![]() 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. I mused to myself, “This must be how other people do laundry! What a treat!” 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 sat at breakfast without any worry about what touched what and I thought, “Oh, this is really nice. 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. There are moments, though, where I have flickers of what it must be like to exist without contamination OCD. I can’t mourn the before because I don’t remember it. 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. But what kind of difference I can’t possibly know. Would it have made a big difference if it came on more gradually when I was older? Probably. 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. If I hadn’t gotten strep, I probably wouldn’t have gotten so sick so young. This provides a clear “sliding doors” moment. That might seem strange since my OCD was triggered by strep throat and it came on fast and furious at an extremely young age. 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. 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. 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. 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. I tend to drift toward the latter, which is strange since I have no memory of myself without my disorder. Some see their disorders as totally separate from their true selves. Some people choose to see the positives of their disorders as a kind of superpower. ![]() And that’s wondering what my life would have been like if I hadn’t gotten OCD as a four-year-old.Įveryone’s relationship to their mental health is different. But there is one area of “what if” where I don’t tend to let my brain go. I force my close friends and family to partake in thought experiments whenever the mood strikes-or I feel the least bit bored. ![]() I’ve spent years asking various guests to predict how they would act in all sorts of made-up situations. If any of you listen to the Just Between Us podcast, you know that I love a good hypothetical situation. ![]()
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