Welcome to the Chronicles of a Girl Worried AF. This blog was started at the suggestion of my therapist; a very smart, funny, and magician of a woman who I met through NOCD.com, a web-based therapy community that provides therapy and resources for those afflicted with OCD. My therapist is like the Cheshire Cat, and I will reference her from time to time, so let's call her Cat... and you can call me Alice.
All in the Golden Afternoon
All in the golden afternoon
Full leisurely we glide;
For both our oars, with little skill,
By little arms are plied,
While little hands make vain pretence
Our wanderings to guide.
Ah, cruel Three! In such an hour,
Beneath such dreamy weather,
To beg a tale of breath too weak
To stir the tiniest feather!
Yet what can one poor voice avail
Against three tongues together?
Imperious Prima flashes forth
Her edict "to begin it"—
In gentler tones Secunda hopes
"There will be nonsense in it!"—
While Tertia interrupts the tale
Not more than once a minute.
Anon, to sudden silence won,
In fancy they pursue
The dream-child moving through a land
Of wonders wild and new,
In friendly chat with bird or beast—
And half believe it true.
And ever, as the story drained
The wells of fancy dry,
And faintly strove that weary one
To put the subject by,
"The rest next time—" "It is next time!"
The happy voices cry.
Thus grew the tale of Wonderland:
Thus slowly, one by one,
Its quaint events were hammered out—
And now the tale is done,
And home we steer, a merry crew,
Beneath the setting sun.
Alice! A childish story take,
And with a gentle hand,
Lay it where Childhood's dreams are twined
In Memory's mystic band,
Like pilgrim's withered wreath of flowers
Plucked in far-off land.[4]
-Lewis Caroll, The Adventures of Alice in Wonderland, Preface. 1865
Living with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder can feel like Alice through the looking glass. Everything is upside down and too big or too small... devilishly distorted so you question your own reality and this is why I have always identified with Alice, even before I knew what OCD is or what it meant for me and my life. In a world where you can simply not even know what is true, I can, and will, promise you that I will always be honest. This is a promise to myself too. Having OCD is not comfortable and my hope is that being completely truthful will help in my recovery. This condition is very misunderstood. Without getting on a soap box, OCD is not about being super organized or loving pretty closets and pantries. OCD is a lot of things, but one thing it is not is an adjective. More on that to come...
So, like I said before, you can call me Alice and I invite you on my adventures of slaying the Jabberwocky that is OCD.
My journey with OCD has been long and complicated. Long because I was diagnosed is about 30 years ago, complicated because, well... because I had no idea what it meant to be diagnosed with OCD. I can do a deep dive look at my life and identify key times that it was obvious that I had OCD.
First memory of something that was clearly OCD... I broke out of my house in the middle of the night as a small child. Maybe about 6. I slept walked through the house, unlocked doors I would never be able to unlock awake, opened a fence gate, walked across the street and banged on our across the street neighbor's front door like someone was trying to kill my family. I still remember the dream... 42 years later, I remember that dream. I was trying to save my family from someone trying to kill us all. It was raining. I even remember the dripping of the water off the front porch roof. In reality it was not raining. I had wet myself. The very nice man that lived in the house brought me back to my parents.
2nd memory... I don't know what happened this time. All I know is that I got upset by some imagined injustice perpetuated against me by my parents. This time I was a teenager. Maybe 15 or 16. Everyone chalked it up to teen angst. I was a very angsty teenager. I had a melt down over something. I was inconsolable for hours. My grandmother came to my room and tried to talk to me; tried to rationalize with me. Nothing landed. I carried on and on for hours. I couldn't let it go.
