The Main Thing Is to Not Be Afraid: Tove Jansson, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder and Art in the Era of Climate Change

Moshe Schaffzin

“Everything looks worse in the dark, you know”6, writes Tove Jansson, famous Finnish painter and children’s author, in her first book The Moomins and the Great Flood during the last years of World War II. I imagine her sitting hunched over a wooden desk stained with paint and covered in pencil shavings, interrupting her writing every few minutes to glance anxiously out the window at the grey Finnish sky. I see myself in her, as I sit writing on my laptop in Canada where the temperature has reached 31°C, compulsively picking up my phone to check for some kind of catastrophic emergency alert whenever my mind begins to wander. The scream of an air raid siren and an iPhone sounding the disaster alarm don’t sound that different after all.

Though my anxiety is a product of the time in which I live, it is also a product of my obsessive-compulsive disorder, which has been the biggest obstacle for me in all areas of my life for as long as I can remember. I have begun 2025 with another OCD relapse, and my obsessive thoughts, which normally involve fears of terminal illness, have this time been coloured by the effects of a changing climate. Recently, I’ve been reading a lot about Tove Jansson, partly because I’ve been interested in her work since I was a child, but also because I’ve found her to be quite relatable. Like myself, she was both a writer and painter, but what has been grabbing my attention in my self-guided research the most is the fact that she began her professional artistic career in the midst of World War II. Very rarely has humanity faced a level of existential threat similar to that brought by the Second World War, but the largest threat facing humanity at this current instance, climate change—and its resulting environmental, social and political breakdown—does just that.

To quote a cliche, “history doesn’t repeat itself, but it does often rhyme,” and as such I, as a university student just beginning their writing career in the midst of all this, have been looking to Tove Jansson for guidance. By examining both her professional and personal writings, I have come to the conclusion that the only way through the challenges that coincide with climate change is to accept the uncertainty these events bring without avoidance—such as expressed in the typical model for OCD recovery—while still holding onto hope. As demonstrated by Jansson, the medium of art is perhaps the most effective way of processing and channeling all manner of anxieties about the future into beautiful creations that inspire this hope in the midst of existential threat.

The first real memory I have related to OCD takes place when I am six years old. I’m sitting with my elementary school class, learning cursive on the first Wednesday of the month in mid-spring. If you’ve ever lived in the American Midwest, then you’re probably familiar with the ebbing siren that unleashes its guttural, frankly pretty frightening voice whenever the region is bisected by the path of a tornado or nearly swept into the muddy, Ohio River by a severe thunderstorm . . . or if it happens to be a first Wednesday of the month in spring, when they test the alarms. The typical reaction is a brief seizure of anxiety, leopard fur standing on end, before the memory surfaces that yes, today is a first Wednesday. There’s nothing to worry about, and the conversation lulls back to a dull purring. I wonder how often Midwesterners in the 2020s find themselves in these periods of brief, full-body-encompassing anxiety, and if it ever happens in the absence of alarms.

I’m sitting in class with my teacher, who is helping me learn to perfect my cursive A, when the room momentarily buzzes with anxiety at the ringing of the familiar siren song, before settling back into calm at my realization that it’s Wednesday. It has been stormy all day, and little Moshe anxiously twists their Skechered feet in four clockwise circular motions, then four counter-clockwise circular motions. Obsessive-compulsive disorder is a very misunderstood disease that is often stereotyped as being an extreme form of germophobia, but this could not be further from the truth. OCD is characterized by unwanted, intrusive thoughts about a particular “obsession,” that is, an extreme personal fear. This can be anything from fear of developing a serious illness to fear of getting into a car accident. To counteract these obsessive thoughts, people with OCD will engage in “compulsions,” which are repetitive behaviours that momentarily relieve the anxiety, but that end up reinforcing the obsession and making the anxiety worse in the long run.

My teacher, seeming to have a sixth sense for what would become my obsessive-compulsive disorder says something like, “Don’t worry. It’s just a Wednesday. There’s no tornado.” I remember her reassurances bringing me first calm, then an overwhelming anxiety once that immediate relief wore off, as is the case with most reassurances in relation to OCD. First the sweet, falsified comfort, then the tsunami of fear. I have no way of knowing, when the first drop of reassurance calms the swirling whirlpool that was my childhood OCD, that despite it being a first Wednesday, when real tornadoes are never supposed to happen, a severe thunderstorm will knock down the hundred-year-old oaks in the backyard of my childhood home that very night. At that moment, all I care about is how nice it feels to think, “Yes, it’s just a Wednesday,” before being yanked underwater by my pigtails again.

