So Glad You Said That

My parents dropped me at the psychiatrist’s office, a special delivery, when I was about to turn 18.

I was absolutely terrified, but I didn’t want them with me. I wore shiny black Payless heels because I needed to make sure the doctor knew I was different than all the other people that end up in a psychiatrist’s office. I was normal! I wore heels to a psych eval on a Tuesday afternoon!

Fear and obsessions were close companions all my life.

 -age 4 wringing my hands in the corner of a room

-age 8, hiding in the bathroom during sermons at church about the end times. Needed to be with my parents to keep them from dying.

-age 10, obsessing, replaying. What if I had unknowingly hurt a baby as I worked in the church nursery the previous Sunday?

-age 12, constant confession and rumination of the bad things I had done, just knowing my sin could never be forgiven and I must do more to make it right

A myriad of themes and obsessions and fears swirled around in the early years of my life, but my first big league breakdown happened my freshman year in college.

Suddenly, I began having horrific, unwanted, terrible thoughts. They were of unspeakable things, bombarding my mind at all times. I was scared to go anywhere, see anyone, do anything.

I couldn’t control my thoughts and the harder I tried, the worse they became. They were graphic in nature and absolutely terrifying to me.

I prayed they would go away – I wrote verses and taped them around my top bunk. I slept with my Bible by my head. What was happening to me? Who could I tell? I would be locked up and separated from society. I was a monster.

I gradually began to unravel. At one point, my roommates called my parents to give them a warning of how the situation was unfolding. They were worried. 

A few days later, my dad and my grandpa, driving a light blue mini van, made the 5 hour drive to my college to bring me home and get me help.

That’s what brought me to the psychiatrist on Tuesday afternoon.

Horrible, unwanted, intrusive, thoughts.

Did I tell him that?

Kind of.

If I would have told him the truth, he would have hopefully promptly diagnosed me with Obessive Compulsive Disorder. If I would have told him how the thoughts barraged me unendingly. If I would have told him I crumpled in the shower with my eyes squinting shut to get the thoughts and images out of my head. If I would have told him the truth, he would have known, hopefully, that I was describing a textbook onset of OCD.

But at barely 18, knowing nothing about OCD beyond media depictions, could I risk sharing with him the truth of what was happening in my mind?

Ultimately, I decided it too risky. In no uncertain terms, my parents told me I better not come out of that office without a prescription for something. 

So, I told him I had some thoughts that made me anxious. He asked me what kind and I couldn’t say. I wouldn’t say. I described how bad the anxiety had gotten.

Generalized Anxiety he said. 

Nothing about what I was experiencing felt generalized. It was specific and obsessive and intrusive and horrific.

At 34, how I wish I could take over my 18 year old body and confidently and calmly explain to him all I have learned. The confidence I have now talking about my brain- this precious, broken, volatile, unpredictable, beautiful brain- would boldly offer to educate any medical professional about OCD and correct all stereotypes that are a barrier to people getting proper treatment. And I certainly would not be in heels.

I left with with a paper prescription folded carefully in my back pocket. I couldn’t let my parents know that I listened to them and got one. I needed some semblance of control in this nightmare. 

November 2008 was the official start of my mental health journey, but as I’ve shared already, it had begun long before that. It had a name now, an incorrect one, but with medication and a bit of an understanding of what my brain was doing, I got better and continued my freshman year.

16 years later, I have had an official OCD diagnosis since I was 25, have been on and off, and on and off, and on and off various medications. I have done specialized therapies and done “the work”. I have struggled with the idea of needing medication in different seasons, fighting that idea with the feeling I had everything to prove to myself.

I can describe it like waves.

Psalm 42 was comforting to me in the midst of a deep OCD episode last fall:

As the deer pants for streams of water,
    so my soul pants for you, my God.
² My soul thirsts for God, for the living God.
    When can I go and meet with God?
³ My tears have been my food
    day and night,
while people say to me all day long,
    “Where is your God?”
⁴ These things I remember
    as I pour out my soul:
how I used to go to the house of God
    under the protection of the Mighty One^[d]
with shouts of joy and praise
    among the festive throng.

⁵ Why, my soul, are you downcast?
    Why so disturbed within me?
Put your hope in God,
    for I will yet praise him,
    my Savior and my God.

⁶ My soul is downcast within me;
    therefore I will remember you
from the land of the Jordan,
    the heights of Hermon—from Mount Mizar.
⁷ Deep calls to deep
    in the roar of your waterfalls;
all your waves and breakers
    have swept over me.

Waves and breakers.

Billowing grief and suffering that crashes in like roaring waves.

Episodes of darkness and panic have swept over me too many times to count.

But, He has been faithful.

The request has been that He remove this from me, but His answer has been a God who stays near as I suffer, revealing more of Himself to me and providing an incredible community of people who love me, help me, support me.

I’ve often begged God to take this from me so that I can serve Him more, better, differently, more effectively.

But again, the answer is that I offer myself broken and weak and watch as He moves in my life IN my weakness, drawing me and others closer to Him.

So I walk this road – so joyful when I experience calm waters and a reprieve from the billowing breakers, but anchored in Him when the waves come back, knowing I will have ultimate healing one day even if not in this lifetime.

May I suffer well until then.