Art and the artist - OCD and the role it plays in Amy Bodossian's life (part 1)

Speaker 1 00:00

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Speaker 2 00:20

Brainwaves. Hear the world differently. Bringing community mental health to you, raising awareness and challenging stigma. Tune in to 3CR Community Radio, Wednesdays at 5pm.

Speaker 3 00:32

Melbourne's drivetime radio program featuring community organisations, powerful stories and information. Find us at brainwaves.org.au - proudly sponsored by Wellways Australia.

Speaker 4 00:45

This episode is episode 1 in a two-part series. Please tune in next week to listen to the second part of Amy's interview.

Speaker 5 00:55

My guest today is acclaimed and award-winning cabaret-spoken-word icon OCD Ambassador and mentor Amy Bodossian, who's been enchanting audiences for over 15 years with a striking blend of whimsy wit, irreverence and profound sensitivity. Amy launched her book Wide Open in 2016 and has performed sell-out shows at festivals across Australia. Amy's show In Bed with Amy and Friends is coming to Melbourne Fringe Festival October 8th and she joins us today on Brainwave to talk about her experience as an artist and performer who lives with OCD.

OCD is heavily misrepresentated in the media and Amy feels passionately about spreading the very real effects of her illness and advocate for others who might feel the same. Hi Amy, so nice to have you on the show.

Speaker 6 01:43

Hi Ananya, thanks for having me.

Speaker 7 01:45

I would like to begin by paying my respects to the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation who are the traditional custodians of the land on which I am coming to you from today. Land where at brainwaves we tell our stories and land where the traditional custodians have told their stories for many, many years before us and continue to tell their stories. I would like to pay my respects to elders past and present and acknowledge all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander listeners who are listening today.

Have you always created and performed? Why do you love performing?

Speaker 6 02:22

I was always a creative person ever since I can remember. I've always made things like, and I had a lot inside of me, shall we say. And maybe the world was very overwhelming and confusing for me. And I found a deep urge to express what was going on inside of me. And I think like, it came out like maybe because I was, because I did experience complexity. Yeah, the short answer is probably. Yeah, I came out of the womb, you know, in a secret dress, singing. Love that Wise and Minnelli song. I was always making stuff, like I said, I was like putting on shows for my parents, in the garage, you know how it is, and they had to sit through them and all that. I think I was always, I was always drawing, I was always doing something.

And I think that it's like, what I'm struggling with now, which is to say it in a linear way, creating and performing is like, it's just straight from the heart, like poetic language, painting, performing. You know, it's like, I do have all this kind of neurodivergent stuff going on. And I think I was pretty dysregulated from a very young age in the womb, one might say, that I just, this kind of language of performing an art just cuts through all of that.

You don't have to find a linear way to explain something. You just take your heart out and sort of put it there and go, here it is. I felt like I had this real sense that there was something going on, like I've always been like, I was very like, hmm, I was very, look, I don't wanna, it's hard to not sound, you know, arrogant or whatever, but I was always very, I could see a lot, shall we say, I'm very sensitive. So I would pick up on a lot. And I saw a lot what was going on around me and I saw my mom and dad and my own in a world which I couldn't communicate. But I just sensed that there was power in, I've always been able to express myself out of that sense.

There was something, I don't know, I just knew intrinsically, I don't know how that it was really vital to share my self and that I just had a natural inclination to show myself knowing somehow intuitively or maybe not knowing, finding out as it has progressed that it would facilitate general other people to also feel comfortable, you know, but I think that may have come later. First of all, it was just, I have a lot going on and it needs to come out somehow, some way. And I wasn't a mathematician. So that's how it came out. And yeah, why do I love performing? Well, I just kinda answered the question.

Speaker 5 06:03

Yeah, you did. You answered it really well. I think a lot of sensitive people look for ways to belong in the world. And it seems like that was your way of finding your niche, finding your way to belong. And that's... amazing. That's really something very beautiful. So you mentioned performance is your being, it's something very core to you. You're currently working on a show. Can you speak some more about your current show?

Speaker 6 06:34

Hmm. I get, it's funny, as soon as I have to start selling myself or talking about a thing that I've made, I'm really,Aall right, so In Bed With Amy, okay. So I'm doing a show called In Bed With Amy and Friends for the Melbourne Fringe. It's at the Wesleyan. I've been doing it now. I did my first iteration in 2022 and it's a live cabaret talk show. It's, I put my bed on stage. It's not a full-size bed. It's like a set dress sort of, but it looks like a bed. It looks deep, you know, because humans are very strange. We can see what we want to see, don't we? And art's all about that. 

