Realism vs. Believability, Part 2

If you’ve followed me on social media for any amount of time, you know that I’ve taken a lot of criticism because my characters are “too realistic.” This is usually directed at the main character in my Shadows of War series, who struggles with PTSD and not in a pretty, clean, sanitized way. I’ve written about this before, right here—but I didn’t tell the entire story.

So here it is, at long last.

<deep breath>

In July of 2018 I was diagnosed with OCD.

It was both the last thing I ever expected to hear and the answer I’d been searching for since my son had been born almost five years earlier. I’d known for that long that something was wrong, but that something was elusive.

Depression, friends said. I tacitly accepted that, even though it didn’t make much sense. I was a new mother, coping with my husband’s latest deployment and later an interstate move I was unhappy about. Sure. I wasn’t thrilled with life. Depression seemed a stretch, but it was what everyone, including multiple therapists, threw in my direction. They had to be seeing something I didn’t.

Anxiety, others told me. Well, maybe. I was pretty stressed and worried about a lot of things, after all (a combat deployment will do that to you). Like depression, I didn’t seem to meet the criteria I read online, but sure. Why not. What else could it be?

OCD hadn’t crossed my mind when I finally begged a new therapist for help. OCD is washing your hands until they’re raw and standing for thirty minutes flipping a light switch on and off and being late for work because you had to turn around a half dozen times and make sure the stove was off. And when people with OCD aren’t checking the lock on the front door, they’re cleaning. Obsessively. Usually their kitchen.

Me? My desk is always clean, yes, but that’s a work requirement. My house? Not so much. I sometimes forget to take my shoes my off, and please don’t come into my kitchen if I’m not expecting you. I don’t own a planner or pencils to line up in a nice, neat row. I don’t even plot my novels. OCD wasn’t even on my radar.

I didn’t know it when I was first diagnosed, but I’d fallen prey to believability vs. realism.

My reality? I was terrified—of everything. I had thoughts about dropping my newborn down the stairs and seeing his brains on the concrete. For the first year of his life I was afraid to bathe him, terrified I’d intentionally drown him. Seeing a cop with a radar gun on the side of the road sent me into hot anxiety; I was certain I’d end up in jail for something. My books? Deleted from Amazon every time someone made a negative comment about self-publishing or left a less than glowing review. And every time there was a knock on my door, I knew it was two Air Force officers with the worst news of all.

So I went out of my way to avoid carrying my own baby. I made my husband bathe him. I stopped speeding and became that old woman with Florida plates who everyone jokes about. I desperately sought reassurance all over the internet about my writing ability, chasing the doubt around Facebook and Twitter and blog posts. When the UPS guy knocked, I stood in the foyer, frantically googling the news before opening the door.

You’d shake your head if you read about those experiences in a book, wouldn’t you? It’s all pretty unbelievable, right? Only problem is, they’re real. And worse than being real, my symptoms weren’t uncommon. My postpartum obsessions and compulsions in particular were textbook, but because it’s not something we talk about, I had no idea I wasn’t a horrible, dangerous mother.  Part of that is the stigma surrounding mental health, which is a whole separate issue.

But part of it is, like the reader who called my protagonist “unheroic” because of her PTSD, we don’t want to hear the unsanitized version of life. And that’s a problem. I won’t say authors have an obligation to give out mental health advice—that’s not what I’m doing when I write. But if we’re going to talk about representation, then realism matters, and that’s why I’ll keep choosing realism over believability in my writing, even when it’s messy. Even when my beta readers say you know, this doesn’t actually happen this way.

Because sometimes it does.

And when it does, we deserve to see our experiences the way we live them—not as a sanitized, believable, stereotype, but raw and realistic and truthful.

Further reading: I Didn’t Know I had OCD. Here’s Why the Stereotypes Are So Harmful.