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[neurodiverseactivism-blog]

Always on my Mind

            “It’s a different day,” I tell myself, yet the feeling never goes away. It’s always there, lingering over me, waiting to pounce. Sometimes, there will be a “trigger”. I use the word trigger sparingly because it seems people just throw it around nowadays. “Oh, I’m so triggered by this thing being out of place!” I don’t mind it – I think it’s funny sometimes. But they just don’t understand, which is why I don’t tell them. However, most of the time, they’re just there. Always on the edge of my mind. They’re just “things” that I have. For those who actually know what OCD is, I’m not one of those people who washes my hands till they bleed or are immobilized by anxiety when I see something out of place. Those are few and far in between. I’m one of those many people diagnosed with OCD that live our everyday lives almost normally. Almost. I’m in the group that nobody talks about because we’re high functioning, I guess. And now, college. College is quite possibly the worst place to have OCD. There are so many things around that can trigger OCD. And frankly, I just must be harder on myself in terms of what I let affect my OCD. College just forces you to deal with it, and I do every single day.

           I like to compare it to a crying baby, as odd as that seems. You know those annoying things you always see at the mall? Yeah, those guys. So, imagine you’re walking peacefully through the mall. And unfortunately, you’re the one stuck with the baby. Suddenly, your baby is screaming its head off and won’t shut up. You feel embarrassed. Everybody is looking at you. You just want your baby to be quiet. So, you have two options – you can give it candy and make it shut up, or you can ignore it and muscle through the loud obnoxious noise until it goes away. Problem is, if you give the baby the candy, it will never learn its lesson and will just do the same thing the next day and the next – every single day. Even better, if you choose to ignore it and stick through the noise, the baby will learn that you won’t coddle it and cry and cry and cry. It’s pretty much a lose-lose situation. It sucks. Welcome to my everyday life.

Let me take you through one of my days. Let’s say it’s Friday, who doesn’t love Fridays. Different day, same thing. I wake up and go through my routine. At any time, my OCD may kick in.

My hands feel a little dirty, I should wash then. After all, I haven’t washed them since last now. And so it begins.

            So, I wash them – twice just to make sure they’re nice and clean. I take a look at my phone – it’s 9:15, still plenty of time to head to class. I see a smudge on my phone. That’s definitely dirty, I tell myself, I should clean that. I use the conveniently placed antibacterial next to my sink to wipe down my phone, but now my hands are probably dirty again. I wash them. But what if my phone’s still nasty, did I get anything on it? I wipe that down. 9:25. Another wash, and another wipe. I look at my straightener. I definitely didn’t use it this morning, but is it turned off? I take a look; it’s off. A feeling of relief rushes over me. I start leaving for class finally at 9:45. Late again.

           Wait, did I turn off my straightener? My chest pounds and my brain gets fuzzy. I hurry back to my dorm and check. And then double check. I leave again, locking the door and rushing to the bathroom to wash my hands again.

           It’s these obsessions that define my OCD. I’ll obsess over how clean my hands are, about my straightener, and I can’t get them out of my mind until I fix it. Whatever I do to get rid of the feeling is a compulsion. I have this thing about being clean, and it’s a very common obsession among OCD sufferers. And no, it’s not about the germs. It’s weird. I hate “outsideness”, if that makes sense. Just things that I’m not familiar with. It sounds ridiculous and I agre. This one time, my friend gave me a stuffed animal for my birthday and before I put it on my bed I kept it on my nightstand for about a month because I needed it to get rid of the "outsideness" and absorb it into my room. It's totally irrational and makes no sense, but it's how my mind works.

So, fast forward through my day. Occasionally, random thoughts will pop up in my head. As I’m walking around, I’ll just randomly think, “okay, if you don’t make it to that light in 20 seconds, so and so is going to die tomorrow.” Let that sink in. Pretty morbid and freaky right? Yeah, just another thought. Of course, no one’s going to die, but I still make it in 20 seconds without fail. Whenever I accomplish one of these tasks, I can relax. No more worries for a little time before they inevitably pop up again. What keeps me doing it is that they don’t seem like difficult tasks. But, they never stop coming.

           After a long day of classes and more handwashing and more phone cleansing, I come back to my dorm to take a nap. My dorm, specifically my bed, is my haven, my home. And my OCD kicks up a notch when it comes to this area.

