TW: this post, though written in a light-hearted manner, contains details of the early pandemic days and might be triggering to some.

Disclaimer: This post is based on experience and is not to be treated as medical advice.

Hello, world! Fresh introduction. I’m a germaphobe, OCD about cleanliness, hygiene, order and disease. Hyper-organised, hyper-anxious. Classic fascist-in-the-making traits, you must think.

I don’t know how or when it started, but I can think of at least three sources: a) my mother worked as an administrator at a tertiary care hospital and she has been a public health educator too, hence the topic of what’s sterile and what’s not may have started earlier than usual for me; b) I received religious education alongside school education and, perhaps by virtue of being a bookworm, absorbed as much knowledge about purity and impurity as possible - a bit too much, may be; c) the final nail in the coffin was the discovery of the germ theory of disease: the moment I learnt that there are invisible creatures in our world that can make us sick, my life changed for good. They could be anywhere, everywhere but we cannot see them, so how do we tackle them? How do we know what is infected and what isn’t, when we cannot even see them with the naked eye? A bit like ghosts, isn’t it? They certainly did haunt me like ghosts.

I would read everything that was available, almost with an urge to consume. I'd read advanced books way ahead of my grade: science, religion, everything. I may have ended up reading about the germ theory of disease earlier than other kids, and I think I once cultured spores in order to verify it for myself. I took books, in general, very seriously, and I would try to replicate science experiments at home, often running into problems because I did so without parental supervision. I read a lot of religious literature with expert Q&A's about cleanliness, purity, impurity, and so on. If a science or a religious textbook said something about trace impurities, I went full OCD to ensure I steered clear of those. For reasons of science and for reasons of faith.

I still wash my clothes obsessively so as to rid them of bacteria, and I dry them obsessively to keep the fungi out. A bit like Don Quixote tilting at windmills. Did I mention the fear of undercooked food? Fear of salads!

I would wash my hands obsessively as a child, and my mother would make fun of it, saying "try not to peel off your skin." Of course, I thought that I'm the logical one here despite the heavy amounts of moisturiser that I had to follow it up with! How will I ever know if there are any micro-organisms on my hands unless I wash thoroughly? Even Dettol kills only 99.9% germs.

Germaphobia makes life hard. You are on a bus and someone just wiped their nose and then touched a seat railing or a handle for support, and you make a mental note not to touch that spot while trying to get up. But what about the other spots? How do you know who has touched them before you did? The bus conductor hands you back old, dirty looking currency notes at times and all you can see is germs, germs, germs. How do you know that the person that you just shook hands with had clean hands? I had read in a film magazine, back in the day, that the actor Govinda would wash his hands every time he shook hands with a stranger. Seriously, this is what I took away from a film magazine! And this made complete sense to me, of course. This also made life difficult, because I was always anxious about outdoors hygiene.

Up until the time that the luxury of home-cooked food was available, I didn't have a lot to worry about. However, as soon as early adolescence kicked in and I started to move about on my own, I realised that I had to navigate the world on my own and couldn't afford to be afraid of germs, ghosts and insects all the time. I needed to woman up in order to be prepared for the world.

So, I learnt to go easy on washing hands while continuing to maintain good hygiene, brush my teeth at night, etc. Did I strike a complete balance? Not at all. I still need my glasses spotlessly clean or I won't drink from them. Result: I end up drinking a lot less water than I should. I once read in some magazine that a sipper has more germs than a toilet seat! I wash water containers more often than I drink from them. I am terrified of water-borne disease, hence I cannot use freshly washed utensils that have water dripping from them. They must be washed and dried naturally before I can use them. As you can imagine, this severely limits the choice of people I can cohabit with.

When I started college and began to travel, I had to - as I said - woman up. I had to live with roommates in hostels, flatmates in different cities, I had to visit friends, go out, and so on. And being germaphobic is no fun when you're adulting. Cash, for germaphobes, is not money, for example; it is microbes. This part of you never fully goes away; you just learn to turn it off in order to survive. A bit like Elena's humanity switch in Vampire Diaries. All or nothing. I had switched off my ... germaphobia/germophobia whatever ... until ... fast forward to 2020 ... COVID invaded our lives with a completeness that no one had ever imagined, until COVID became the only reality.

Before the lockdown happened, I went in for one of my last in-person therapy sessions and used the washroom first. In the washroom, there was a notice that instructed people how to wash their hands as per the WHO protocol: with warm water, for 20 seconds, etc. I imagine that this must be spooky/alarming for anyone in general. For a germaphobe, however, this is the stuff of nightmares. It's the switch that we had turned off in order to be able to navigate the world as adults. It's the return of our ghosts. I asked my therapist (who also has an MBBS) how exactly the WHO arrived at this 20-second hand-washing rule. They explained to me that it is only a way of reducing probability of infection as far as possible. Same with masks. Nothing guarantees full elimination of microbes, but these are the practical measures that one can take to reduce the probability of risk as far as possible. This made sense, and I am glad that I got to have this conversation with my therapist before the world around us shut down.

