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I’ve come to realize it’s been with me my whole life. My first memory of its presence was after my parents’ divorce. I was six and my life was newly split in two. Two houses. Two Christmases. Two sets of expectations on who and how to be. I was too young to be involved in the details of the divorce and therefore didn’t know who to blame. So I decided to blame them both, beginning with my mom one morning in the elementary school drop off. As I opened the car door and stepped onto the sidewalk, she turned from the front seat to face me and call out, “Have a good day! I love you!” In an act of self-protection, as if to send a clear message that I was hurting, I didn’t return the gesture. Instead I withheld my love. Slamming the door while mumbling a faint, half-hearted, “You too.”
To most, an attitudinal elementary schooler is nothing to write home about. But I was aware of the contents of my heart, and I knew my actions didn’t match up. I did love my mom. I just couldn’t express it. Something within me blocked my love from coming out. And so, as I stepped through the front doors of the school, ‘it’ showed up — very clearly for the first time — in the form of a thought. It was the same thought that would haunt me in decades and relationships to come, bound tightly within a ball of guilt, shame, and fear. What if she dies?
Looking back, there are many signs that it’s always been there, now that I know the symptoms — if not a loud roar then at least a low hum. In childhood, it showed up in the tiny habits that I considered to be my quirks. Counting telephone poles outside the car window. Counting the syllables of every sentence I heard — songs, conversations — repeating the words in my head and tapping my fingers one-by-one until they landed on a multiple of four. In adulthood, it got clever. Eventually taking the form of a narrative that was so convincing, so pervasive, I practically became it. Like a host that succumbs to a parasite, it controlled me. In ignorant obedience, I rattled off its mantra until its message became my own. I am not living my truth.
For upwards of ten years, the idea that I was living incorrectly — that something about me or my life was fundamentally not right — consumed my every waking thought. I spent hours, days, weeks taking personality tests, applying to jobs, seeking reassurance from anyone who would hand it to me that I was not wrong for feeling this dissonance, this wrongness, coming from within. Its eradication became my mission. My solution and my problem. I wouldn’t rest until I could identify the root of my unhappiness and pull it clean out of the ground, so that my internal desires would no longer feel misaligned from the outside world. I lived my life as a race against the clock. My biggest fear became dying before my peace was restored and my destiny was reached.
Until one day, on a cloudy March morning, I sat across from Connor in our Los Angeles bedroom and confessed to him through tears that he was next in the crosshairs of my mind’s disease. Something about my life had felt wrong for some time, I explained, and lately I couldn’t get over the thought that it might be our relationship. The words felt bitter and cruel coming out of my mouth, and for the first time there was a part of me that didn’t actually believe what my thoughts had to say. For months, they had insisted that Connor might be the source of my greater discomfort, but in my heart, I knew that I had never loved anyone or anything as much as I loved him and that my life had only benefited from his kind, free, unwavering love for me. So why then was I pushing him away? A new kind of dissonance emerged.
I took a jog alongside the LA River — my attempt at outrunning the whiplash of my mind — but only made it half a mile before my body begged me to be still. I pulled off to a parkside bench and took a seat. With my hands on my knees, I looked up to the sky and privately but audibly begged God for assistance. “What is happening to me?”
What-is-happ-en-ing-to-me? What-is-happ-en-ing-to-me? What-is-happ-en-ing-to-me? I repeated the phrase in my mind, counting on my fingers until the syllables landed on a multiple of four.
It was here. Sitting with me on the bench. The same ‘it’ that had torn me apart since I was young and then blamed me for being in pieces. I pulled out my phone and took to Google, just as I always did when I wasn’t exactly sure where to turn next. I typed some desperate inquiry into the search bar and hoped that someone somewhere would be able to explain to me what I was feeling. What I found was a series of articles that seemed to describe an obscure mental health condition, each paragraph dense with a particular kind of jargon I’d never heard before. Words like compulsions, exposures, and habituation. As I read through, I was surprised to find the deep nuances of my personal experience reflected back at me. An alignment. A knowing. This is me. I found myself standing up and walking home slowly as I continued reading, completely engulfed in these new ideas, terms, and diagrams that equally terrified me and gave me hope. Perhaps I had found the answer I was looking for, I thought. Perhaps I could finally put a name to the ‘it’ that had wreaked havoc on my life for so long.
I stepped through the front door and crumbled onto the couch, drained. Upon hearing my return, Connor walked into the room. We locked eyes as I sat up, and I began to sob, again, uncontrollably — fully surrendering, finally, to whatever transformation was taking place within me. He sat beside me and held me while I cried, placing his arms around my shoulders, his cheek pressed to my back. I felt like a monster accepting his affection, his unspoken forgiveness, after I’d stuck my claws into his heart only minutes before. But I accepted his affection nonetheless. Turning to face him, I handed him my phone and spoke aloud the words that would come to change the course of both of our lives as we knew it.
“I think I have OCD.”
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A few things I’m thankful for:
- Time moving slowly
- Vegetables
- The mundanity of caring for my home
Pop culture things I’m thinking about:
- I found this podcast episode enlightening
- I just purchased The Alchemist. Anyone read it?
- “Guess” by Charli feat. Billie !?!!
A random journal entry:
4.13.23
OCD:
- top 10 most debilitating illnesses
- every time someone participates in the compulsions, the obsession gets stronger
- like an itch - you scratch it, the itch intensifies
- generally taboo topics
- checking, repetition, order…
A random thought:
If you got through today’s writing, I commend you. It’s a dense and heavy one!
I’m challenging myself to spend the next few newsletters writing a bit about my experience with OCD. It’s a complex, confusing topic that I’m still trying to wrap my head around myself, and I’m definitely by no means an OCD expert — let me make that clear! Anything you read here will only be through the lens of my experience. I started with today’s story “The Big Bang” because I wanted to describe how I came to discover I have OCD. Who knows what facet of the disorder I’ll explore next.
For any OCD related questions you might have, pointing you to a few resources I found helpful below. And please, please, OCD or not — take care of yourself! Take this as a sign to rest, give yourself a break, drink water, go on a walk, go on a bike ride! Love you!!!!!
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Thanks for reading :) Talk again soon.