I Miss Who I Was Without OCD

She’s long gone. The girl I once was. I can still see her, but I can’t touch her. I look on at her through a glass wall between us — the effortless, hilarious, persevering, beautiful girl who once took ownership over life unlike anyone else. I miss her.

You can’t see it. Unless you catch the glistening of my damp hands. Or you see the furrow of my brow, steady, focusing on one thing in the distance for an unknown period of time. You can’t see my anxiety, my severe obsessive-compulsive disorder or my silent, paralyzing panics, but they are always with me, looming over me as a soaked, wool blanket hanging on my shoulders.

 

Every room I walk into is a room full of red lasers, and I have to find a way to get to the other side without touching any of them. Each laser is the deep, paralyzing need to perform a compulsion with every step I take. Some days the lasers are less bright — depending on how bright the seemingly common anxieties are. Other days, I can feel the red lasers in front of me before I even open my eyes. The desire to perform compulsions the instant I wake — the obsessions even follow me into my dreams. I used to sleep to leave my obsessive world — but I can no longer escape. What you might consider just another hurdle in life — I see as my ending. I see a hurdle and want to give up. I don’t have the energy anymore.

I hate that I unknowingly allow my severe OCD and anxiety to get in between myself and every hurdle. I wonder what I would have accomplished in this world? If the triggered car accident had never happened? Would I have lived a “normal” life?

I’ll never know. So I keep going. I keep looking ahead, hoping my next hour will come with less weight. I keep fighting. I keep writing. This is my world and I won’t just accept it. So to the girl I once was — I may have OCD, but OCD does not have me.

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Thinkstock photo via Victor_Tongdee