My teeth are rattling in tandem with the fidgety opening keystrokes of All My Friends by LCD Soundsystem. That’s about as much as I will move for the next seven minutes and 33 seconds. So many nights of my life have ended to this song. This song written by some…

I was in my 20s before I realised that there was a difference between “relaxing” and “not moving much while incredibly tense” and, as it turns out, I actually only know how to do one of those things. Similarly, I was well into the third decade of my life before…

the main thing i know about kobe bryant is that he died today. i know he was a legendary athlete, and that he played for the lakers, but i don’t know his stats or how many championships he won. i know that he was accused of sexual assault, and that’s…

king of the function i want to run through this first part quickly, because i’ve said a lot of it before. i’ve got ocd, dyspraxia and a sensory processing disorder. what do these things mean? ocd means that thoughts, usually horrible ones, get stuck in my head like broken film…

A sampling of ways in which OCD hijacks my brain — I once saw myself extracting hypothetically contaminated blood from my own veins and injecting it into a lemon drizzle cake in order to poison an office full of people. I saw it in my mind, just so we’re clear. I was pretty sure it hadn’t actually happened, but that never…

You look at your arm and notice freckles that weren’t there before. Freckles between the old freckles, and some others out on their own, where there had been none at all. On the underside of your forearms, or your neck. Under your collar, or the top of your chest. The…

Reflections on life with obsessive-compulsive disorder — A Scale of 1 to 10 “On a scale of 1 to 10, how suicidal are you?” It’s February 2018, exactly six months ago, and I’m speaking over the phone to a woman who works for one of the charities to which the Irish state has farmed out its duty of care to the mentally ill…

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, a period when children’s fiction was inescapably dominated by an orphaned young man with a wand and a scar — I was preoccupied with a different set of orphans. While I loved Harry Potter, nothing in my childhood had ever compared to the…

My Chemical Romance: all their songs, ranked Organising musicians into genres is a game best left for fuzzy logicians. Over a long career producing albums and albums’ worth of tracks, most good bands and artists will deviate from their origins and transcend the pigeonhole. From the grungy, melodious punk of…