Hello all. 

Sorry for the radio silence. I’ve just handed in my final manuscript, and the preceding six weeks were a wild-eyed blur of grubby tracksuit bottoms and matted hair and pasta-and-butter. But it’s done now.

Here are the vital statistics:

62,000 words 
200 pages 
46 chapters 
6 Neighbours references 
1 vaginaface

A few people have asked when the thing’s going to be published. The date’s set for September, which I appreciate is a boringly long time, but there’s still a lot of work to be done before it becomes an actual book: copy edit, typesetting, cover design, press, etc. Some world class medical man is also going to give it the once-over to make sure all the mental health bits are responsible.  

~

Ernest Hermingway said ‘the first draft of everything is shit’ and he was right. Though I didn’t realise just quite how shit my first draft was until I had the joy of working with my Unbound editor, Liz Garner. Before she came on board, the manuscript was turbo-shit, and she helped me turn it into something that I really love. The process gave me a new appreciation of editors’ wizardry: their sixth sense for patterns, shapes, repetitions, pace, tension – beats I couldn’t see even yet alone control. It was a wonderful experience.

~

Ironically, in writing a book about obsessive compulsive disorder, my obsessive tendencies went loco. My thinking was black and white. If I couldn’t write a superlatively brilliant book, then it must be terrible – absolutely, risibly, embarrassingly so. I once heard OCD described as a ‘catastrophic misinterpretation’ of intrusive thoughts – which is also apt to describe my totally melo-dro unpicking of editorial feedback:

Editor: I think it’s great.  
Me: She thinks it’s awful.

Editor: Part two feels fine. 
Me: Part two is fokking horRENhous.

Editor: I love it.  
Me: She hates it.

But, rather fittingly – given the book’s central theme of accepting uncertainty and greyness – I finally handed the beast over, not knowing if really I’d nailed it, but feeling pretty pleased none-the-less. 

Thank you again for all your pledges. Means the world. 

Rose x


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Done it

Me in Marie Claire this month. 



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 I'm 28 now and I've had OCD for nearly half of my life. Sometimes I still rue the pain, but I am deeply grateful for the lessons it has taught me about the value of doubt. Overthinking is the malady of our generation, and as I've learnt, our attempts to control our thoughts are often self defeating. Seeking 'closure' isn't as productive as Hollywood would have you believe - often the more we ruminate the less certain we feel. But when we loosen our compulsive grip on our emotions, and accept that doubt pemeates every aspect of our lives, the present moment feels all the more shiny and vital. And I think there's something beautifully uncomplicated in the realisation that when we strip away our defences, we're all just girls, staring out into sea, not knowing anything for certain.

Girls girls girls

Extract from Pure.


I choose a world-renowned OCD therapist in New York. I’m due to have Skype sessions once a week for however long it takes. I don’t know whether it’ll be better than the other therapies I’ve experienced, endured, but I’ve gotta gamble. Things have never been more fucked. I am at the apex of fuckery and if I fall this time – I don’t know, I don’t know – je suis complètement fuckée. 

The sessions are £100 a pop and I can’t afford them. So I make money writing bullshit for bullshit web start-ups with bullshit concepts – mobile hive swapping and digital data hounding and social data-hive crowd-mapping – which will make someone a lot of money but which are dry and bodiless. The bullshittiest gig of all is writing self-help content for a media behemoth.

Self. Help.

On a typical morning I get out of bed in tears and eat brie straight off the block while contemplating not being alive, before sitting down in the dark to write a 1000-word piece of life-advice called ‘Be Successful’ or ‘Make Friends Easily’ or ‘Achieve Job Satisfaction’. At the height of its popularity the resulting e-book is downloaded 15,000 times a day. When I read a trumpeting email from my boss telling me that my job role now has an official title, I sit in my knickers laughing blackly, spraying clods of shortbread at the screen. I grab my phone to text Jack: ‘FYI, I am now officially a “Life Coach Editor”.’

But despite my professional whoring, the £400-a-month therapy bill renders me more skint than I’ve ever been, and I revel in it, delectably traipsing the aisles of the Turkish mart downstairs and counting out the change on the counter. One day they give me some BBQ Beef Hula Hoops on credit and I am thrilled. I don’t know. I guess physical discomfort offers a concrete-and-upright worry amid the mental dereliction.

The whole Skype thing is pretty awkward, given my paper thin bedroom walls and the mouse-like demeanour of my sweet and kind French housemates. Every Monday evening before the therapy session I put on the washing machine in the kitchen next door so that when they come home they won’t hear me over its whirring – won’t hear the throes of yet another boob-induced panic attack as they chow down on their tartes-aux-whatevers. I wash heavy denim items with buckles and rivets, for their superior clatter.    

