It was the summer before my sophomore year of high school and we were walking home from dinner in my parents’ home city of Belgrade, Serbia. I had managed to get my mom alone. How will I tell her?
At dinner, I had been disconnected from my parents and their friends, glued to my phone. They had probably assumed I was texting or scrolling through social media, but in fact I had been desperately searching Google for answers. To “obsessive thinking.” To “rumination.” To “I can’t get this thought out of my head.”
That morning, I had had a deeply disturbing sexual thought. It had filled me with panic and I had wondered, “What if this thought never leaves?” It didn’t. It stayed with me every single second that day. Every single second.
Walking home from dinner, I saw I had no choice but to be vulnerable. I can’t live another day like this. “Mama, I have to tell you something.”
For some people, OCD manifests from a young age, and for others, it gradually sneaks in. For me, it hit like a truck.
This is not to say that I showed no risk of developing the disorder. I started hair pulling in 5th grade during our end-of-year standardized testing, which soon developed into trichotillomania. In school, I plugged my ears when reading test questions because every little sound felt offensive. Before bed, I performed a fully-fledged routine consisting of journaling, meditation, and stretching that would cause me great panic if disrupted. My parents gave up on watching TV with the sound on at night because I could feel and was deeply bothered by vibrations through the floor.
But unlike these inconvenient “quirks,” my intrusive thought was all-consuming. It was there when I opened my eyes in the morning, and it was there when my head hit the pillow. It trained with me during swim practice, it watched me do my homework, it joined in on every conversation I had, and it ate every meal with me. There was nothing that was off-limits. It took over my life and my identity. I didn’t just have a disorder, it was all I was.
My path to recovery began on that night six years ago, but that path did not have a constant upward slope. I had felt as though I had definitively crossed the line from “normal” to “crazy.” The “crazy” no-man’s-land I found myself in was petrifying not only because it was foreign, solitary, and freakish, but also because it remained undefined.
The night I told my mom that I was struggling with scary thoughts that wouldn’t leave, she put me on the phone with her best friend, a children’s psychiatrist, who reassured me that these were intrusive thoughts, a symptom of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. Over the next two months, I grasped onto her words as my lifeline from abstract insanity, because the only thing scarier than being mentally ill was the possibility that my mental illness was uniquely and only mine.
Sometime during the start of my sophomore year, I was sitting on the carpeted steps next to the door frame to the kitchen of my childhood home. My mom was on the other side of the frame, holding a book she bought for parents of children with OCD. She was telling me that my intake appointment was scheduled for October, which was soon enough, theoretically, but I wasn’t quite sure how I was expected to make it till then.
Shaking the book, she said, “But I don’t think you have OCD. You don’t have any visible compulsions.”
I choked on her words, because if it wasn’t OCD, what could it be?
Without a formal diagnosis, I was in a state of limbo and the invisibility of my compulsions cast doubt on our best guess. What my mom (and everyone else) couldn’t see were the phrases I had picked up to try to combat the disturbing sentence that was living in my head. “It will get better. It will get better. It will get better.” Or, in other words, this thought will leave. They couldn’t see the visualizations of being hit by a car or stabbed in the leg that soothed me, because they promised at least a few seconds of peace from my thought.
At my intake appointment, I was diagnosed with OCD and matched with a clinical psychologist for Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). She began our work together by educating me on OCD and the vicious anxiety cycle that is maintained through compulsions: intrusive thought, then anxiety spike, then compulsion, then momentary anxiety decrease. Repeat. One way of treating OCD is by exposing yourself to the anxiety trigger while taking out the compulsion. Anxiety can only spike up for so long.
Finding the right exposures was a trial-and-error process. At first, I had to say the thought out loud, take it out of my mind and speak it into existence.
I can’t remember if I started crying before or after I uttered the words for the first time. I cried not because the words were unbearable, though they were, but because I was 15, sitting in an office room across from a stranger, being forced to say a vulgar sexual sentence. I wanted “normal” problems; I wanted to be annoyed with homework, uncomfortably self-conscious, and at odds with my parents. But somehow, I had ended up in a room with a stranger, being forced to say a vulgar sexual sentence.
My pain was isolating. My reality shifted drastically and rapidly, and I felt completely disconnected from the person I had been just a few months ago, because our problems felt incomparable in scope. Everything around me also seemed minuscule and inconsequential, and, in turn, I found it hard to relate to others. I noticed envy and resentment growing when my teammates were upset after a bad race or when my friends complained about school. Because my identity became so entangled with my disorder, I felt unknown to all my peers, but being understood was not something I dared to dream of as a possibility. The thought that gave life to my disorder was simultaneously irrelevant and deeply shameful. As anyone who is well-versed in OCD knows, a person’s intrusive thoughts only reveal their most intimate fears and disgusts. But, of course, most people are not well-versed in OCD. When most people assumed “cleanliness” and “compulsive checking” at the disclosure of my disorder, how could I share even a taste of my reality or the sexual nature of my intrusions without risking a hurtful, ignorant interaction?
Once I mastered speaking my thought out loud in therapy, we experimented to find more triggering and effective exposures. We tried reading news articles about occurrences related to my thought, but to no avail. This revealed that I had no fear of the thought occurring in my own life. We tried writing scripts about how my life would look in 5, 10, 15 years if my thought persisted, but I felt nothing when we read them. This revealed my fears were not rooted that far in the future.
Eventually, we found effective exposures by rediscovering the question that sparked the onset of my OCD, “What if this thought never leaves?” I learned to comfortably answer, “Maybe it won’t.”
I forced the question “What if it gets worse?” onto myself and learned to expand on the scenario in my head, making it more detailed and disgusting. The worse, the better.
After finding and using exposures that worked for me, my intrusive thought gave me less anxiety and, consequently, popped into my head less often. As good days came more frequently and stayed for longer, I noticed a strange emptiness inconspicuously settle within. I couldn’t remember the pain of my worst days, but who was I without that memory? What did I have to show for it all? My therapist suggested that maybe a part of recovery for me was letting the past become blurry, letting myself start to care again about the “silly” things again, letting some of that new-found perspective fade away.
There was no momentous moment when recovery became “real.” I don’t remember much about my OCD journey going forward, which is how I know I let myself move on. I stopped collecting anecdotes of pain as proof of my experience. I let new problems take up space without belittling them. My intrusive thought did not disappear, but it didn’t shut me down or put a halt to my day. And since I was able to accept it into my life without letting it take over, after a few years, it did virtually disappear.
Now, I use past tense when I disclose my disorder. It doesn’t begin to define me anymore, but it has helped shaped me in ways I now find beautiful.
I am more understanding and empathetic, because I know how difficult it is to go through life feeling like your experience is misunderstood and unknown.
I don’t waste time on disingenuity, because I know a friendship that isn’t there in turmoil isn’t a friendship at all.
I do not shy away from vulnerability, because I believe our strength shines brightest when we let ourselves be soft.
And I am unapologetically myself, OCD and all, because I’ve fought too hard to be here to waste it pretending to be someone else.
