Why I Started This Blog
Hello! I wanted to start this off by saying thank you for reading this first blog. I have been working to start up this blog for a while now, and I am so excited to finally be posting! Now, to the topic of this blog.
For as long as I can remember, I have been stuck in a constant cycle. It started with not being able to get my hands clean enough, being deathly afraid of germs, and having my mind tell me I was going to die if I didn’t scrub my hands until they were cracked and damaged. When I was a child, these intrusive thoughts remained highly centered around my livelihood, and that of those around me. I was put into talk therapy, which was unsuccessful, as at the time my parents and medical professionals thought I was just an anxious kid who had panic attacks. They weren’t seeing the real underlying issue. For years of my life I woke up with stomach aches, didn’t eat, opted out of opportunities, and struggled to form connections all due to the stress caused by my OCD.
After not being successfully treated for so many years, having to learn how to push my anxiety down, and mask it, I started high school. This change in my life caused my OCD to resurface, in a way it never had before. This time, my intrusive thoughts followed a different theme. These thoughts made me think I was going to harm myself, someone else, or that I was an evil person. I was terrified of these thoughts. I didn’t know what OCD was yet, so I thought I was losing my mind. I physically could not go to school without having a massive panic attack and bawling my eyes out. I became so depressed that I couldn’t get out of bed most days. I felt like the person I was, not even a month prior to this, was gone. I didn’t look like myself or feel like myself. I’m not a religious person, but at certain points I was in so much mental pain that I prayed for God to make it stop, just for 5 minutes. To allow my brain to just go silent for a little while. But nonetheless, these thoughts continued.
While being unable to attend school, feeling the lowest I had ever felt before, I had teachers attempting to get me dropped from their classes. While some teachers were supportive, and we set up a plan for me to get work done, other teachers overlooked my work ethic and strength, and didn’t attempt to help. While to my face, they acted sympathetic, they told my parents there was just no way I would get through the school year like this.
6 months after I had started having this overwhelming attack of intrusive thoughts and panic attacks, I finally got in to see a psychiatrist. This was the first time I had felt hope in months. I explained to her what I was going through, and she said that without a doubt, I had OCD. Following my diagnosis, I struggled to find the right medication option for me. The first couple of medications I tried made me severely depressed, but after a while, I found the right option for me. Within a couple of weeks, I started to feel like myself again. I never thought I would see the other side of this battle, but I did.
The main reason I started to be able to fight OCD was because I began ERP therapy. Exposure and Response therapy helped me to be able to walk through the intrusive thoughts in my head, and make me be able to control how these thoughts made me feel. When I had first explained to my therapist what I was going through, she pulled out a book and read to me the textbook definition of OCD. I aligned with everything she read. So much so, that I cried. I cried out of joy. I cried out of the realization that I wasn’t going crazy. I cried out of anger that it had taken this long to realize that I had this mental illness, when I had really been struggling all of my life. Giving what I was dealing with a name, helped me to face it.
Once I was finally on the right medication, continuing ERP therapy, I got better. I started to see myself in the mirror again, and not a sickly looking stranger. I finished my classes, with the same teachers who tried to have me dropped, and had a pretty good overall gpa.
This was my experience with OCD. This experience is what made me want to start this blog. OCD is talked about so little, whether that be in our communities, on social media, or just in the general public. There needs to be representation for what OCD can look like, so that people who are struggling like I was, don’t feel so alone. I want to provide that representation with this website and all of my blog posts.
During my struggle with OCD, one of the only things that made me feel better was reading about other people’s struggles with OCD. It made me realize that I wasn’t alone, and that other people struggled too. I want to provide that space for people to come and read about experiences, lessons, tips, and research I have done about OCD.
I want to be the voice telling you that it is possible to get through this mental battle with OCD, because there was no one there to tell me that. You can do it.
Thank you again for reading this blog. I will update very often, and I hope that I can provide some form of comfort in this platform of mine. I want to provide a space where you feel like you are not alone. Please subscribe to this website to receive news and updates when new posts are made, and please follow all of the social media accounts linked at the bottom of this page. Thank you so much and I hope you enjoyed reading.
