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Thesis as cure   On 31 December 2019, I wrote in my diary that 2020 would be a Year of Exposure I had no plans to make this public For as long as I could remember I had felt it necessary to control ‘the narrative’, which in practice meant that I resisted telling essential facts about myself to anyone other than those people who, within the stark ecosystem of my mind, fell into the categories of ‘necessary’ or ‘safe’ Behind a shame-faced semblance of functionality, I hid a version of myself that was shaped by the irrational contortions of fear that had been with me since childhood, and the failed rituals that I desperately used to exorcise myself of my terror After years of denial, this fearing self emerged only in moments of out-of-control feeling, and within the medical settings that were designed to bring feeling back under control Eventually, this self found the fate of a diagnostic determination To shrinks, in their language of shrinkage, I was suffering with a Specific Phobia of Vomiting and health-related OCD   After a number of aborted therapeutic interventions, in mid-2019, through a collision of events – nothing so spectacular or drastic as hitting rock-bottom, but some luck, lots of desperation and enough willingness – I began a course of treatment The recommended treatment for phobias and OCD is Exposure Therapy, which methodically places the patient into situations they have habitually avoided, with the aim of helping them overcome their fear   By the end of the year, I had found some small yet significant success Filled with the endorphins of progressive change, I set myself on the senseless quest of self-experiment – a commitment not just to the standardised series of sessions provided by medical guidelines, but to a Year of Exposure I made a lengthy list of things I would do; it ranged from small acts of disclosure about my phobia, to what I termed ‘vomit simulations’ – where I would spit chewed acidic concoctions into the depths of the toilet bowl – to taking a flight for the first time in three years In my