Mental Health

Happy OCD Week, I Guess?

This week is OCD awareness week, which I somehow missed despite the International OCD Foundation telling me about it repeatedly in emails I forgot to read.

If it gives any hope to anyone who struggles with it, OCD and I have found a very tenuous ceasefire in the last couple of years. Don’t get me wrong — we are at a constant standoff and it likes to push boundaries and try to get up in my space all the time. It’s more that I am able to pick the battles in which to engage. Acceptance and other therapy not-bullshit-I-guess. Also Prozac.

I still do a lot of the more benign compulsions because fighting them makes them think they’re worth the effort. They’re not.

I’m definitely giving it a lot of side-eye during the pandemic. I had a couple of nights recently where I was absolutely convinced that I was going to die before the end of the pandemic and would never get to live my life or have fun again. A fun side effect of the ceasefire is that my brain kept circling around looking for a compulsion and I couldn’t find one to latch onto and that made me more anxious. Because that’s how the OCD do. I just kept reminding myself it was still better than spending hours curled up in the fetal position while policing my thoughts and forcing myself to think of every person I know in order to prevent bad things from happening.

I spent some time today reading through some of what I’ve written in the past about OCD. It features in a lot of my writing about anxiety – and I write about anxiety a lot – but I actually don’t have that many posts explicitly about it.

Here are the three that most directly express what it is sometimes like in my head — and the enemy that still likes to lurk in the shadows.

 

It’s Not All Hand Washing and Light Switches – This was the first thing I ever wrote about OCD. It was on the front page of HuffPost because I have a habit of going all in. I know it’s an essay that helped some people, so it is still among my most cherished.

 

Her Fearful Symmetry – This was the first time I made a deeper dive into what it’s sometimes like in my head. It chronicles some of the early-ish days in therapy and the fact that OCD isn’t just something you can turn off except for the times when you can.

 

The “What if” Light Bulb – My OCD doodlestrip. This one is specifically about my need to be sure in my relationships and how it is frequently a hidden form of a “checking” compulsion. OCD reassurance seeking at its finest.

 

And a picture of this tree. I am sure I could find some sort of metaphor or analogy about this tree and OCD, but really it’s more that I need a photo for this post and I thought this opera singing tree was cool. I came across it on a solo life-can-still-be-fun overnight trip to the mountains, which I suppose is relevant.

dead tree that looks like it's singing

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Rhiannon Giles

Rhiannon Giles is a freelance writer from Durham, North Carolina. She interweaves poignancy and humor to cover topics ranging from prematurity to parenting and mental health. Her work has been featured on sites such as The New York Times, Washington Post, Parents, Scary Mommy, McSweeney's, and HuffPost. You can find her being consistently inconsistent on her blog, Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram.

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