SPOILER ALERT: This post contains full spoilers for The Other Side of Now by Paige Harbison (Amazon affiliate link). If you haven’t read it yet, I absolutely loved it, so much that I had to sit down and write this the same day I finished the book because my brain was just BUZZIN. This is your last chance to stop before I spoil it for you.

And while you’re at it, click here to follow me on Goodreads. I’ve been told I have the best book recommendations…. no big deal… hair flip.

OCD and anxiety will always tease you with the alternate reality/timeline.

It sounds like this: if I had made that different choice, taken that other job, kept quiet instead of saying the thing, didn’t do that weird/awful thing 7 years ago, stayed when I left or left when I stayed, then everything would be better. The relationship would work, I wouldn’t have gotten sick, I wouldn’t feel like a horrible person, the anxiety wouldn’t have festered, and the version of me in that other life got it ~right~.

When you have OCD or anxiety, your brain builds that alternate life in convincing detail. If you’re anything like me, it can feel like a whole damn scary movie in there sometimes. The more time you spend on that alternate fantasy, the less you can be in the life you’re actually in right now.

I read “The Other Side of Now” TODAY and instantly gave it 5 stars. Cillian is my new book boyfriend, but that’s not even the best thing to come out of this book.

Most summaries frame this as a story about making amends with a friend who died. That’s in there, but to me, it’s about what happens when you spend so long in the alternate version of your life that you lose track of how to be in the actual one. The grass-is-greener spiral run through a plot, the fantasy with no bad parts because it’s some manufactured, idealized version, the comparison between the full messy reality of your life and the highlight reel of the one you didn’t live.

OCD is very good at running such comparisons.

Meg Bryan, known to the world as actress Lana Lord, gets launched into this alternate fantasy (or timeline? No one really knows). She’s so devastated by the loss of her childhood best friend that she shuts everyone out and becomes a shell of herself. And when she cracks (I think during a birthday party), she flies to the Irish village where she and Aimee once dreamed of living. She finds herself in the other life. The one where Aimee is alive, where she never got famous, where the alternate life she’d dreamt of was waiting.

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There’s a quote early in the book. I had to put my Kindle down after it.

“When you’re ‘perfect,’ you never truly are. You don’t cross a finish line of hotness. It’s a constant battle of maintenance that involves constant failure, and the goalposts are perpetually moving.”

Harbison is talking about Meg’s relationship with her appearance, but read it with OCD certainty-seeking in mind. That is the most accurate description of that process I’ve read in a novel. (And I’ve read a lot of novels. See: Goodreads. See: the 52-book challenge. See: my bookstand situation, which is, frankly, insane and unnecessary.)

You don’t cross a finish line, you never get to this place where you’re like, ahh, yes, certainty! I feel 100% sure now! I’m good now! Never to worry about that thing again! The goalposts keep moving.

Personal example: After social interactions, an intrusive thought shows up. Did I ask enough questions? Did I talk too much about myself? Did that land wrong? And I want to go back over the conversation, I want a tally that adds up right, I want to know I was the correct amount of interested and interesting. For about four seconds after I review it, I feel better. Then the goalpost moves. Maybe I asked enough questions but the tone was off, or I brought up that one thing. The reassurance expires and the next version of the doubt loads immediately.

OCD always promises a finish line and never delivers one.

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