But yeah, it's like a, it's very whimsical, like actually comes from all the shows I did during lockdown informed my live performances. Like I brought my internal world more to the stage. Like I used to do cabaret shows and then like it's just an extension and I, yeah, so I have my bedroom vibe. I said, Wesleyan, so it's very glittery and cabaret and beautiful, but yeah, there is my bed. It's kind of, my stuffed toys are on and everything. It's very inviting and welcoming and very good for me. Like it's very neurodivergent friendly. Cause like I'm quite a creature. I just, all my stuff, like I've just got my tissues, my puffer, like I've just brought it all to the stage.

And then the Friends bit, it's performers that I have like chosen that I just love and that have like lived experiences that fascinate me. They're amazing artists. And I invite them and I sort of shepherd the evening with my cabaret and my songs and my spoken word and my wackiness. And then I have two performers each night and they perform their amazing work, spoken word, drag, burlesque, comedy, music. And they, yeah, so they perform. And then after they perform, they hop onto my bed for like a heart to heart about like all kinds of things like artistic process.

And, you know, it's a good 20 minute chat. It's like an interview, but it's also got that live talk show vibe where it's kind of like, it's funny and it can go very poignant and fun. And it can go into chaos. And it's just like a really, and I have often queer performers or just, and all kinds of disability, you know, different lived experiences, you know, just all kinds of people. I had beautiful, in my first one, I had a [?far hard band], Deshu, he's an amazing performer, artist, activist. He's an incredible guy. He was on Manus Island for six years, I think. And he's like an extraordinary human. 

So it's also like my main desire, and he's an incredible artist, musician, everything, is to like have people that kind of have had, have, I guess, are in the ethos of what I feel I am presenting, which is what I'm talking about, alchemizing, you know, like we see people perform and then we get to hear like them talk about, well, how do they make art? And questions you're asking me and like, how have they managed to be themselves and get through? You know, they're quite, I love reaching into the light inside of other people and really like, I hope the audience feels like affirmed and, you know, connects with their inner light.

And yeah, I've spoken to some amazing people. You saw my last one and Lisa Proud, who's a dancer of short stature, who's just like this incredible, gifted, talented and wise person, you know, and she performed, she danced and it was incredible. And then she got on Bed With Me and we just like, she just said, she has so much wisdom and poetry from her lived experience and she's just, and I love the chemistry that I have with each person and it's just like good for me because I'm very spontaneous. And so it's really brought out my, you know, like the more I can be in the moment, the better and interviewing other people gives me the opportunity to be completely in the moment because I never know really what they're gonna do or say.

And yes, so I'm really excited about my Melbourne Fringe shows. I'm really excited about the lineup. I have, we're actually one of my dear friends, Nikki Vivica, who's a incredible spoken word artist. She was in gender euphoria. She's just like, she's an amazing actor, poet, very fierce, trans woman, beautiful, glittering, wise. brilliant like our conversation is just going to be brilliant but like we're all neurodivergence so we will our conversations you know they go everywhere you know but there's just a lot of yeah I love you all my guests are going to be great and I just can't love you wait

Speaker 5 11:51

Yeah. I, like you mentioned, saw your show. I loved it. I love the wackiness. I love the outward neurodivergence. I think it was a very safe space for other neurodivergence to exist in. And I'm myself very passionate about everything that you just said. Like I love having those conversations and looking for those light, looking for the enlightened people. But I also feel like neurodivergent people have a lot to share, a lot of different viewpoints, which add, add, add in add a little bit of, you know, nuance to our daily lives, I think. And it's, it's amazing. It's, I, big fan, loved your show. What keeps you staying? What keeps you staying in the performance arts?

Speaker 6 12:35

Oh I'm sure. So yeah I'll just give you a little insight. So yeah I have OCD as you said in the intro and what's funny, what's not funny, what's painful is that like I'm, there's a lot, this sort of format of an interview is like a big proponent of OCD is like perfectionism and like ruminating. So I'm like ruminating about my first answer and I'm wanting to do it again and you know that's very a little bit of insight. OCD for you are humans out there. Yeah is that yeah it's the ruminator is like it's trying to sabotage the interview let's just put it that way.

But anyway, what keeps me in the performing arts? Well COVID really shone a light on like why I love it and why I do it because during COVID everything changed as we know and the performing arts it all shut down and I remember watching my calendar for the year it was just like email emailing which cancelled cancelled cancelled you know and everyone was like you remember that time it was so very strange and people were like not really believing it and then all the emails started coming in of like everything's cancelling and I remember because my OCD was very triggered as well because it was a pandemic.

Speaker 5 14:13

Yeah.

Speaker 6 14:13

Centring around themes of contamination, I look to the world, to others for a bar of what is yes, a template for what is quote-unquote "normal"... and to calibrate my own neurosis, and that was gone, so that was extremely painful, so I instantly went to make a show online, like immediately - and it was two things and it was so clear at that time like it just completely crystallised everything about like it's just so intrinsically a part of me and my like heart and my spiritual will like my my sense of purpose in the world of what I want like it's so valuable to me it was like I wanted to create not just for the sake of it.

