“Shut up, I say to the now familiar voice in my head, the one that isn’t me but is inside me and so must be me – who else could it be?
How are you supposed to live with yourself now, hmm? How?“ – “How to Hide in Plain Sight”
Between one and three percent of children and adolescents have obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD). While that statistic may seem trivial, consider this: OCD is the fourth most prevalent mental disorder, and the average age at which people report their first symptoms is 19. This is significant because, around this age, people are also undergoing major changes–such as moving to college or transitioning into the workforce–that often lead to an increase in stress, both for those with and without an existing anxiety disorder. While not technically an anxiety disorder itself, OCD is often comorbid with other mental health disorders, such as anxiety and depression. On top of the common stressors young adults face, the development of OCD can make everyday life a challenge.
In “How to Hide in Plain Sight,” author Emma Noyes begins with a note of her personal experience with OCD and how it influenced her novel. When describing her first onset of symptoms as a child, she says, “I thought I had just lost my mind. My brain wouldn’t stop looping over the same thoughts. Horrible thoughts. Taboo thoughts, things that cannot be spoken aloud in public society.” She describes how, due to the disturbing nature of her thoughts, along with the guilt they caused her, it took her a while to reach out for help. Before transitioning into the novel, she says, “there are millions of people who suffer from this disease – and they do so in silence, with a false smile on their face, their disease hidden in perfectly plain sight.”
“How to Hide in Plain Sight” is a romance novel that tells the story of Eliot Beck, who has been struggling with OCD ever since childhood. At the age of 18, due to the guilt she feels from her disorder, she withdraws her college admission decision and moves to New York, cutting off contact from her family and her best friend, Manuel Valdecasas. The story rotates between two timelines: one that focuses on her development of symptoms in childhood, ending with the events that led her to move to New York; and one that focuses on her current life at 21, when she returns to her family’s private island in Canada for her older brother’s wedding. For the first time since she’s left, she must confront her family, her best friend, and all the “Worries” she’s tried so hard to leave behind.
In the timeline that focuses on her childhood self, Beck describes how her OCD first developed after the death of her younger brother. While lying in bed one night, she faces uncontrollable thought spirals of guilt regarding her brother’s death. She runs out of bed and attempts to tell her dad, though is unable to, as she tells the reader: “Though the Worry isn’t gone – though I can still feel it turning and turning, a wheel in a track of wet mud – I recognize then that I’m the only one who can hear it.” Beck meets Valdecasas in the fifth grade, and they quickly become best friends, as he is someone she can tell anything – including her “Worries,” which she capitalizes throughout the book. She describes how talking to him makes her feel better, even if the relief is only temporary. When she cuts contact with Manuel, describing how she feels that she doesn’t deserve him, her thoughts grow worse.
OCD manifests in various subtypes, or focuses of obsessive thoughts. The subtype that this novel focuses on is Pure O, in which compulsions are usually mental and include rumination, mental checking, and seeking reassurance. As most compulsions in this subtype are not visible, this subtype is often hard to diagnose. Pure O OCD is also difficult due to the disturbing nature of the intrusive thoughts. Those who live with them – on top of living with the thoughts – often live with feelings of guilt and thoughts of being a bad person. In young adults, who already must deal with the anxiety and uncertainty of transitioning into adulthood, the added fear of uncertainty that comes with OCD can be hard to manage.
In “How to Hide in Plain Sight,” Beck must overcome several hurdles, both external and inside her head. Despite her struggles, by the end of the book, she learns both how to love herself and how to embrace love from others, in particular from Valdecasas. Though not a traditional romance novel — the book centers not only on her relationship with Valdecasas, but also on her experience with OCD — How to Hide in Plain Sight shows how love from family, friends, or a partner can help overcome personal challenges.
As Valdecasas tells Beck in the last line of the novel, “‘Don’t you ever apologize for being who you are.’”
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