Dev Patel in ‘The Green Knight’ Helped Me Manage My OCD

I bend I kneel I bow, my head to the ground. I say, “God have mercy on us,” my hands raised and cupped before my face. “Forgive me,” I beg, “O Deliverer of the ruined, and Rescuer of the drowning.”

It’s 2 a.m., and I’m praying tahajjud salah, a prayer done in the last third of the night, when God descends to the lowest heaven, and says, “Ask of me and I will give.” I take all I can; I cling to the rope of that promise. Whatever it takes, I think, to make things right again.

I’m praying for forgiveness, for a mistake I made years ago, that has come back to haunt me a hundredfold. I have Real Event OCD, a subset of OCD where the sufferer is tormented with thoughts about a mistake they made, usually a moral one, to the point of paralysis. What makes it OCD is that the sufferer tries to alleviate their anxiety by engaging in compulsions, which can be physical or mental. I have what’s called Pure O, meaning my compulsions are primarily mental ones. They include confessing, trying to neutralize anxiety-provoking thoughts, praying obsessively, and constantly checking for sensations—the “correct” feeling in response to a thought, the feeling of certainty in the center of your chest.

At this point, I’ve been caught up in the cycle of obsession and compulsion so long that I can’t remember what peace of mind feels like. It feels like a whirlpool in the center of my chest, the constant threat of drowning under the weight of it, crushing out all air from my lungs. I struggle to concentrate at work; I struggle to sleep. I feel certain that I’m the worst of people, unworthy of life or goodness. My life becomes a gray blur.

But there are moments of goodness in it. My partner, steadfast and gentle in his love, arranges for us to go see The Green Knight at an old theater in town. I’m determined to enjoy the night, grateful for any reprieve. I do anything I can to stop the thoughts, even for a moment. I seek out any distraction I can find. But I know I’ll just return to them afterward, and the thought of that fills me with dread as we settle into the hushed theater.

I do anything I can to stop the thoughts, even for a moment.

All I know is that this is a retelling of the Arthurian legend Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, with the inimitable Dev Patel as Gawain, the young, untested knight of King Arthur’s court. I watch as Gawain, a flawed and terrified man, winces and blunders his way through a quest to face his own death. In one of the earliest scenes, a hungover Gawain stumbles and falls. Instead of immediately rising again, he curls up on the floor.

“Get up!” his lover tells him. “Not yet,” he mutters, “I’m not ready. I’m not ready yet.”

It’s a moment that tells you much of what you need to know about him. He’s young, achingly so, and facing the vastness of all he has not yet done. He wants more than anything to be a knight, but when his uncle, King Arthur himself, calls him to his side at the Christmas feast and says to him, “Tell me a tale of yourself, so that I might know thee,” Gawain swallows and says, “I have no tale to tell.”

In the memories of the mistake that consume me as I watch this scene, I was young, and arrogant, and selfish. I had grand ideas of what I wanted to do, who I wanted to be, but I was not at all ready to face the discipline and hard work that that required. How many times could I have said the same as Gawain, drunk and sprawled on the floor, or terrified in the face of my mentors, “I’m not ready. I’m not ready yet.”

Enter the Green Knight: a being preternatural and unknowable, who comes from God knows where to propose a “friendly Christmas game” to those gathered: knights and nobles, King Arthur and Merlin. He says that he will face a champion in combat, and should the chosen warrior land a blow or even a nick on him, he will grant him his prized axe. However, the champion will have to seek him out one year later, and submit to having the blow returned.

The knights hesitate, uneasy, until Gawain, too eagerly, says, “I’ll do it.” He jumps into the ring, Excalibur, King Arthur’s sword, given him by the king himself, in his hand. All eyes are on Gawain, the vastness of the legacy he has not lived up to before him, while the Green Knight kneels and bares his neck.

Gawain hesitates. Is this a test? A trick? But he believes that knights are bold, wild at heart, and keenest to win fame. So he cuts the Green Knight’s head from his shoulders. It seems he’s won, until the knight rises, holding his own head, and declares, “One year hence.” The knight rides away laughing, and Gawain is left to the empty applause of the hall.

Later, he tells his lover it felt like cutting a melon in two. It was so easy in the moment, he says—it felt like nothing. So, too, did the mistake that continued to eat away at me. If anything, it felt right at the time, as if I were doing something good and pure, as if I were being drawn inexorably toward the only possible end.