Like, you know, sure I wanted to make beautiful things because now there's nothing to do and art comes out of that place like I was just saying in the beginning, you know it comes from alchemizing our pain you know spinning gold out of you know difficulties and and Covid was certainly difficult especially for me although in some ways I was well placed because I was already a neurotic, spent all my time in the room - but it was also the nature of what I was making... I went immediately, wanted to make an online show, like it was, it wasn't like I wanted to write a song just for the process, it's super outcome-oriented because I'm a performer - because what I wanted was to create something beautiful but also to share it with people. 

And mainly I felt this deep desire to connect with community and to like I said in the beginning put my heart out there and show my experience... because I felt like I wanted to be close to everybody and bring everybody in and and the, you know that the songs that I was writing and the show that I was making, it was like a little kid - I was just like a kid again in my house, like, and I'm an artist to the core, like you know it was like, it's usual medium now. So I got out this whole projector and dusted it off and put these projections behind me and got costumes and sets...  and I, like you know, and I had played guitar but not a lot, but I got I usually work with musos - but it's like Well now I have to do it alone. 

So I fully wrote songs on the guitar, and told these stories and I did this beautiful like, in like within three weeks of lockdown, this show called The Lighthouse. And I wrote this song you know I Am a Lighthouse, and I won't go out and, you know, it just it was like, and it was a beautiful, because it was at the very beginning of COVID, right where it was, like everyone was, it was like novel, yeah. So the first show, a lot of, like about, I don't know, 70 people tuned in, and it was quite if, it was like a little camping together online - it had that real fresh, I think we can remember how that was kind of exciting and everyone was reacting and you know doing their love hearts and talking and I felt like elated and it was like okay, I make, I love making beautiful things, I love I love telling stories and I love sharing my heart with people, and I'm a show-off - I love being centre of attention, you know, I just love it, I love it all.

But it's not an ego thing, it's like yeah, I love being centre of attention, but I really love being with people, and just the balm that it... provides. And because I do suffer with OCD and I have this ADHD as well, and I do suffer - and we'll get on to that - but like, it's really real ... I'm not complaining, it's more just like, it's a fact that there's a lot of inherent pain in my condition that people don't even see. And so because I have this kind of gift of extraordinary adversity, I just, hmm, like I just, I have a lot to work with, I just have a lot, a lot to work with, let's just put it that way.

Speaker 5 18:27

I think that's such a well-rounded answer in the way of there is definitely, which we can again go on to later on, there's definitely some gifts that you get obviously from your illness, from your OCD, but there's also the, it just sounds like from your answer, it sounds like performing is a way of being for you. It's your core, it's your need to be seen, to be expressive.

Speaker 6 18:56

I don't know if OCD, I'm very cautious not to say, it brings me gifts or it's good, because it's more like, Yes, there's a silver lining, the language is a bit difficult around that. Does that make sense? Cause it's like, there's nothing great about it, but nonetheless you can find, it has brought me gifts. So it's a complicated...

Speaker 5 19:21

I love that you corrected me, because everyone has different terminology that they're comfortable with. And if you are uncomfortable with calling it a gift, very valid.

Speaker 6 19:32

It's not that it does, it's fine, it's hard to explain, it's not that there aren't gifts that have come out of the suffering, but OCD in and of itself, you can't wield it, it wields you, if that makes sense, but we'll get on to that, but has the suffering brought gifts to me? Yes, it has.

Speaker 5 19:53

Since we, you didn't mention OCD a few times already, let's... sort of dive deeper into that. Like, how have you always had OCD, and have you always created and performed with OCD, like how is, how's that relationship been? 

Speaker 6 20:06

So I think, yeah, it's so deep to talk about OCD - and it's like, I'm almost like, so OCD about talking about it, because I get perfectionist about it because it's like, How do I even tell people this? You know, that's partly why I like your question, like the art and how do they go together? It's like, like I said at the start, like art isn't, it's like, it's so overwhelming. I just wanna tell a story to show it what it's like to say this is what it's like because it's so nuanced and it's so isolating to experience this thing that's so kind of very difficult to understand, honestly.

If people don't have this experience, which is why I love doing this show because I don't know what it's like to have had the experiences that the people I just mentioned, I've got like, I've got no idea. You know, I have an idea of what it's like to suffer, what it's like to be human and that's my way in, that's our sameness. But then there's all the differences, you know, so there's our sameness, which is our heart and then there's all the different ways in which it manifests and I haven't walked in those people's shoes, you know, which is I think my own need to talk about my story -and then to maybe share other people's stories is coming from the same place.