           I always shower before I get into bed, and I mean always. I don’t care if it’s for a 20-minute nap or when I’m coming back at 3:30 in the morning after a long night and I can barely stand or keep my eyes open. I will shower. If I can’t somehow do it, I’ll sleep on the ground. If someone else’s bed is there, I can sleep in that one dirty fine. But not my bed, not my safe space. If I don’t shower – it’s hard to explain – but imagine someone is screaming in your ear constantly, a baby perhaps, until I get up and shower and get it to shut up. Extreme discomfort, anxiety, whatever you call it, keeps me awake and I won’t be able to sleep since I just want to get out of my bed and shower. I finish showering and right before I get into my bed, I see the corner flipped up.

           It kicks in again. I must make my bed. Some of these compulsions are part of my routine. I make my bed each and every morning without my parents telling me because I need to keep my space clean and organized. They’re just things I do daily and they really don’t impact my life much. However, like in this case, my bed is not made and it needs to be made. It doesn’t matter that I’m going to get into my bed in two minutes – I’m making my bed.

           Night rolls by, and it’s a Friday. I wish my OCD would just realize I had just come back after a party and it’s almost 2 AM and my roommate is asleep and I’m about to pass out. But it doesn’t. I crash on my bed, and an overwhelming sense of anxiety fills me. Something is crushing my chest. There are no thoughts that come to my brain. Something is yelling at me. I have to get out of this bed. I’m sure you all have felt anxiety at one point of your lives. Like before a big test or maybe after, when you think you’ve failed the test and you’re playing the consequences over and over in your head. You can’t think. But it’s the only thing you think of. Except, you’re thinking about a test. I’m thinking about getting out of my bed and showering. I lay there, paralyzed. Sometimes, I can wait out my compulsions – I don’t always have to wash my hands or check my hairdryer. But this, I can’t do. I lay there, my body is exhausted, but my mind is alive. I try to sleep but I can’t. I jump out of bed. Shower. Wash my hands. Sanitize my phone. Make my bed. And pass out.

           Welcome to my daily life. As a person who can live their normal life, I’ve gotten used to saying OCD doesn’t affect my life. But there’s no doubt it would be different without it. We all have our things, quirks, whatever you want to call them. But for the most part, people can avoid them. Maybe after some strong words from your parents, you can cut your bad habits. I can’t. They’ve become part of my routine – things I just do. I can’t avoid them. I wouldn’t say they’re constantly on my mind, but they do shape the way I act. They’re always there, waiting. You could say they’ve become a part of me, a core aspect of my identity, but some of even my closest friends may never find out. They can be easy to hide, but hard to avoid. However, I’m just one of almost four and a half million people in the United States who have OCD, living and breathing right along with you. Welcome to our world.

[neurodiverseactivism-blog]

Progress

Another day, you can do this.

I stared at my underwear-clad reflection and grimaced. I cupped my hands around my waist and sucked in, seeing if my thumbs and fingertips would still meet together on the front and back of my waist. They still did. Stepping back, I stood with my feet apart, my back slightly pushed out, and looked towards my thighs in the reflection. This was the very first thing I did in the morning, every morning.

Sighing, I slid the scale from out under her bed – the metal ice cold against my dry, ashy fingers. I wonder if Ashley, my roommate, knows about my scale. Or about me. About this. I stepped onto the scale and squeezed my eyes shut. My heartbeat quickened and my fingers trembled. It was 97.3 yesterday. I waited desperately for the beep, what was a mere 3 seconds felt like minutes.

The scale read 97.9. Progress. A sense of calming rushed over me, but my anxiety still pounded in my chest. I’m still not completely over it – these numbers. My mind cleared up. Good job today. One day at a time. I stared at the breakfast bars sitting on my desk. Five months ago, I would have never touched those bars, or maybe I would’ve wolfed them down just to throw them out hours later in shame. One hundred and eighty-one calories. I knew it all by heart. Banana: hundred and five calories. Cup of coffee: thirty calories.  Bowl of Honey Nut Cheerios: hundred and ten.

My phone buzzed, liberating me from all the calories I had memorized over the years. There must have been so many numbers poking at me each day. Just a single notification.

 9:30 – EAT BREAKFAST NOW.

I looked at the bar again. Who even eats breakfast in the morning in college? I unwrapped it, the silver crinkling under the weight of my dry fingers. Nobody, except everyone will eat lunch and dinner unlike you. I chocked the bar down. Progress. I pack my bag and I even take the bus to class today – walking to class and burning those 50 calories really doesn’t make sense anymore.

