The Mighty Logo

How COVID-19 Made the 'Monster Under My Bed' Become Real

The most helpful emails in health
Browse our free newsletters

Editor's Note

If you struggle with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), the following post could be potentially triggering. You can contact the Crisis Text Line by texting “START” to 741-741. To find help, visit the International OCD Foundation’s website.

Imagine, for a minute, that my obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) were a monster under my bed.

Since I was a little girl, I knew I had a monster under my bed. I could see it there. It was terrifying. I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t think. My focus was completely on the monster.

“There is no monster,” everyone kept saying.

“But there is. I can see it with my very own eyes. I can hear it breathing. It’s mocking me, it wants to get me,” I insisted.

There is no monster under the bed, they assured me. But how could I take their word for it? How could I believe them over what I saw for myself, staring at me, as real as the bed I was lying in and as the goodnight kisses my mother was giving me to make me feel safe?

Lying awake at night, I would try to figure out what to do about it — the monster. What does it want from me? Does it want to harm me? Does it want to terrorize me? If I tried to please it, could we coexist? I looked to the grown-ups to tell me what to do, but they couldn’t see the monster; they kept claiming it was all in my head.

When I was 11 years old, I was taken to therapy for the first time — “to help you cope with your fears,” my mother told me. That was the first of many different kinds of treatments, raging from visualizations to psychiatric medications, but mostly just learning to tell myself over and over again: “There is no monster. The monster isn’t real. It’s all in my head. It’s not rational. No one else sees the monster, no one else needs to please the monster, and no one else has ever been killed by the monster. And neither will I.”

A banner promoting The Mighty's new OCD 30+ group on The Mighty mobile app. The banner reads, Are you an adult who's living with obsessive-compulsive disorder? The OCD 30+ group is for you. Get support and share information with Mighties who get it. Click to join.

Slowly, I took little steps to defy it. Whatever the monster wanted me to do, I tried to do the opposite, or at least do it on my own terms. Year after year, I learned to challenge the monster and its attempt at scaring me into submission. I gathered every possible tool I’d learned and reassuring voice from the people around me to stand up to it and say, “I know you are not real. And I will not let you be the boss of me!”

I worked so hard. I learned to live with the monster under the bed. It made the mattress a little lumpy, but I did learn to sleep at night, even with its presence always making me uncomfortable.

Then, it happened. One day, I turned on the news and on every channel, it was there. The monster. Suddenly, everyone could see it. Everyone could hear it. Everyone could feel its wrath, and everyone was terrified.

“You have to listen to the monster,” everyone around me started saying. “You have to do what it wants. If you don’t, you could die. Someone you love could die.”

The monster is real? My head started spinning. Every ounce of terror I had managed to squeeze tightly into a corner in my brain came popping right out. The monster is real. I knew it. I felt I was running out of air. The tools, the reassuring voices, all went up in smoke. The monster is real.

Now what?

Struggling with anxiety or OCD due to the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic? Check out the following articles from our community:

Photo by Engin Akyurt on Unsplash

Originally published: June 17, 2020
Want more of The Mighty?
You can find even more stories on our Home page. There, you’ll also find thoughts and questions by our community.
Take Me Home