As I watch, I find myself less concerned with that moment when Gawain stands in the ring of spectators, facing down the Green Knight. I find myself less concerned with what happened there than I am with what happened after. I find myself compelled by the way Gawain responds and adjusts to the decision he made during a split second in the ring. Yet it feels as though I should be fixated on the mistake of that moment itself, as I am on my own mistake.

Gawain murders the Green Knight for all the obvious things—a boy’s vision of glory, a toxically masculine eagerness, the pressure of fate, the pressure of being tested. But also, the mistake is just that: a mistake—a fast and foolhardy moment beyond logic. I empathize with him, though Gawain understood the consequence of his decision and proceeded anyway, ultimately damning himself. It’s a choice that defies rationale. But as I watch, I can’t help but think that sometimes our actions are incomprehensible even to ourselves. No explanation accounts for all of it. And so it is with the mistake I made.

While I can extend the courtesy and grace of not focusing on Gawain’s mistake, I cannot seem to do the same for mine. My mistake fills my brain. I’ve analyzed every aspect of it, turned it over in my mind, dreamed about it, prayed about it. No answer is enough. “One year hence,” the headless, laughing knight tells him. For me it was many years, but facing it came anyway.

What follows in the film is a quest as incomprehensible and wild as anything I’ve seen. Gawain sets off one year later for the solo journey that will take him to his death. He sits with his lover, saying this is what makes men great. “Why greatness?” she asks. The question echoes in my mind. As Gawain prepares, he is outfitted with all he needs by the mother and uncle who have perfect faith in him, though he has none in himself.

I have all the support I could be given by my family, by my most loved. Every day that I face my OCD, I’m given kind words, a hand on my shoulder, some dear one murmuring that, hard as it is, I can face it. But at the end of every day, in the small hours between me and God, I face it alone, just as Gawain must.

He goes on to shudder and stumble his way through the world and his quest. Along the way he’s robbed by a group of mere children, after begging for his life like a worm. His shield is broken under their feet. His axe and horse are taken by their leader, who tells him blithely, “I’ll finish your quest for you,” and rides away. He lies alone in the forest, stripped of his knightly glory.

The camera pans away from his terrified form on the forest floor, turns in a perfect circle with a steady, deliberate slowness, inexorable as the march of time and death, to circle back to him, now lying as a skeleton, his bones whistling gently in the wind. It’s the worst possible outcome, something the film offers visions of time and again. OCD does that to you too, warping time and place to flash visions of ruin and decay before your eyes, again and again. But Gawain, as if he’s seen and thought all this, is revealed again, very much alive. He manages to writhe his way to his sword, dropped on the forest floor. He cuts himself free and sets off running.

What Real Event OCD does is steadily strip away all the things that make you yourself. You can’t trust your memories, your sense of your own worth. I have stood in front of the mirror, wondering who is reflected back at me. I have felt so lost I thought I was losing my mind. All the while hearing a voice in my head, as if I were possessed, saying, You are worthless. You have sinned worse than anyone. You deserve nothing but pain.

What follows are endless cycles of compulsion, an action that signifies giving in to the most fearful, most bewildered self. Gawain begs for this life, questions and attempts to turn back countless times, often gives in to temptation of anything that could ease the journey. I have done the same with my OCD. The cycle seems never-ending. I check my body and mind for a response to my memories, I beg God for forgiveness, I scour my memories, searching for the redemptive something that might save me, the most heinous possibility that might damn me. I have cowered before the shadows that told me the worst possibilities about myself, lunged at any promise that this time, this time, I’ll be comforted. So much of my cycle with Real Event OCD plays out on screen as Gawain struggles to complete his mission.

In the film, Gawain takes a shortcut that leads to robbery and humiliation. He betrays a man who shows him nothing but kindness. He accepts a belt that promises no harm will come to him, despite his promise to the Green Knight that he will accept the blow. He gives in to temptations of all kinds. At one point, he comes across the ghost of a murdered woman, who asks him for help retrieving her severed head from a lake.

“What will you give me in return?” he has the gall to ask her. “Why would you ever ask me that?” she responds, disgusted.

Chastened, he dives in and brings her skull back, gasping.