Exposure therapy in the treatment of sexually-orientated OCD aims to gradually habituate you to anxiety-prompting sexual content. Over the months my therapist will feed me with more and more explicit images and video moving right up to hardcore stuff, sexual pandemonium, utter havoc, and right now I don’t feel like I’ll ever get there. But I will, I’ll be a diligent student, gold star-worthy. Eventually, towards the end of therapy, I’ll watch so much smut that I’ll be able to identify the production company by the luxuriance of the pubic muffs, or lack thereof. 

But for now my therapist and I have agreed that sexual pictures of actual humans will send my anxiety levels soaring too high, so we start with cartoons. This is when I feel most pathetic, when I slump down after therapy and don’t get up for hours because an amateur pencil sketch of a naked Betty Boop, drawn by some sex-starved virgin far away, has made me cry. 

Life Coach Editor. Fuck yeah!

Is there anything scarier than a naked Betty Boop? Happy Halloween.

I'm doing a Twitter Q&amp;A tomorrow (Friday) from 1pm about the experience of getting into print - including the writing process, finding an agent and a publisher, etc. Tweet your Qs to @unbounders with the hastag #womeninprint. 

I'll pull some As from somewhere.

DISCLAIMER: I will be en route to the North at the time. Chiltern Wi-Fi, don't fail me now.

 


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Q & A

Hello all, 

As many of you know, before I wrote Pure I wrote an article about my experiences in the Guardian in 2013. It was the first time my form of OCD had ever been aired in mainstream media.

When I later crowdfunded the book – which you all generously contributed to (thanks again) – I received an extremely generous donation from a stranger. It turned out that stranger was entrepreneur Aaron Harvey, the founder of a successful digital agency in NY. Aaron had been living in silence with the same condition for over 20 years. 'I didn't feel any relief until I came upon Rose's article,' Aaron said, 'she forever changed, if not saved, my life.' 

Galvanised, Aaron used his strategy, design and analytics expertise to found <a href="http://intrusivethoughts.org">intrusivethoughts.org</a>, a groundbreaking new resource for people with OCD. Then it was my turn to be inspired – it's highly technical, highly creative brains like Aaron's that will change the way the world thinks about mental health in the future. 

With our common goal to create accessible, beautiful content and products that humanise mental illness, Aaron and I are now working together, between London and New York, exploring new ways to push mental health awareness forward through art and tech. 

We want to continue our conversation at SXSW 2017, so we're proposing a two-person panel discussion called It's Here: The Tech Future of Mental Health. It’d be brilliant if you could do me one more favour and vote for us. It takes less than a minute:

Create a SXSW account: <a href="https://auth.sxsw.com/users/sign_up">https://auth.sxsw.com/users/sign_up</a> 
Login to your email and follow the link in the authentication email 
Click the thumbs up here: <a href="http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/vote/67070">http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/vote/67070</a>

Thanks so much, once again. 

Rose x

Tech and mental health at South By Southwest 2017

Wow. 

Okay. 

So…

'The Shed'.

What IS this place? Who knows. But you've just bought access to it because you bought my book. Which means I adore you. 

15% funded in 2.5 days. This is amazing. It's incendiary. And I am incredibly, inarticulably touched by your generosity and support. 

Like so many things in life, these crowd-funding campaigns can get a little saggy in the middle. So please do keep trumpeting this around. By the water cooler. Online. At the pub. In da club

Once again. Thanks thousands for your pledge. It really does mean the world to me. And all jokes aside, I think this book could be a friend to a lot of frightened people out there.

THANK YOU.

Rose 

xxx

P.S. WHY isn't 'inarticulably' in the dictionary?

THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU

100% funded! YES! Thank you so, so much for your support. :) :)

Here's a little festive video message from me to you: <a href="http://vimeo.com/114869288">http://vimeo.com/114869288</a>

x

THANK YOU VIDEO

Hello,

I’m super delighted to now be over 70%. Endless thanks for helping me get here. Your pledges and well-wishes have meant a great deal. 

Now I’m on the home straight, if you could do me a final fave and share my video link one last time with an accompanying nudge, that’d be a wonderful help: <a href="http://unbound.co.uk/books/pure">unbound.co.uk/books/pure</a>. Pledges are scarce these days, so I'd be mega-grateful of any sweet-talk or weasling you can do on my behalf.