But it's like, because I know how freaking painful it is to, you know, what to be seen. So it's obsessive compulsive disorder, which is you obsess over things and it could be anything, really, you could obsess over literally anything. Classic one would be one that the listeners would relate to would be hand washing, which is it presents in so many different ways for people. There is no one way that it presents. Hand washing is not, some people do not do that. They count or they check anyway. The point is is that, let's go over the example. So you will not want to pick the thing, eat the thing that you've touched with your hands without washing them because think you're going to contaminate it.

So you would wash your hands before you ate the thing or you will, that's one thing and the washing the hands would be a compulsion. You cannot not wash your hands because it's just, the agar is just too high. It's too painful. Or you could eat the thing and not wash your hands, but you would ruminate a lot. Do you know what I mean? Like that could be a compulsion too. So because ruminating is a compulsion.

So I've gone through all different incarnations of OCD. I have contamination OCD, which means that I, there's the obsession. What if I get sick, blah, blah, blah? What if, well, I can't touch that. I can't touch this, I can't, dah, dah, dah, dah. And it's kind of, everything's like a threat. And then you're very vigilant, hypervigilant about not touching that or ruminating so that you're not feeling the feelings essentially, right? Because basically it's like a fight, flight, freeze thing of not wanting to feel the feelings, which I believe is coming from, this is my little tangent, is almost a pre-verbal trauma.

I'm going into a trauma space. I'm going into a gabble, matez space here, everybody, gabble. This is, I come from that, through that lens that you became hypervigilant and went into fight, flight, freeze as a way of not wanting to be in your body. And the human brain can go in lots of different ways. And it manifested me in that ruminating fight, flight, freeze. So it leads to a love avoidance. Everybody has these thoughts. But with OCD, they're so deeply disturbing and you latch onto the thoughts because that arouses deep sense of anxiety.

And it's very high, very, very high anxiety. Like I don't want to be here anxiety. So you ruminate or do compulsions. Okay, so an example is like OCD. Well, it's gone through so many themes. Like basically there isn't, it's cycled through so many themes for me. Like there's the contamination stuff, which I think happened when I was, you know, from the beginning, I was just like washing my hands, avoiding touching bins and all that sort of, I was kind of trying to control my world, yeah. Control within the lack of control. And then as I got older, you know, I had in my late teens, there was, it started to go into pure OCD, which is the compulsion of like having intrusive thoughts, like harming people and stuff like that.

And you're very alarmed by that, you know, it's just like the same thing as what I was saying as being alarmed by dying or whatever from touching that food. And you don't want to harm people. So you get obsessed with it and then you avoid the thought, you know, and then you can even avoid people or, you know, say someone will be like, I don't want to hit people in my car on the freeway. So they just won't. drive or they'll go back and see if they drove over someone, they'll go back and see if they drove someone or in my case you ruminate because you're not one who goes back and does it physically you just ruminate did I did I cannot let it go right um kind of attacks what you love in a way it's like a saboteur in a way.

So I'm aging lately,so I take you know getting older, I'm a, and there's, you know, it's very vulnerable to talk about - like I am a performer, and I'm a... you know, I want to be desired or whatever and I'm turning 46 this year and I... it's really latched onto it, like in a diabolical way, I am taking selfies all the time, I don't want to, I just, you know, I'm... obsessed with my aging face at the moment because it's, you know, it's come in big with the big guns to try and like, you know, and it's interesting because if it's something like... will I get sick from washing, not washing my hands - actually you kind of that's you probably won't but you actually have to sit with the unknown with OCD.

So you do what's called Exposure Response, there's prevention therapy which is you won't wash your hands, you'll sit with the discomfort and ride around and feel like absolutely terrified and... not what she has an [?eighth] thing... and it's like a whole thing you do with therapists and groups and everything, but you actually go OK, well I'm not, maybe I'll get sick, maybe I won't - the likelihood is that I won't. What's interesting when it latches onto very kind of saliently kind of like, things like aging, well actually it's got a lot stronger grip in a way because - well guess what, I am aging - you know what I mean, guess what I am gonna look older... but I still don't know, you know, to what degree and how much of that you know it's still hypervigilantly controlling that in a really full-on way.

But there's a lot of grief, a real-life grief, inherent in that one - so it's really latched on in a more profound way - and I think it's trying to protect me, it's very complex, it's trying to protect me from the grief, but it's over-vigilant - it's harming me - but I have to love it, bring it in thank you for trying to protect me, I know you really care and you started long ago, but I love...

Speaker 5 27:31

Thanks for listening to Brainwaves. You can find more of our shows at brainwaves.org.au - If you'd like to send in any suggestions or feedback, please email us at brainwaves@wellways.org ... The second part of today's interview will be airing next week at 5 pm on Brainwaves. I hope you were able to take a moment and be present with us today. We'll be back next Wednesday at 5 pm for another episode of Brainwaves. See you then!