In a letter written during the Second World War, Tove Jansson writes:

 

You can’t scream inside yourself. You push things aside, you keep working, but you avoid things that bring the outer world closer to you: newspapers, radio, the telephone, war magazines. They dig up everything that’s smouldering and burning deep inside you. Even though one does not bury one’s head in the sand but is intensely present, every moment in, every part of oneself.7

 

One of the principal but lesser known symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder is avoidance. It’s a form of compulsion where, instead of doing a certain behaviour to relieve the anxiety caused by intrusive thoughts, you avoid things that trigger the intrusive thoughts in the first place. Avoidance is something I have struggled with for as long as I have had OCD. In middle and high school, I refuse to turn in homework assignments, or don’t complete them in the first place, because I am scared of getting bad grades. Of course, this means I not only fail the assignment, but am also forced to take home letters to my parents chastizing me for my failure (which I secretly recycle, along with the offending papers marked with a circled or underlined “F”). It doesn’t mean the grades aren’t there; I still get low Cs or Ds in the classes that make me the most anxious, but OCD is not logical, and neither is my avoidance. But then, the fear itself isn’t logical in the first place either. I graduate with a GPA of 3.35, not the best, not the worst, and am still able to get into a major university. My bad grades affect me very little.

But during this most recent relapse, my avoidance has taken on a new form. Starting in January of this year, I have begun avoiding the news. I can’t figure out why—the election? Anxiety about my family in the U.S.? Catastrophizing about the various wars happening around the world? I remember one instance of laying on the couch being unable to stop crying, my sobs turning into weak, raspy, hiccuping and my eyes swollen to bee stings, after accidentally seeing a scary news headline on a newspaper stand in downtown Ottawa. “Who even reads newspapers anymore?” I think to myself. “They’re inventing headlines to make me upset.” From that moment on, I decide that I need to avoid the news. I delete nearly all my social media; I block news websites on my phone; when I walk by a newspaper stand, I look the other direction and try to hold my breath, as if the bad news was a ghost trying to possess me as I passed a graveyard.

When I see a headline about there being more CO2 in the atmosphere today than there ever has been in any year human beings have lived, and I feel the familiar somersault, body-turning-inside-out feeling that typically accompanies seeing a trigger unexpectedly, I realize what it is I’ve been avoiding: climate change. Unlike my past fears, like my fear of having terminal cancer at 21 with no family history, I find it very hard to recognize this fear as improbable, because it isn’t, really: it’s happening. Every day, every hour, every minute, I am (and you are) living in a world where the climate is changing—and those changes are happening right now, not in some hypothetical, unlikely anxiety scenario.

The thing about avoidance is that it makes the anxiety worse whenever the avoidant behaviour is engaged in. In your mind, it feels like you’re preventing the anxiety because you’re avoiding the things that make you anxious, which seems logical. However, even if this provides momentary relief, the object of fear still exists when you’re not actively looking at it, so the anxiety about it never wholly leaves. If this is the case, then why is it that so many people spend every day of life in 2025 avoiding thinking about climate change? I can recognize, as someone who has done all manner of intensive OCD treatment, that this is an irrational behaviour. The threat of climate change is there; trying not to think about it doesn’t make it not exist, but we keep doing it anyway.

The simple answer is that most people are under the impression that there is nothing they can do to stop climate change, because they’re just a little person with no power, so they justify the irrationality of avoiding thinking about the subject by saying, “Well, there’s nothing I can do, so it’s not worth thinking about.” But how healthy a coping mechanism is that really? In my experience, it’s not a very healthy one at all. The more time we spend pushing away our fear, the worse it gets, until we reach some kind of mental tipping point where the fear completely takes over. In exposure, response, prevention therapy (ERP), which is the gold standard treatment for obsessive-compulsive disorder, you have to run towards the fear in order to overcome it, because not thinking about the fear doesn’t make the threat stop existing.