I tried to strike a practical balance between observing COVID hygiene and going fully crazy for a few days. Then, I read a Facebook post from Italy: a woman who wrote movingly about the death and destruction in her country, urging everyone else in other countries to learn from it and reduce contagion by whatever means possible. Then, the movie Contagion started trending on Amazon Prime, and I had the misfortune of watching it. Then the articles about the resilience of the Coronavirus started coming in: how it can survive on glass surfaces for 9 days and rough surfaces for 24 hours, etc. I damaged a phone just by over-sanitising it. At this point, you must wonder if there is such a thing as damaging your phone by over-sanitising. Well, try me! Then began the articles about how the virus can remain suspended in air for 9 hours after an infected person has walked past the spot.

Kahani-mai-twist: At first, it felt like a vindication. A vindication of all my childhood habits and hygiene practices, my questions about the snotty man on the bus, the coins/cash handed to me by the conductor, about the germs on my sipper, and so on. I finally felt seen and heard and understood. And vindicated. No longer shunned for obsessive hand-washing or for mentally mapping bacteria on public transport.

This was until we needed to go the pharmacies and the grocery stores. Even though the shops were mostly deserted, we were terrified. We wore double masks, gloves, sunglasses (because eyes are a transmission route). We got back home as fast as possible, took a hot shower, dipped our clothes and masks in detergent water that we had already kept outside the bathroom. (In case you're wondering, 'we' here is my sister & I). We disposed of the gloves, kept the shoes out in the sun to get sterilised, sanitised the door knobs, washed the ... no kidding ... fruit and vegetables in soap solution! I was in favour of having only rice, dal, pastas and other dry grain. Back in Kashmir, that's how we survive harsh weather and harsh political conditions.

My sister, however, ordered fruit, vegetables, curd (fresh food) and I saw her as putting us through danger by doing so. We once brought home something that couldn't be washed before storing (must have been something like onions because at this point we were washing even mushrooms in soap solution, not with very good results of course). Inspired by all the articles on how the virus can remain suspended, remain alive, etc., I proposed that we clean the fridge. So, we started to sanitise the refrigerator and, while doing so, I felt a terrible loss of control. I could picture them everywhere - the viruses - they could be on anything, and no matter what or how much we cleaned, they could still be out there.

This video should give you the picture.

Though funny in retrospect, I started to feel light-headed with anxiety while cleaning the refrigerator. My sister asked me to lie down and I did. Then, in order to make me feel comfortable, she cleaned the house with Lizol and Detail. This is when I felt, for the second time in my life, that I must turn off the switch because I had gone down the deep-end of hygiene obsession. From the first wave till the second, I did not go in for a dental check-up because of the extreme fear of infection and this has cost me a tooth. More recently, I came down with a lot of other ailments, aside from COVID, touchwood! This too has made me realise that COVID is not the only reality. During the deadly second wave (summer of 2021), spooky articles about how COVID is 'airborne' again sparked anxiety and discussions between me and my friends about how to protect ourselves.

Every time there is a new variant or a black or a white fungus scare, articles in popular media continue to fuel mass paranoia with relentless information/disinformation about what to expect, when in reality nobody really knows fully what to expect. The harsh reality is that this is a new virus and it is highly under-researched. Unfortunately, everybody has become a COVID expert, some with their doomsday theories of how it survives for 9 days on your phone, others with their conspiracy theories on how this is a certain American billionaire's plan to install nano-chips in everybody's blood or brain or whatever.

COVID has exposed everybody's fear of the unknown and while some people like myself choose to react by putting on 3 masks on a flight, others go maskless. The golden balance might be somewhere in between, but we don't fully know or understand that, as yet. People should understand this, as should doctors: even they don't know everything. Last summer, after I received the first dose of vaccination, I contacted at least 4 gynecologists about having irregular periods for the first time in my life and every gynec's knee-jerk response was: "vaccine se kuch nahi hota" (translation: no, the vaccine doesn't affect anything). My question was, how do you know? If this hasn't even been studied, how do you know that it doesn't do anything? When vaccine effects on menstruation finally began to be studied and acknowledged, it turned out to be my biggest I-told-you-so moment of 2021. More on that some other day. For now, I'll leave you with the following advice if you are a germaphobe:

1. Take the virus seriously. Even if it is a global illuminati conspiracy, it'll still make you sick. So, the disease is real.

2. Follow whatever precaution you can and whatever is appropriate, depending on whether you are in an open park or in a COVID hospital ward or a containment zone.

3. Work on building your immunity, consider getting vaccinated, wear procedure masks properly please, wash your hands, depending on your logically anticipated exposure level to the virus. Now, I wear my mask on my sleeve (quite literally, as it is the most sterile method of storing and putting your mask back on) and I put it on every time I'm entering crowded spaces, even if they don't have a mask mandate. As my therapist said, the idea is to reduce probability of risk, not to go overboard.

4. Read up, but don't read too much and avoid going down rabbit holes. Take everything with a pinch of salt. Nobody is omniscient on this, so avoid the extremes. Stay in the middle, stay skeptical.

5. Don't get cavalier about your safety, but don't get anxious either because it doesn't help anything. Try to reason out and stay logical.

   PS. I might have given you the impression that I have 'learnt' germaphobia from books and magazines. I don't think that that's entirely the case. While the information about germs might be learnt, I believe that it is a certain kind of predisposition that causes you to pick up this information in particular. Everybody reads more or less the same books, but anxious people might be more predisposed to picking up stuff about germs, purity, and cleanliness. I'll stop being a quack right here. Good day!