like a stranger in this skin case.'
In 'A Lesser Person; Washed Away' the author describes her hand-washing compulsion morphed into strict physical isolation from the outside world, to the extent that she became 'stuck in a snow globe', unable to venture outside even to comfort her dying dog.
Reading this collection gave me an insight into the reality of living with severe OCD. I would like to think that it made me a more compassionate human being, or at least, a slightly better informed one.
March 13, 2024
Beautiful, spare, journalistic. Dheda writes with a commanding voice about anxiety, compulsion, and grief with prose that’s both raw and gorgeous. A powerful collection
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews