From Fine to Dying

One second I’m okay, managing to make it through my day with my usual stress. The next second, I’m dying, I can barely breathe, everything is falling apart, I won’t be able to make it through the rest of my day. My Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) is very good at jumping out when I am not ready, once I think I have everything under control. It makes my daily life a roller coaster, and I never know when it will strike next.

It’s rather ironic, when I’m expecting the OCD to come, to strike at full power, it doesn’t always arrive. I’m not complaining, but more often than not I’m not prepared for whatever my OCD throws at me next. When I’m unprepared, it feels like a brick was thrown in my face while I was taking a nap. I have no clue what’s going on, I’m panicking, and I think I’m probably dying.

Whenever I’m okay, and I’ve managed to get the OCD under control for a time, I begin to wonder why I thought the OCD was so bad. Little do I know that this is actually my OCD in disguise. I begin to think that maybe I’m just overreacting, or was just making an excuse. Then I start to wonder if I actually have OCD, or if everything I know about myself and my mental health is a lie. I feel like a fraud, like I’m telling everyone lies.

Then, after the OCD has snuck in undetected, it strikes. It tells me that I’m a huge liar and that no one believes me and that I made it all up and everyone knows that I made it up and they all think I’m a joke. No one is truly my friend, they just like to see how I react and then make fun of it.

I try to rationalize, thinking of all the stuff my OCD has caused me to do, but my OCD is one step ahead. It says that I don’t remember right, that it’s an over exaggeration, that I can’t say what I experienced how it happened in my head (the actual truth), because no one would believe me. So, I under exaggerate, and my OCD grows.

It has grown to the point where whatever I tell people in person about what I go through, I always under exaggerate, at least just a little bit. Not disclosing my full struggle has prevented me from getting the full help and support that I need, and has made people think that everything is fine when it’s truly not.

Then, when I’m under OCD’s control to not tell what is fully happening, the other obsessions come in, and no one knows the true extent of the struggle. They see the smile, and the laugh, and hear the “I’m fine, just worried about school”.

OCD is cunning, it knows me better than I know myself. It knows each crack in my defense, each place where it can get in and try to “protect me” (according to its logic) by doing compulsions, that end up trapping me further in the downward spiral of obsessions and compulsions.

With each time I catch OCD and overcome an obsession, it changes, shifts, puts on a different personality. I will be battling OCD my entire life, throughout each different way it presents itself. However, I will not give up. I will keep fighting, even though I cannot see the end of my battle.

With each day of fighting, I get ever so slightly closer to being able to live side by side with my OCD, instead of being trapped in it’s cage. I will have tripups, OCD will knock me down and I will slide backwards. As long as I keep getting up, and get up one time more than I get pushed down, I will not be defeated.