So if we accept climate change without running away from it, what happens? Often, people’s immediate reaction is to fall into despair, as humans are wont to do in times of extreme upheaval. During the war, Jansson writes:

 

War everywhere, the whole world at war. What can I say? I don’t say very much these days . . . I don’t think very clearly either, it’s all just feelings. Sometimes it feels as if something of the collected agony of the whole world has been weighing heavily in me like a lump and threatening to burst apart. Never has sympathy been so mixed with bitterness, love so mixed with hate, and the will to live–and despite everything to live rightly and worthily–with an urge to just creep away and let go[.]8

 

Feelings of despair are common in obsessive-compulsive disorder. Most intrusive thoughts involve spiraling about what feels like an inevitable tragic event. During the height of my relapse, I often spend over an hour pacing back and forth, ruminating about every way climate change could destroy what I’ve built so far in my short life. I wonder if people without OCD find themselves acting similarly when thinking about climate change. Maybe not to the same degree, but I imagine many of the people reading this article without OCD have felt the same all-encompassing anxiety response at one point or another.

Often in leftist circles people will talk about how panic isn’t helpful, which is true, but even if you can suppress the panic through compartmentalization, the feelings still exist, they just now have no outlet, and the despair still weighs on you heavily. This, I believe, is what leads people to avoid talking about climate change. With no outlet for their feelings and no idea how to move forward, they avoid the thing that makes them anxious, because otherwise they would fall into despair. Avoidance is unhealthy and provokes anxiety, but so does spending time actively pondering what climate change means for you as an individual and for us as a collective. In 1944, Jansson loses her ability to paint.9 At the time, she is primarily an oil painter rather than a writer.

With no outlet, her despair becomes more pronounced and all-encompassing, her mind overwhelmed by the existential threat of the war. It is also around this time that her mind begins to search for a new outlet for her anxiety: playful children’s writing.10 It is in 1945, during the last months of the war, when it seems that the barbarity of the fighting has reached an unbearable level, that Jansson’s first Moomin book, The Moomins and the Great Flood, is published.11

The conflict in Moomin narratives, especially those written during and immediately after the war, is often driven by true peril. Floods of biblical proportions and world-ending comets are just some of the threats the main characters are faced with. Unlike many other children’s narratives, the Moomin characters are allowed to express their fear and sadness openly.

There is one scene in Comet in Moominland, likely inspired by the bombing of Helsinki in 1944,12 where the characters discover that the red-hot comet hurtling towards their valley has made the sea dry up. Snufkin, who is normally the calm, wise, advice-giver of the group, weeps at the sight of the dry seabed.13 I can’t help but be reminded of my own circumstances, in which the town I live in, located in southern Ontario, an area rarely faced with drought, has recently announced strict water restrictions due to dry conditions in the midst of a two-month-long heatwave.

But despite the peril present in these narratives, the stories always end with a beacon, however small, of unbreakable hope. At the end of Comet in Moominland, while the characters huddle in a dark cave waiting for the end, the comet suddenly diverts. When they emerge from their bunker, they find the sea rushing back into the dry seabed and laugh with relief as they play in the waves.14

What does art like that of Tove Jansson’s mean for us, we who are also living through an era of unprecedented change and ecological breakdown? If avoidance only multiplies anxiety and ruminating leads to despair, then maybe the correct way to deal with this overwhelming climate anxiety is to channel it into art. Recently, climate fiction has been emerging as a prominent genre both academically and commercially, with many universities now teaching it as part of their creative writing programs. Climate fiction authors like Octavia E. Butler and Jeff VanderMeer line bookstore shelves across the world. As a writer of primarily climate fiction myself, I may be biased, but it seems to me that there is a real want from the general populace to have an outlet for their climate worries. The common thread I have found between many of the climate narratives I’ve read, even dark and dystopian ones such as Butler’s Parable of the Sower or Omar El-Akkad’s American War, is a small but persistent nugget of hope.

For someone like me with obsessive-compulsive disorder, acceptance of the uncertainty while also having hope is the most important thing for recovery. Nowhere have I found a more effective strategy for coping than in creating art about climate change that expresses all the fears swirling inside me, funnels them into narratives that ground me with feelings of acceptance of my situation, and inspires me with practical solutions for a better future. I hope that the solutions posed by artists and writers can become a vehicle not just for personal acceptance of the reality of climate change, but also for collective implementation of these solutions.

To overcome climate change, we must take a page out of the OCD recovery manual and accept global warming as reality without avoidance while still holding onto hope, however slim it may seem. Art can be a vehicle for our anxiety about both our reality and our hope, and maybe, if accepted by enough people, it can also become a vehicle for positive change within ourselves and in our societies. In Moominland Midwinter, Tove Jansson writes, “All things are so very uncertain, and that’s exactly what makes me feel reassured.”15 An era of changing climate has now become inevitable, but despair doesn’t have to be.

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