“The Battle Inside” by Jacqueline Aumenta, 18
The doctor ordered my parents to start taking pills when they reached their late forties. My doctor prescribed me my medication at age sixteen. A thirty-year difference between us, and yet our schedule is the same every night: take pills, drink water, and swallow the bitter taste of sulfur before it can dissolve and intrude on our taste buds. The only difference is that theirs were for blood pressure and vitamins, and mine was for obsessive-compulsive disorder.
Obsessive-compulsive disorder, a chronic illness that not even the Google database can get right. I mean, search it up and Google will greet you with a harmful stereotype right off the bat, portraying the disorder by a misconception to uneducated individuals as if it were correct. And to that I say, no, we are not all "neat freaks" who get upset at the slightest inconvenience, like a pen not lining up straight on a desk, just as the image claims we are. Instead, we are victims of our own moral beliefs, turned out and used against us as if we were puppets on a string.
Most people remember simple things, like their first time driving a car or their first goal scored in soccer. Instead of memories like those played on replay in my mind, met with feelings of pride and delight, the feelings of despair and anxiety plague my mind, the helplessness I felt experiencing my first obsession and compulsion. It all started when I was twelve, just two months before quarantine was set in place. I felt safer at school than at home; the problem that awaited me when I stepped inside my house was one that only existed in my thoughts. Check the windows, my brain would urge, beg when I did not follow through. When I ignored the command, it became screaming and aggressive, forcing me to get up and obey like a dog to its owner. There's a man in a car from out of state looking to break into your house, my mind would provide. Watch the window for hours, and nothing would happen; that was the solution I was
told by no one but myself. So I did, I checked the window every other minute, staring with my best effort. It worked for thirty minutes, and then the cycle would continue. It was horrible, a constant battle against my thoughts. There was never a man, I knew that deep down, but my brain told me otherwise, and I felt that if I did not check just that once, I would be sending into existence the exact scenario, and it would all be my fault.
Much to my dismay, that was not the end, but just the beginning of the biggest secret I have ever kept. I hid these obsessions and compulsions surprisingly well. I was known to be an anxious child since I was young, and it was "normal" for me to act that way. Nobody would have known I was even dealing with more severe obsessions, fears of ruining my life, harming others through words, and more. Checking OCD is what I was later diagnosed with at fifteen, but before as a fourteen-year-old girl, going into her first year of high school, doing this all by myself for two years so far, I felt like I was crazy, insane. I had put my symptoms on Google, and obsessive compulsive disorder popped up. Truthfully, I ignored it, thinking, "That's a cleaning disorder; I do not have that." Ignoring it and dealing with it alone only made the thoughts worse. My brother was the first to catch on when I started asking him to check my social media accounts, my messages, anything that could let me hurt others online. At first, he was annoyed but did it anyway, not understanding why. Sooner than later, he discovered something was wrong, questioning me instead of checking. I was frustrated and outraged even when I found out he had told my mother. She confronted me, and I admitted everything in tears over a text message. I thought she would hate me, disown me, and judge me. Instead, she was compassionate, reassuring me she loved me and would find a therapist I could talk with. That was the beginning of my therapy journey.
The thing they forget to mention about therapy is that getting an appointment is almost impossible because of how backed up they are with clients and how full the waitlists are to get in. It took months to get just one appointment with a therapist I ended up not agreeing with. I remember her words exactly: "I don't understand," she said when I expressed my feelings and told her what happened over the past few years. I felt hopeless, because if a professional in her field could not understand, how could I ever get the help I needed? It took another year before I could find another therapist, months of sessions before my therapist decided I needed to be medicated, telling me she "could not help me until my brain relaxes." It took months to find a psychiatrist, and it was only then that I was diagnosed. After two years of being with my psychiatrist, I have been put on 200mg of Zoloft and 2mg of an antipsychotic, too complex for me ever to remember.
It's been six years with the disorder, three years diagnosed, six with just symptoms. Some days it's hard to live, a constant battle with obsessions and having to fight the urge to do my compulsions. On other days, it's easy to breathe, where I can live like a typical teenager for a day, thanks to my medication. Truthfully, this essay is the first time I have ever spoken so honestly about living with obsessive-compulsive disorder. I write this in hopes a struggling teenager finds it and reads it, relating to it and knowing that it does get better, and that you cannot do it by yourself, that it takes time and effort, but is worth it in the end.