The Covid-19 pandemic has had a devastating effect on people's mental health, and I'm no exception.
I've got OCD. And not the kind of OCD which gives you a penchant for cleaning or the inability to have books in anything but alphabetical order.
I have the scary OCD. The kind that's made me wonder if I could have killed someone and forgot about it; the kind of OCD that makes me record myself sleeping to make sure I don't unconsciously do anything bad.
But for all my OCD has made me suffer, that suffering has been eased by three unlikely heroes: my pet rats.
Yes, there's an irony that three rats have helped me through a modern plague, given the historical misconception that they were responsible for carrying the Black Death (in reality, it was humans).
My gran said it was pretty exciting when World War Two broke out, and to be honest, the start of the 2020 pandemic provided me with a lovely temporary distraction from my harmful thoughts. iIt was exciting, in a messed up way. Then I decided to go home so that I could isolate with my family during the first lockdown.
This did not go to plan.
Discover the therapeutic benefits of rats below:I developed Covid-19 symptoms and was forced to isolate alone in a strange house as my OCD got worse.
I reached breaking point when an article I wrote lead to an extreme backlash where I was accused of deliberately causing harm.
I can deal with trolls insulting my intelligence or appearance, but at that time, that really was the worst thing in the world.
However, I had an unlikely savior in the form of my hamster Ziggy, who I'd dragged all the way from London to Scotland in a little red carry box. Props to Ziggy. My furry little hero.
Just having another living thing with me during that time made all the difference.
He was my only company for six weeks and helped keep me sane throughout what was definitely one of the most challenging periods in my life.
But fundamentally, Ziggy is a hamster. Not the best for cuddling. And he is an exceptional hamster. He has more empathy than any other hamster I've ever owned, and I knew that I needed more of that.
After returning to London, I researched other small animals online, but none of them seemed like a good fit to get me through the remainder of the pandemic. Then, after the untimely death of my other hamster, Brodie, who literally slept all the time, I met some rats.
That day, I was convinced that I'd killed Brodie. The heat in London last summer was unbearable, and unfortunately, she was a casualty.
I don't think I've ever met a rat before then. Sure, I saw a dead rat outside a fast food joint once and thought yikes, but I'd never actually had the chance to hold and interact with them.
The rats in question belonged to my friends. They had a mischief of eight (yes, a group of rats is called a mischief), and within ten minutes, I was asking them what kind of bedding they needed.
Shortly after, I acquired three rats from a local rescue.
Lola, Sadie and Stardust were shy at first. Sadie's always been the leader of the mischief, but even she was reluctant to get too close to me.
Stardust was a particularly difficult rat to win over. She only has one eye, and neither I nor the rescue knows what happened to it. I had to carefully stroke her and show her that I wasn't going to hurt her.
But just a week after owning her, she was willing to cuddle up to me and boggle – the rat equivalent of purring, which involves their eyes popping in and out of their heads.
From then on, whenever my OCD played up, I'd take Stardust out for a cuddle, and just feeling her heart beating away provided a welcome distraction from the chaos in my mind.
If this little innocent animal who could hardly see her own nose thought I was a safe person, then maybe, just maybe, all the dark thoughts were just that – thoughts.
But rats are a lot more than just cuddle bugs. They are quite possibly the most intelligent animals I've ever encountered, and this is backed up by science too, with a 2011 study by the University of Chicago finding that rats will forsake chocolate to help a drowning cagemate.
When Stardust has a run-in with a candle (as a first-time rat owner, I have made mistakes, and candles and other household items, especially wires, should be kept out of their reach), she had an accidental wax.
Instead of leaving her uncomfortable, the other two helped to clean her fur before I had a chance to, something I found incredibly touching.
For all they can have their disagreements, my mischief are fundamentally a team.
And it turns out that I am a part of that team. When a close family member passed away from Covid-19 during the UK's third lockdown, without any provocation, Sadie came out of her cage and started licking my tears away.
Afterward, I texted my boyfriend and simply said: "We do not deserve animals."
One of the brilliant things about rats is that they can accompany their human owners just about anywhere, and they will happily sit on my shoulder as I go about my day-to-day tasks.
As I have been working from home for the past year, this has provided me with company throughout the day (although rats are most active at night), and when I have them with me, my OCD thoughts aren't so loud.
OCD is misunderstood to the point where it is seen as nothing more than a character quirk. When I've told people that have the illness, they've joyfully exclaimed, "Me too!" without having the slightest idea what it's really like.
The misuse of OCD as an adjective is more prevalent than ever before during the pandemic too, where traditional OCD behaviors like handwashing are being praised.
As Chrissie Hodges, a peer support specialist, told me in an interview for the Metro last year: "If the community does not take the opportunity to make a unified stand together in correcting language used about being 'so OCD' or 'the benefit of OCD behaviors' during this pandemic, we will be left with facing more trivialization of this disorder than we did before."
OCD can make interacting with people difficult, no matter how good your intentions are, because when I am fixated on an OCD thought, it can seem like I'm on another planet entirely.
But rats don't notice this symptom in the way that people do. They are just happy to have you close to them, and I think that's something worth celebrating.
You can find out more about OCD through the charities OCD Action and Made of Millions.