If you are anything like me you grew up thinking of mental illness in extremes. The only examples I was aware of were from movies, tv shows, and the insensitive conversations of my family. The most notable of these were from the movie SPLIT, where the movie centers around a person with Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), which was previously known as Split/Multiple Personality Disorder. The character shows intense and deadly personality shifts, that paint him as the villain of the story in a very tragic light. Another example is from the popular, Criminal Minds. One of the early episodes is about a serial arsonists that turns out to have Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD), and commits her crimes in a pattern of threes. Many of the offenders in this series turn out to have been suffering from extreme cases of OCD or Schizophrenia. There are many movies and conversations about Veterans with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), and Depressive disorders caused by the death of a loved one. Narcissistic Personality Disorder is thrown around to describe any self-centered person. I have always been fascinated by mental illness in its extreme form, because to me it seemed relatable. However, these misguided representations of mental illness proved to only cause harm to my own psyche. Growing up I believed that people who have anxiety were just afraid of things which implied that they were weak. People with depression were simply not close enough to the Lord. OCD, well that’s just people who are organized and perfectionistic. These thoughts caused a ironic and vicious cycle inside of me.

Growing up I have always exhibited signs of depression. I spent considerable time alone, and was incredibly sensitive. I internalized all of the instability of my childhood. I was not at risk of physical self harm, because my worth was found in how good I could be for my family and my teachers. As long as I kept people happy with me then I had a purpose. A purpose worth living for. My family considered the possibility that I may be on the Autism spectrum, because of how I seemed to enjoy being alone, along with many other things. No testing was ever done because I seemed to get on just fine. The earliest red flag that I have been explicitly told about with my mental health, was when I was nine years old, and asked my grandma what it feels like to have depression. My grandma held on to this conversation and relayed it to me recently expressing how it raised a lot of concern for her.

My mental illness reared its ugly head at eleven years old when my parents got their divorce. It was not as ugly as some, but it was unexpected and passive aggressive. For most of my life since then I have been diagnosed with Generalized Anxiety Disorder, and an otherwise specified depressive disorder. I was in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for years, but all of this was only because I said there was a problem and I did not let it go. I spent hours self diagnosing myself with every disorder Google could relate to me. That is when I began to implode. I could not escape this feeling that I was somehow different than everyone else. I felt everything so intensely and it was beginning to wreck my life. I began to lose weight, because I was anxiously vomiting up 2/3 of the meals I ate every day. I lost 45lbs from this alone. I was having panic attacks and they began to spill over into school as well. I hid this from my parents and anyone who did not have to see it. My worldview was beginning to get darker and darker, until I had convinced myself that I was going insane. I became obsessed with DID and began to tell myself that I am three different people. They had names, ages, favorite colors, genders, and ways they would speak. I was aware that I did not have DID because I did not have memory lapses and all of my characters could be around at the same time or at will. I realize now that this was probably my way of expressing the complexity of my emotions. A therapist told me that this was simply a case of antithetical thoughts, or thoughts that disagree with each other. I had three characters, two females, and a male. Maci, Chyanne, and Rayonne. Rayonne was a tough person. His favorite color was blue and he was around his mid twenties to thirty. He liked his alone time and collecting vinyl. He was pretty emo in a sense, but he was a fierce protector. Maci was also a fierce protector, but she did not get along well with Rayonne. They both were a bit of control freaks. Maci was around 36 years old, and was the intelligent character. Her favorite color was green. Both of these characters protected and fought over the welfare of Chyanne. Chyanne was seven years old, and was just full of sunshine and happiness. Yellow was her favorite. There is so much I could write about these characters, but what needs to be known is that I now realize what they each meant to me. Rayonne was an embodiment of my depression, Chyanne was anxiety and people pleasing, and unbeknownst to me until recently, Maci was my OCD.

OCD has become glamorized to a degree where know one really has any clue what it is. Now that I have been diagnosed, my family and friends want to say that they think they have it as well. Typically it is a few intrusive thoughts and anxious checking. My question is always this “How do those thoughts make you feel about yourself?” I ask this because I have thoughts all the time like what if I just slapped someone for no reason or just put a bunch of illicit curses in this post, but the difference between those and an OCD intrusive thought is how I feel about myself for having the thought. Let me give a heavy example. I work with children and animals a lot. I have been through all of the proper training with how to safely take care of children and protect them from sexual predators. Every now and then when a child creates a bond with me and demands my attention, I tell myself that I am a pedophile because I am singling a child out, or that the other adults are thinking that about me. When in reality I do not want to have those thoughts and I most certainly have no other intention than to provide children with the nurturing I feel as if I was lacking as a child. That is the difference with OCD. It makes me believe that I am some type of monster for being completely normal.

This is how I have come to understand my OCD. If you took a bad case of generalized anxiety and cranked it up three times as much you would get OCD. When I care a lot about something (ex. children, close relationships, jobs, etc.) I am plagued by intrusive thoughts because I am so worried that I will be the opposite of what I intend. From the perspective of my therapist, having OCD is a sign you are a good person. Caring about things deeply is a gift, but if you care as much as I do you are going to worry excessively and that is hard to explain, which is why I believe the D hangs on the end of its name. OCD is a disorder and disorderly things do not make sense by nature. No one’s OCD will look the exact same, but these are the things I believe we have in common. The sign of an OCD intrusive thought is one that does not just go away after a few seconds and is over with just like that. The more we care the more intense the symptoms. Lastly, it is a disorder, and it does not make sense.