WHO WOULD I BE (WITHOUT MY OCD)

If any of you listen to the Just Between Us podcast, you know that I love a good hypothetical situation. I’ve spent years asking various guests to predict how they would act in all sorts of made-up situations. I force my close friends and family to partake in thought experiments whenever the mood strikes--or I feel the least bit bored. But there is one area of “what if” where I don’t tend to let my brain go. And that’s wondering what my life would have been like if I hadn’t gotten OCD as a four-year-old.

Everyone’s relationship to their mental health is different. Some people choose to see the positives of their disorders as a kind of superpower. Some see their disorders as totally separate from their true selves. I tend to drift toward the latter, which is strange since I have no memory of myself without my disorder. Over the years I have struggled with how much of my identity to tie to OCD, especially as mental health advocacy has become a bigger part of my career. There are moments when I feel that who I really am is distinct from my OCD and moments when I know living with this thing has shaped my life in ways that cannot be ignored. But whenever my mind starts to ask, “Who would you have been without this?” I feel as though I am pulling at a thread that is better left alone.

One of the reasons I don’t partake in this particular hypothetical is that I am not convinced there is a version of me that would have existed without some form of OCD. That might seem strange since my OCD was triggered by strep throat and it came on fast and furious at an extremely young age. This provides a clear “sliding doors” moment. If I hadn’t gotten strep, I probably wouldn’t have gotten so sick so young. But I do think I was biologically predisposed to OCD and/or anxiety and I’m pretty sure, given my family history, it still would have shown up at some point in my life. Would it have made a big difference if it came on more gradually when I was older? Probably. But what kind of difference I can’t possibly know.

Having been mentally ill for almost my entire life means that I don’t have any context for what it is like to be neurotypical. I can’t mourn the before because I don’t remember it. There are moments, though, where I have flickers of what it must be like to exist without contamination OCD. Like when I traveled earlier this year and didn’t care about getting contaminated because I was already wearing my airport clothes and knew I would clean everything on my person as soon as I got home. I sat at breakfast without any worry about what touched what and I thought, “Oh, this is really nice. This must be what it’s like for other people to exist.” Or, more recently, when I unloaded the dryer right after taking a shower, so I let the blankets touch my body instead of holding them at arm’s length to keep them “clean.” It was so much easier to walk, and the warm fabric felt lovely against my skin. I mused to myself, “This must be how other people do laundry! What a treat!”

I won’t lie and say there haven’t been times when I’ve cried over having OCD or felt frustrated that my experience of life is different than many. Could I use that frustration to get a place where I always let the laundry touch my body through exposure therapy? Probably, but it would take months and months of discomfort and emotional turmoil. While my OCD isn’t stagnant and can get better, it is never without massive amounts of effort. That is different than simply waking up and not thinking about these things in the first place. But one easy way to make myself miserable is to spend too much time on what could have been.

A lot of what has gotten me through the various heartbreaks of the last few years (romantic, platonic and professional) is leaning into radical acceptance. And I’ve learned to apply the same approach to my mental health: this is what I know to be true so now what? I don’t spend time looking for the silver lining of my various struggles. I don’t wonder if I would have been a creative without feeling like a weirdo as a kid. I don’t try to connect the elaborate dots of what led to what and where I could be if some of those dots were missing. I start from a place of accepting that I have OCD and then I work from there in terms of building who and what I want to be.

It feels false to me to try to be grateful for my OCD just because I love my current life. In many ways, I love my current life despite my OCD. But it also feels exhausting to be outraged that I got it in the first place. People are dealt all sorts of hands that are out of their control. Most of my hands were great. One was shitty. Looking at the big picture, that is pretty amazing odds. I have no way of knowing who I would have turned into if I hadn’t gotten sick as a child. But I am more interested in getting to know who I am now than speculating on a version of me that, at least in this dimension, never got a chance to exist. I’ve learned that some hypotheticals are better left untouched.

xoxo,

Allison