Wait, I'm obsessed
By Carly Silverstein
We all know Emma Pillsbury from Glee, the adorable guidance counselor with an abundance of pamphlets. Her entire personality is her obsessive-compulsive disorder — she literally cannot live her life without disinfecting each individual grape, and she wasted her entire therapy session scrubbing her chair. Now, as much as this is an exaggeration and humor tactic, the show pairs it with an attempt to be informative about OCD. It would be easy to say that Glee’s depiction of the disorder is narrow, offensive, and incorrect. But as someone diagnosed with OCD, I understand Emma’s journey with self-awareness and the underlying need for control.
Here’s a science lesson: The DSM-5, which is a guidebook for every psychological and neurological disorder, characterizes OCD as an anxiety-related disorder with the presence of obsessions, compulsions, or both.
Obsessions are unwanted, persistent thoughts that cause anxiety. For example, I obsess over my physiological state and convince myself I’m either going to throw up or pass out, which makes me anxious. Compulsions are the actions you perform to suppress the obsessions.
It’s more than just “type-A,” a personality type characterized by impatience and perfectionism. OCD interferes with well-being and everyday life. Disorders are a spectrum, with “type-A” possibly being a mild version of OCD.
I woke up this morning, haunted by the recurring dream of my teeth falling out. No, I don’t have cavities or gum health issues or any reason to fear the loss of my teeth. Nonetheless, I can’t stop dreaming about those now-dead gnashers falling out of my mouth. I once looked up why I keep having this dream — the internet told me it’s a pretty common anxiety dream; your body takes the pent-up stress accumulated throughout the day and releases it overnight.
I used to be afraid of sleepovers. I know that many kids go through the homesickness phase, but mine was different… If I was away from my mom overnight, I convinced myself she was dying a random, terrible, painful death, and that I wouldn’t be able to find out until the next morning. I felt like if I could be with her, I could control the ending of her life. As a kid, I had no clue how to articulate this to my parents. They put me in therapy, where I was told to “face my fears” and go to sleepaway camp. I lost 10 pounds at camp; I cried and sobbed, and the anxiety curbed my appetite and sent what little food I ate away from my stomach in puking fits. I wrote my parents a 4-page, handwritten letter asking them why they were torturing me. After camp, I went to hypnotherapy (spoiler: it didn’t work).
Nowadays, because I’m conscious of the ridiculousness of my intrusive thoughts, I write them off as anxiety and go about my day. But when anxiety is running high, sometimes I sit in my room and think, “But if I act like everything’s fine, it will jinx it and this will be the time my mom dies.”
I had a date the other day. Nobody special, just someone I met through a dating app. Yes, I get the regular anxieties that everyone experiences before meeting someone for the first time: “What if he doesn’t think I look like my pictures?” and “What if we run out of things to talk about?” Maybe everyone also spends an hour and 31 texts figuring out which identical tank top looks better and will result in a successful date. But I don’t think other people do a mental check to make sure they’ve packed their prescription nausea pills and CVS barf bag just in case their anxiety gets the best of them. Even with these tool belt items, I don’t know if it’s normal to walk downstairs and feel dizzy and sweaty and get in their car and force a smile and immediately open the car door again to throw up all over the street while they’re sitting in front of the wheel. Maybe it’s just my OCD. And I wish that was just the one time I’ve thrown up in front of a guy on a first date.
Compulsions show up in the classroom, too. I've been told by multiple people that I'm a teacher's pet. That's embarrassing. But in a discussion-based setting, the awkward silence that ensues after the professor asks a question is like a taser to my soul. I get physically uncomfortable and time escapes reality.
My friends have asked me what it’s like to live with OCD. I try to give them some emotionally intellectual growth story, but really, I just don’t know anything different. How it feels to live with OCD is how it feels to live. I’m used to it, my identity is intertwined with it. I get my assignments done on time and I don’t know what it’s like to procrastinate. I’m fearful pretty much 24/7. But that fear propels my professional drive and attention to those I love.
There’s something to be said for medication and therapy. While I’ll never change the way my brain functions, learning about why and how OCD affects my life has given me some respite. Take the camp story — if I had known that my intrusive thoughts were just intrusive thoughts, my camp experience would have been a lot less traumatic (I still would have hated it, though). Ever since being diagnosed and starting medication, the frequency of puking episodes has gone down, and I feel less of that background panic.
I’ve talked to people who refuse to take medication because they’re worried about changing their brain chemistry and altering their sense of self. That’s great — not everyone needs to take medication, especially if their disorder doesn’t negatively intrude on their livelihood. But for me, medication is a last-resort way to correct a chemical imbalance in my brain, giving me a slightly more comfortable way of living. Regardless, I’m always a proponent of talk therapy, even if it’s just to understand yourself better.
Like Emma Pillsbury, my OCD can sometimes feel like my whole personality. My whole life plan is centered around it – I’m hoping to become a psychiatrist to help others with mental disorders. At Duke, it can become a silly caricature to make my friends laugh. Even writing this piece for The Coop – I wanted my first published article to be about funny OCD moments and educating my peers about the disorder. Finding balance is a work in progress, but focusing on the disorder to understand it first goes a long way.
When guys end things with me, sometimes I’m genuinely sad about losing that specific person. But most of the time, when things don’t work out with a guy, I’m upset because I hate feeling out of control. I hate not knowing how he feels about me or my inability to choose when it ends. I hate that I can’t make him talk it out with me or hear my side of things. I hyperfocus on the lack of control, and it sends me over the edge into anxiety. Who cares about the guy?
As for my compulsions, I have this thing where I pick at my skin. If there’s an impurity, say acne or dry skin, I will pick at it until it bleeds, even if it’s right on my face for everyone to see. So many times my parents or friends have tried to say, “Stop picking your face!” And you know what my innate reaction is? I cry. If I'm in a picking frenzy, the idea of stopping mid-pick and leaving that one pimple to heal on its own creates an indescribable well of panic. I know it leaves scars, and the oils on my fingers make acne worse, and crusty blood on my face looks worse than a few pimples. I just can’t help it.
I used to hate going to therapy. Why do I need to sit there while some stranger asks me, “So, how does this make you feel and what do you think that means?” Especially when a big part of my OCD is explaining to myself what my obsessions mean in order to feel in control. Trustingyour therapist with the inner machinations and demons of your mind is a long process. Only recently, in my senior year of high school, did I find my now psychiatrist and therapist. She knows how to give advice. She knows I’m a neuroscience major, so she explains my disorder from a scientific standpoint, giving me control over knowing my mind. She gives me anecdotes from her own life and shares new literature in the field to make me feel less alone. I want to be like her when I grow up.