Abby T.
Photography by Sarah Tyner
This past year has been one of the most amazing yet difficult years of my life. The numerous therapy appointments, panic attacks and mental health walks should practically write this letter for me. But really, they've resulted in so many realizations and messages I want to convey to you that all I could do was sit at my laptop and watch the cursor blink. What if I choose the wrong topic? What if my letter isn't perfect? In an all too on-the-nose fashion, I'm reminded that even as I write this, my journey with OCD is far from over. However, I'm proud of how far I have come and if you're reading this, I'm excited to tell you what I've learned about my ever-present friend.
I experienced symptoms of OCD for years without knowing. I couldn't eat at restaurants growing up, because I had such a strong fear of throwing up, but I wrote it off as anxiety. When I obsessively tracked my family when they drove places in case they got in a car accident and died, I joked with my friends about how anxious I was.
These symptoms characteristized my mental health for quite some time, waxing and waning in severity. I finally reached my breaking point last summer. I became plagued with intrusive thoughts about my relationships, my sexuality, and making things “just right”. Thoughts like “What if I don’t love my boyfriend enough?”, or “What if I’m gay and I don’t know it?”, or “What if everything around me isn’t real?”. I couldn’t seem to unstick these thoughts and doubts from my brain. I knew these thoughts weren't true, they weren't how I really felt. "But then why am I thinking them? That must mean there is some deeply buried seed of truth there," I would tell myself. And naturally, that meant I must spend hours figuring that out. So yeah, not fun.
But that couldn’t be OCD… right? Like most people, I thought OCD was about being tidy and afraid of germs. That didn’t apply to me. I didn’t realize that constantly checking my emotions to ensure they were “just right” could be a compulsion. Or spending an inordinate amount of time worrying and analyzing my sexuality and relationship. Or changing my outfit multiple times a day because it doesn’t feel “right”. On paper, this summer should have been amazing. It was filled with so many beautiful memories of visiting my boyfriend in Portland and exploring the Pacific Northwest, working at my dream job and having an apartment to myself. And while I truly did enjoy those things, I felt like I couldn’t enjoy them the way they deserved to be. My OCD was always lingering in the background, robbing me of living my life the way I wanted.
Because I wasn't aware of all the ways OCD could present itself, I went to therapy for months for what I labeled anxiety. I felt so pained by and guilty for the attention I’d given these thoughts and I continued to spiral: sinking into shame and sadness and wondering if I could trust my own brain. There’s a quote from John Green’s book Turtles All the Way Down that sums this up: “The thing about a spiral is, if you follow it inward, it never actually ends. It just keeps tightening, infinitely.” It seems dramatic to say but, it felt like I was carrying the weight of the world on my chest. As I write this, I’m struggling because I want to be eloquent about OCD and the pain I felt. But quite honestly - there aren’t words. It just sucked. A lot. For months on end. It wouldn't be until I realized I might have OCD that my mental health had any chance of improving.
What actually flipped the switch was a post by If You’re Reading This. It was early October and I was scrolling through Instagram in bed. I’d just spent the weekend having debilitating panic attacks and had felt more hopeless than ever before. I came across the IYRT post about OCD. Curious, I clicked on the link and began to read. As I read, I resonated with the words in front of me: “Intrusive thoughts”. That hit home. I began to read about the subtypes of OCD and when I came across Relationship OCD, I nearly cried. The few paragraphs about this subtype of OCD described my experience perfectly. For the first time in months, that weight on my chest lifted. I wasn’t totally crazy. I wasn’t a horrible person. There was an explanation for these spiraling thoughts that I was so confused by.
OCD means you have repeated, unwanted obsessions and the desire to perform compulsions to alleviate the anxiety this creates. OCD is essentially a cycle. There is the intrusive thought, and the discomfort or anxiety it creates. Everyone has intrusive thoughts, but for people with OCD they attach meaning to those thoughts and will do something to alleviate the discomfort (compulsion). It becomes a disorder when the thoughts and/or the compulsions that follow take up a significant amount of your time and inhibit your quality of life. For me, a lot of my compulsions are mental. For example, I could be watching a romance movie and think “this doesn’t align with what my relationship is like,” and need to figure out if this was a problem, feeling a distorted sense of urgency. Logic doesn’t really work with OCD so no matter how much I ruminated on my fears, there was no “solution”. OCD latches onto what you care about. For me, I value my relationships and purpose in life. Therefore, my OCD manifested itself as intrusive thoughts around my relationships, morals and sexuality. Relationship OCD in particular is ego dystonic, which means it attaches to what scares the sufferer. These thoughts don’t line up with who I am and are not indicative of my actual feelings, which is what makes OCD so painful and confusing.
After showing the article to my therapist for general anxiety, I began to see an Exposure Response Prevention therapist as well as started on Zoloft. Since I began therapy, my therapist has been suggesting medication. Despite my values of mental health being important, I maintained the mentality that medication was for other people, not for me. However, Zoloft has been pretty amazing. I wouldn’t be where I am today without it. I say that because you should know that you are not weak for needing medication. It’s not a bad thing. That’s something I wish I could tell myself 6 months ago so I’m telling you now.
That doesn’t mean it’s been easy since then. OCD is called the “Doubting Disorder” for a reason. There are days when I doubt my diagnosis and begin to spiral again. Treating OCD doesn’t mean the intrusive thoughts go away. I’ve just gotten better at accepting the uncertainty. I wish I could tell myself - you are not alone. Thoughts are not facts. They are just noise. You don’t need to figure it out. I would tell myself to sit with the discomfort, and to accept the uncertainty.
But I can’t tell myself those things (time travel is not real, much to my chagrin). But I can tell the readers of this letter. So, if you’re reading this, you are not alone. If you’re reading this, thoughts are just thoughts.
If you’re reading this, I didn’t realize how hard it would be to write this letter.
I’m fairly open about my mental health - my OCD diagnosis isn’t a secret. My Tik Toks about Zoloft speak for themselves. But my heart hurt as I wrote this letter. Despite my openness, my stomach churns at the idea of revealing my most painful moments to the world, to my peers. OCD pops up again, a constant voice of doubt. What if they don’t believe you? You probably don’t even have OCD.
There is no way to fit my entire experience with OCD into this letter. Believe me, I’ve been trying. But if there’s one thing I want you, the reader, to take away from my letter, it’s this: OCD is real. OCD can wear many hats. Every time writing this letter was hard, I thought about how much it would have meant to me to read this last year. So, most importantly, if you’re finding yourself relating a little too much - you aren’t alone. Having OCD has been tough. But there is help out there, I promise. You are not your thoughts and you deserve to live a good life despite them.
Abby T., Georgia Tech
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