The Ride of My Life

For me, it took a drastic, life-changing event to recognize my OCD.

Even though I had lived and tolerated these intrusive thoughts and performed all of these compulsions for years, it just took one event to make me more aware and ask, Wait, are these really my thoughts? 

After that life-changing event, I was put on a medication that multiplied my intrusive thoughts, and they were the worst they had ever been. As any young person with a computer does nowadays, I went online to research what could be going on in my mind. I researched “unwanted thoughts,” and that’s where my life took a turn. 

I clicked on a website that went into depth about OCD and felt like I was reading about my life. I remember feeling relieved and terrified: relieved that these intrusive thoughts were not just my own, and that other people in the world, just like me, were afraid to speak up about them (or maybe were also convinced that these thoughts were true)—but terrified by the realization that I had let myself suffer as a prisoner of my own mind for so long.

I always felt I mustn't tell anyone about these thoughts. Besides, with the constant reassurance I was giving myself internally and externally, my anxious little world was always manageable. Until one day, when my OCD took over the driver’s seat. 

After years of struggling to drive my own mind against the OCD, I was finally stuck in the back seat with no way out. 

The harm OCD punches me in the face before throwing me in the back. I feel so much pain, and I don’t understand what the punch was for. Why couldn’t you have just taken over without making me feel so much pain?

The contamination OCD is knocking to enter the car. I’m in the back screaming, trying to take the wheel, but I can’t reach. The harm OCD scoots over and lets contamination drive for a while. I feel so disgusted. 

Then, we suddenly turn down a foggy path when the “just right” perfectionism OCD enters in. I’m so familiar with you and your exactness, your evenness; you’re so “just right.” You are the worst of them all. 

All three are now scuffling to take over, while a few of the others in the OCD gang come knocking to be let in. I’m still screaming until I fall asleep. I have some peace until I wake up again and see the OCD gang, and they ask each other… “Who wants to drive?”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Mel finds gardening, nature and plant care to be healing. She encourages others to not be afraid to ask for help and uses creative writing to externalize her OCD.