3rd memory...my father had been in an automobile accident a few years before. He was going to be ok, but his recovery was long. My mom did not handle the accident or my father's injuries well. She had a nervous breakdown and was heavily medicated. I took over all of the responsibilities in the house. I paid the bills. I did the shopping. I gave up my social life so my brother could have his. I sacrificed a lot. After some time, maybe a few years things began to return to normal and I went to a sleep over in the backyard of a school friend and got so worried about money and affording to go to college that I had a panic attack. I ended up on the side of her house crying and hyperventilating while the girls tried to console me. I was inconsolable. I ruined everyone's night and I became a social leper. Friends stopped speaking to me. The girl I picked up for school every day told me she would rather take the bus. The wound was deep. I just wanted to escape the scrutiny and the judgment. The fear was real, the worry was real, the need to release it was real, the vulnerability was real. The moment was wrong. The number of "read the room" moments I have had in my life and was unable to control the compulsion to share are so many I cannot even begin to account for them all. I ruminate on them remembering each one of the cringe worthy times I have sucked the air out a room or ruined the moment because I compulsively couldn't control the diarrhea of the mouth.
Fourth memory...turning 20 years old. I was in college. I was obsessed with turning 20 and leaving my teens. My boyfriend and his family were taking me out for dinner. I compulsively went on and on and on over turning 20 and how much I didn't want to be 20 like it was the end of the world. I cried over it. I remember being in the back seat of the car while his father drove and his parents giving each other side eye while I rambled on and on and on. I cringe thinking back on it. It was the mark of the beginning of the end. I know his parents told him to move on and that I was not someone to be with. We tried to continue for a while after that. The relationship was dead. People break up. It's part of being young. Of course I thought, as all young people do, that I was the only one to feel this kind of pain and that no one understood. I stopped eating. I became obsessive over every single calorie and fat gram that entered my body. Because if I was thin enough or pretty enough, I could win him back. I threw up nearly everything that I ate. I wasted. I dropped 25lbs off my already very thin frame. I was a skeleton when my friend called my mom to come get me from school. It was during this time that I saw a psychologist for the first time and received my first diagnosis of OCD. I had no idea what that meant and she didn't explain it to me. This was the mid 1990s. There was no internet. There was no webMD.com. I never went to the library to look it up. I walked out of that psychologist's office with a letter that said I had OCD and never looked back.
I continued to wreak havoc on my life. More relationships soured. Friendships lost. Break down after break down. Anxiety and fear chasing me daily. It affected schoolwork. I couldn't take a test. I would obsessively write notes and compulsively build PowerPoint presentations to study from. I vomited in the hallway before a public speaking assignment. I look back on it now and I see the cracks. Something wasn't right and I continued not to acknowledge the diagnosis I was given.
In college I would ebb and flow. I would have a great semester and then something would happen mid-term and I would fall apart and fail all my classes. I could not maintain. I kept changing colleges. I have 5 transcripts from changing majors and schools so many times. I ran away from my issue. I would relapse and recover. It was a yo-yo. I was up and then I was down. I was failing to thrive.
But, why? I had a diagnosis from a licensed mental health therapist. It seems so obvious. But I don't have physical compulsions. My compulsions are mental. Unlike the people in my family that also have OCD I am not a lock checker like my uncle, or a liner-upper like my grandfather. I do not tie string around my toothbrush bristles like my great grandfather. I convinced myself that because my compulsions are mental, since they are not visual, that they don't exist. Even when I filled out my intake paperwork for NOCD I did not list a single compulsion. My obsessions... I can identify those easily. The compulsions I was completely in the dark. Cat brought it up in my first meeting with her. She had to point them out; I had to be told what my compulsions are. Now that I have been shown... I can't unsee them.
I would get anxious and have outbursts. I would get anxious and tell everyone who would stand still about every single thought I had about why and what was making me anxious. I would become indignant and judgmental about anything or anyone who made me uncomfortable. I lost more relationships. If someone gave me advice I didn't want to hear, I would cut communication with them. I was right and everyone in the world around me was completely and unapologetically wrong. And my anxiety continued to mount. I thought I knew better; I knew more. It wasn't an ego trip. It was my anxiety trying to make sense of it all; my OCD seeking absolutes and seeking reassurance that whatever it is was going to be ok. Because frankly, I wasn't ok and I hadn't been ok for a very, very long time.... if ever. I started up the worry hill and swan dived like a cliff diver time and time and time again. I was in this cycle for my entire life right up to about 3.5 weeks ago when I hit rock bottom. And now I begin my climb out of the pits of OCD hell.
-Alice
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