BY: KAROUN CHAHINIAN
I would wake up every day with an exhausted stream of worries running through my mind. The same worries I was preoccupying over the night before and a month before that. I was living my life in an inescapable bubble that was slowly filling to the brim with my rationalized irrational fear of unintentionally harming my family. I was being dragged down by this anchor of guilt and paranoia, and drowning sounded more and more pleasant every day.
Over the years, I convinced myself that all my obsessions and worries were rational and every other 11-year-old was thinking about the same things, when really, I wasted my precious childhood fighting a mental disorder that I didn’t know I had. My life was, and sometimes still is, darkened by the exhausting grip of OCD.
I would wash my hands thoroughly and while drying, the image of all the bacteria harvested in the towel which I could accidentally pass on to my family would pop in my mind. Then I found myself lathering and rinsing for the fourth time. When setting the dinner table, a chore I dreaded, I would walk with the handful of knives in slow motion, every fragile step grounded by the fear of accidentally tripping and hurting someone. When my baby brother was born, he was so perfect and beautiful, but whenever I would hold him, the only thing on my mind would be how terrible I would feel if he slipped through my fingers.
Picture OCD as a little monster permanently sitting on your shoulder, slipping horrifying images of your worst fears in your head and hissing “don’t you feel bad?” after everything you say or do.
There was a long gap of six years where I didn’t experience these symptoms of OCD: elementary graduation, high school, and my first year of university flew by, but like a boomerang, they came rushing back.
I experienced my first panic attack this past spring. My parents were away for a few weeks in Italy and my three brothers and I were at home. While two of my brothers are old enough to drive and were working most of the time, I was writing exams and was usually at home with my youngest brother who is now 11. One evening when I was making dinner, I was chopping vegetables while he was sitting in front of me and a terrifying thought popped into my head: “What if I lose control and accidentally hurt him with this knife?” That was the moment all my scary intrusive thoughts, childhood fears and obsessions flooded back and while others are able to shake off a passing, but disturbing, thought, here I am four months later still contemplating it. It opened a floodgate: “What if I undercook the meat and make him sick?” “What if I accidentally poison him?” and all of a sudden, the fact that his life and safety was my responsibility punched me straight in the face.
That night, I lay in bed terrified. I would inhale, but it felt like I wasn’t breathing in any air. Tears and guilt were my only company. That was the moment I knew that what I was feeling wasn’t normal, or at least, healthy. I browsed the web for hours, and after reading dozens of anecdotes and mental health papers on experiencing scary thoughts and obsessions, it became clear that I had Harm OCD, which is a common form of obsessive compulsive disorder where you have intrusive and distressing thoughts of causing harm—and in this case, to my family. The weight of guilt slightly lifted. There’s a sane explanation behind my feeling of insanity.
Photo: Timothy Reed
I grew up in a Catholic family. We had a roof over our heads and food on our table every night. If you saw me in pictures I was your typical gap-toothed kid, but behind my elementary school smile, I was hiding a mind-full of obsessive guilt. My life was a hopscotch game. I would jump from one fear to another.
It all started the first time I tasted the addictive bitterness of guilt, which was shortly after learning about what sin was in Sunday school. The fears started small. First I was obsessed with accidentally lying. Then it grew into stealing. And eventually, my main worry became accidentally hurting, or even, killing someone.
At the age of 12, I was sitting in my cousin’s living room watching “Ella Enchanted” while contemplating for the millionth time whether or not I gave back that pencil I borrowed from my friend for a test. If you don’t know the synopsis of the movie, the lead character Ella is put under an obedience spell and the scene that started it all was when she was ordered to kill the charming prince. Of course, she didn’t do it, it was a children’s movie, but for some reason I couldn’t get over the fact that she almost did do it. And then it happened. I thought to myself: “I would feel so bad if I ever hurt somebody” and from then on, the concept of living in the moment was foreign to me and I lived by the question “what if?” Even if something harmful didn’t take place, I would torture myself because something bad could have occurred, and if it did, it would have been my fault. For that reason, I would replay all my actions and encounters hundreds of times in my head to make sure I had every possible scenario covered. The lines would blur completely between thought and reality and I would forget what even happened in the first place.
So I turned to my faith, but a dangerously extreme form of it. I would say a prayer, rest my head on my pillow and an intrusive or violent thought would pop back into my head, so I would sit back up and say another prayer. It would go on and on for hours and began to feel more like an addiction rather than a comfort.
I even had a phase of never being able to hold my hand in a fist because it simply looked like I was holding a knife. If I ever was holding my hand in a fist, I would check to make sure I wasn’t ever close enough to hurt anyone in the case that there was an actually knife in my hand.
After hearing the story of a man who killed his wife in his sleep on the news, I developed this fear of harming my family while sleeping and would hide all sharp objects in my room and lock my door every night even though I had no history of sleepwalking.
I would even try to tell my parents about my worries, but at that age, I wasn’t able to properly articulate it and didn’t fully understand them all myself, so how could I expect them to?
OCD was not in my vocabulary as a child, so I had no idea why I was doing or thinking all these things. Imagine a 5th grader having these irrational fears of accidentally killing her brothers or parents pop-up in her head not knowing they’re a result of a chemical imbalance. What was more horrifying was that being Catholic and someone who secretly watched too many horror movies even led me to believe my intrusive thoughts, which are a very common symptom of OCD, were clear signs that I was possessed. That then made 11-year-old me obsess over how I was going to break the news to my parents before Sunday mass.
Finding out the images and obsessions were not a demonic reflection of my character and instead of a treatable disorder was followed by the biggest rush of relief I’ve ever experienced.
OCD has a way of tricking you to believe that you are a bad person. Thinking about death for the majority of the day, every day had me convinced that I was a sociopath. But the intrusive thoughts OCD sufferers experience usually involve their worst fears and are completely against their character, but when you’re kept awake at three in the morning, paralyzed by anxiety, that detail can be easily forgotten and you convince yourself that the thoughts are there because you want them to be.
Photo: Vasilisa Forbes
At first, I avoided opening up a dialogue and tried to cope with it independently, but it only bit back harder. Now, I’m happy to say that after talking to my parents more articulately about what I’ve been going through, I will be visiting a counselor in a few weeks to correctly treat and diagnose the disorder and gain access to coping tools which will help me keep control over my life and my thoughts.
This may come off as a bit crazy, but I’m thankful that OCD found a way back into my life six years later. Having that break enabled me to differentiate between what is real and what is concocted by my disorder. Also, the fact that my illness is based on loving my family too much and worrying myself sick over their safety is actually quite beautiful. I can totally see some Elizabethan poems being written on my struggles. Damn, I was born in the wrong era.
Everyone battles with something in their lifetime and OCD happens to be my main challenger. Hopefully one day, I will run out of things to worry about, but until then, I believe it is in my life for a reason. I’m not sure what it is right now, but I will find out soon enough. But what if I don’t?
Sources: huffpost.com, cargocollective.com, nebula.fi, ozonweb.com