I am on the road to recovery. It has been five months since I fainted in the gym after not eating anything but pretzels and water for 4 days. Since I finally had a talk with my parents, who I had hid my problem from for so long, who I had lied to every day to keep my anorexia under the radar, who could’ve helped me if only I had listened. I was stubborn and didn’t want change in my life. I had moments of fleeting happiness. I wasn’t depressed. But when your only happiness in life comes the number of calories you eat every day or the red digital numbers that show up on the scale, change must happen and I knew there was something wrong with me.

I knew the whole time, it was just so hard to change. It became a habit - I would count my calories every night before I fell asleep or every time I saw a food, its calorie count would pop up in my head. It still happens even now but I manage my body.

In my bag, I have everything I need for the day. No, not what you’re thinking of. Of course, I have my laptop and notebooks and textbooks, but more importantly, I have my meals for the day. The doctor put me on a tight diet, something like a reverse diet so I actually eat. I have snacks: an apple (ninety-five calories) and a bag of pretzels (hundred and ten calories). I also have a salad with dressing. Yep, I said it, with dressing. Around a hundred calories with an additional eighty calories worth of dressing. All this for a single day when it would've been my weekly meal in the past. Progress.

11:00 - EAT SNACK NOW

My phone buzzes annoying in my back pocket, and I don’t even have to look at it to know what it's screaming at me for. I reach into my bag and take out the apple. My day revolves around these notifications on my phone. My classes are even planned around them, which can make scheduling difficult but I need to manage it. Before, I planned my classes specifically during lunch and I would have work right around dinner. That way I had an excuse for myself to skip out on my meals. I chomped on my apple, calories and sugar tickled my taste buds. I would have friends use my card and meal plan just so my parents wouldn't find out. I didn’t even want to be around food.

1:30 - EAT LUNCH. ALL OF IT.

I thought used to be in control. That I was strong. I found an excuse for my miserable life that made everything I did seem reasonable. Nights where I couldn’t fall asleep because my stomach was growling showed me how much "willpower" I had. Who else could do what I was doing? Those people are just giving in to their desires when eating and I was "disciplined". But really, it was I who was giving in to something even worse. I'd be jealous of those people in the cafeteria who could just devour their lunches. I wanted to be like them, but my mind was holding me back. When I would go to the gym whenever I had free time, I thought I was doing it for my body. The gym was where I'd go amidst the anxiety of dealing with my anorexia since there was no food there, no intrusive thoughts, only opportunities to get even skinnier. I'd run through the pain. My body would ache for help, but running on the treadmill until I would almost pass out from exhaustion was supposed to be "good" for me. I mean, look at all the calories I burned.

4:00 - EAT SNACK NOW

My phone buzzes as I open the bag of pretzels. Anxiety and panic set in. It's Sarah's birthday and my friends are planning to go somewhere nice for dinner. Meet for dinner? Where are we going? What time? If I go, will I eat too much? Will I eat too little? Thoughts race through my head. We haven't all gotten together in forever. I want to but I have to prioritize. They move the time around, accommodating for me, but I can't. I tell them no again and again. I feel like a horrible friend. The pretzels feel like sand in my mouth. I don't want to eat them anymore. I can't go tonight - that would mean sacrificing so much. These are the repercussions I have to deal with now. They probably think I hate them or something. But I'm too embarrassed to tell them about this. About me. I tell them I'll see them another time. The bag of carbohydrates is still staring at me. I force myself to eat them one by one. Progress.

7:00 – EAT DINNER NOW

I flip through the sheets of paper that my nutritionist has given me, looking for an appropriate dinner. My nutritionist has spoken with the cafeterias and he’s come up with this extensive dietary plan just for myself. I settle on a sandwich – I don’t want to leave my dorm. Three hundred and forty-eight calories. My mind is still hovering over my friends and all the fun they’re having together at dinner. My anorexia, my mindset, has not gone away and I expect it to never leave. All the thoughts are lingering in the corners of my mind but I battle to ignore them. Eating is a battle. Recovery is a battle.

One hundred and eighty-one calories.

Ninety-five calories.

One hundred and eighty calories.

One hundred and ten calories.

Three hundred and forty-eight calories.

Total: Nine hundred and fourteen calories.

Progress.