In other news, I recently gave a talk at a Mind event about the outrageous media stereotypes surrounding mental illness that I’ve encountered while promoting Pure. Here’s a link to an edited version of it: <a href="http://www.rosebretecher.com/2014/10/i-never-set-out-to-challenge-mental.html">rosebretecher.com/mentalhealthstereotypes</a>. Short on time? NO SWEAT. Here’s an extract:


 “A cursory browse of most publications’ mental health sections reveals an homogenous parade of white-skinned loners, ranging from the angsty youth lingering in the school corridor long after the bell has rung, to the middle class brunette lamenting on her beige sofa, as if the pesky dog’s muddied the shag pile and the AmbiPur has run out.”


Lots of thanks and love,  

Rose x

The home straight

Hello pledgers, 

I've reached 50%! Whoooo.

Thanks so much to you all for getting me here. Your support means ever such a lot to me. 

Here are the outtakes from my video to celebrate this milestone: <a href="https://vimeo.com/101519514">https://vimeo.com/101519514</a>.

Rose

x

Video outtakes

Now a major Channel 4 series

Rose Cartwright has OCD, but not as you know it. Pure is the true story of her ten-year struggle with ‘Pure O’, a little-known form of the condition, which causes her to experience intrusive sexual thoughts of shocking intensity. It is a brave and frequently hilarious account of a woman who refused to give up, despite being undermined at every turn by her obsessions and enduring years of misdiagnosis and failed therapies.

Eventually, the love of family and friends, and Rose’s own courage and sense of humour prevailed, inspiring this deeply felt and beautifully written memoir. At its core is a lesson for all of us: when it comes to being happy with who we are, there are no neat conclusions.

No-one could have guessed that something was going to explode inside me. I was a happy child.
 
I was the youngest of four kids in a big, Catholic family, and there was always dressing-up and water-fights and conkering and Captain Haddock; orphaned pigeons to break our hearts over and trips to pat the pigs down Pig’s Lane. I remember the electric hush when we saw a wild deer in the Wyre forest, and the low buzz of Dad’s voice through his back when he carried me, even though I was a bit too big to be carried. I remember Mom’s hand reaching from the front seat to stroke the chubby little knee behind her. How she’d rearrange my saggy socks without looking.
 
I remember the thrill of naughtiness when my parents’ backs were turned – the daily acts of gleeful perversion: mixing cat poo poison in jam jars; singing Gregorian chants over dead mice; pulling faces at Father John at the ‘body of Christ’ bit. And I remember the bums – me and my older brother Pat were positively enraptured by bums. We made sourdough bums; we drew bums on frosted windows; we painted faces on our bums and made sumo bums with our swimming trunks. On rainy afternoons we’d huddle under the bed with the neighbours’ kids and sniff each other’s fingers after a diligent bum-scratch, adopting the mannerisms of the most sincere sommeliers and applauding the hints and top notes. It became a game. We called it Smell Bums.
 
Our biggest brother Ted knew very well that he could elicit shrieks of delight from his younger siblings by mooning out of a bedroom window on Easter morning, or spelling ‘ARSE’ on the scrabble board, or farting during mealtimes. How we’d roll with laughter at Dad’s disgruntled face and booming reprimands: ‘You’re a DRAAAIN, Ted, a true vulgarian’.
 
We lived in a 1950s semi behind the train station, and you could hear the platform announcements clearly from the garden. Pat used to climb the lime tree by the back fence and belt out erroneous timetable information and made-up destinations through a traffic cone. I’d stand at the bottom of the trunk jumping up and down in ecstatic throes.
 
Me and Pat were separated from Ted and our older sister Maggie by eight long years, and they were therefore our benchmarks of being – our heroes. We listened to their alien lives develop through the walls. Guns N’ Roses through Pop Will Eat Itself then Saint Etienne. When they let us sit on their beds and spray their deodorants and build houses with their cassette collections, we were kings.
 
Ted and Maggie were both devoted Rockers, and all their friends had long hair and chokers and big t-shirts. You were either a Rocker or a Townie in those days. Townie boys were called Kevs and they had curtained-hair and stud earrings and collared shirts. Townie girls were called Sharons, and they wore hair mousse and lip liner and plastic miniskirts. I was going to be a Rocker when I grew up, I knew that for sure. When I was seven I chose a pair of imitation Doc Martens for my school shoes and Ted said they were ‘wicked, man’. I was high for weeks. Twenty years later he would cry as he hugged his little sister – as tall as him now and a howling Sharon – sorry he never knew.

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