This scene is a lesson it has taken me years to internalize. We often want the easy rewards for goodness, a quid pro quo of cause and effect. If I’m good, then good ought to come to me. If I don’t wish to do harm, then no harm should come from me. But nothing is that simple. We’re compelled by things we can’t explain; we are the sources and targets of harm and good, in a pattern we can’t decipher. It offers no easy answers. It’s easy to do harm, through intention or neglect or plain wrongheadedness. It’s easy, too, to ask for fate to hand us our redemption once we say sorry.

If I dive into the lake and bring you back what you ask for, what will you give me?

If I do right this one time, will you hand me back my goodness?

Real Event OCD feels like turning around to look at your life—a life you thought decent at least, beset by the odd mistake or two, but as a whole, something ordinary and decent—and finding nothing but ruin facing you. It’s being convinced that you are not who you thought you were: an ordinary person doing their best. Instead you are the worst of sinners, the most cowardly, the most despised. You have done something that can’t be undone. Despite all your striving, all the shining values you hold dear, you are no honorable knight.

Ultimately, Gawain goes on, bent double by shame, to face the Green Knight. He kneels before him, waiting for the blade to fall. “Wait!” Gawain cries. “Is this really all there is?”

“What else would there be?” the Green Knight asks calmly.

What unfolds is the worst of all possible outcomes. Gawain runs for his life. The film flashes forward as he returns home to live a lie, marries, loses his only child, and dies a worthless man. It is a vision of a possible future for the young knight, should he not face the manifestation of his mistakes head-on. When the flash-forward ends, we’re brought back to the present: a trembling Gawain on his knees in front of the Green Knight once more.

I beg God for forgiveness . . . searching for the redemptive something that might save me.

With OCD, the most respected treatment strategy asks you to write out the worst possible scenario, to imagine that your worst fears are all correct: You’re worthless, the worst of people; you deserve only punishment and shame. And you’re supposed to read it until the fear it brings is something you can bear. Like Gawain, I have seen the worst-case scenario unfold in front of me, ending only in ruin.

But here’s where everything changes, and this is where I found myself weeping at the film, certain that it had understood something I could share in and live. It was a parallel with my own life that I couldn’t articulate until this moment, a feeling of being seen and understood in a way that was harsh but deeply fair. When Gawain opens his eyes to find himself still at the Green Knight’s feet, in the moments before the blade falls, he’s seen all his cowardice could do—all the misery that running would bring him and those he loves. He undoes the belt around his waist that promised a cheat to beat death’s blow.

“Now I’m ready,” he says. “I’m ready now.”

The Green Knight kneels to face him. He cups Gawain’s face in his hand.

“Well done, my brave knight,” he says. “Now, off with your head.”

The film ends there. Will Gawain live or die there, at the Green Knight’s feet? We don’t know, but that’s as it should be. He’s already done the thing that matters. He’s faced his worst fears with something that reaches toward honor. He’s accepted the terrible fate he cannot change, and, in doing so, he’s avoided the worse one.

OCD is often called “the doubting disorder.” It’s a cycle of fear and compulsion whose aim is to stave off ruin through the obsessive performance of rituals that are, at the end of the day, empty. But the only way to beat it is to let in the voice that taunts you and say, “Maybe, maybe not.” The only way to face it is to exist in uncertainty, to allow it to cup your face in the moment before the screen fades to black.

What recovery asks of you is what feels most impossible: to accept the uncertainty about the worst possible outcome. You have to accept that the worst may be true, may happen, and live your values anyway, strive to be good anyway, believe enough in yourself that you can face the worst pain of the condition. I had to learn to let in the possibility of ruin and heartache, dwell in that in-between place, knowing that I might die at the next breath but believing that I am brave enough to take off the belt and face it anyway.

I let out a sigh from my heart at that moment, the ringing chorus of the score singing, “Be merry, sweet lord,” and rose from my seat. I could face it, I thought. Though Gawain’s and my story part from each other here, his leading toward death and mine leading into a life I can’t predict, the journeys have run parallel. Though I don’t have the certain doom of death facing me, I can face my life, knowing I already accept the possibility of the worst. I can face the shame and the guilt, the certainty that I am nothing, and know something more dear and real. We may not always be the people we want to be, we may try and fail, we may shudder and quail at danger, at the demand to make something great of ourselves.

“But why greatness?” Gawain’s lover asked before he embarked on his quest. “Why is goodness not enough?” And so we live anyway, believing that though we may never reach the golden things we strive to be, something in us is refined by the attempt, and we are transformed.

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