I can’t even count the amount of times I’ve started to write this in the past five months or so. Every time I start, I get frustrated or too insecure and I delete it all again. Who knows? It may even happen this time, I’m only three sentences in.

I desperately don’t want to be one of the many people on social media who over share the things that are going on in their lives, so I promise to try to stay away from that area.

I haven’t really made it a secret on here that I have Obsessive Compulsive disorder. I’ve mentioned it a few times, usually in a light hearted manner. But today there’s been a significantly more amount of suck rather than not suck and I’m finding myself exhausted and run down, and I think it’s time to finally talk about it.

Now, before you get too skeptical and tell me that I’m self-diagnosing, I can assure you that I’ve been diagnosed by a professional.

So here we go:

“OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder): Obsessive-compulsive disorder is characterized by unreasonable thoughts and fears (obsessions) that lead you to do repetitive behaviors (compulsions). It’s also possible to have only obsessions or only compulsions and still have OCD.

With OCD, you may or may not realize that your obsessions aren’t reasonable, and you may try to ignore them or stop them. But that only increases your distress and anxiety. Ultimately, you feel driven to perform compulsive acts in an effort to ease your stressful feelings.”

That right there, that’s me.

I can’t tell you the exact day that I realized I had OCD, but over time, it was an accumulation of little things – actions, and thoughts, that made me realize that something wasn’t right. I was worried about things that no one else was worried about. I felt the need to go back and double check things that no one else felt the need to do.

At first it was small things…thinking that I could physically feel germs on my hands, making sure that the flat iron in our bathroom was unplugged at least five times in a row before heading out the door to school or church, holding my breath around people when they sneezed in front of me in fear of breathing in their germs. But little by little it escalated, morphed and changed. It snowballed, picking up more and more worries and adding them to the pool of anxiety swimming in the back of my head. I began to feel the need to wear slippers every time I went downstairs, in spite of the fact that we vacuum and mop our tile floors once…sometimes even twice a week. I felt like dirt was seeping through my socks and getting onto my feet, so I needed to wear slippers to protect them, I grew anxiety over making sure that the stove and gas fireplace was completely turned off, and I began to need to check that our alarm was set multiple times a night, even if I had set it myself.

Those are just a few of the things that grew inside my head over the years. The list is actually a few pages longs written out on paper…but like I said, I’m not trying to over share. For years, in the back of my mind I knew that I had OCD, but there was never anything major. Yes, it was getting worse and I knew that, but I felt like as long as I only let it control me in little ways, that I would still have it under control…I was wrong.

I didn’t know that triggers existed in OCD until one of them knocked me on my butt and kept me there for almost an entire year, and continues to drag me down into fear and anxiety on an inconsistent yet frequent basis.

In August of 2012, besides the stress, anxiety, and worries from my normal “stuff,” I felt fine…then out of nowhere at two O’clock in the morning I woke up terrified. Fear like I’ve never felt before racked my body and mind. I was paralyzed and the only thing I could think to do was read my bible and pray that the night would end sooner. For the first time in my college career, my eight o’clock class could not come soon enough.

For a few hours I thought that maybe I was just having some abnormal freak out session, that maybe I was just experiencing a random anxiety attack for the first time in my life, but when it didn’t go away, I knew it was stuck there. It was in my snowball.  I texted my parents in the morning, telling them what happened and that it had to be my OCD, that I wouldn’t be this freaked out, that these things wouldn’t be stuck, circling my brain and consuming my thoughts if I didn’t have it. I don’t really know how they did it, but for that entire first week, they somehow kept me on my feet…kept me from crumbling into a mental wreck.

That week turned into months though, and eventually the fear dulled. But there were and still are days where I can be feeling totally normal, or as normal as I can feel, and suddenly it will pop into my head and my chest is constricting and fear is pounding my lungs and brain with no power to stop it. Since that trigger, I’ve encountered several more, though nothing as severe as the first.

Around seven months ago, I finally broke through my pride and started going to therapy. I stuck with it for a long time, but ultimately nothing has changed and I’m not sure that anything other than medication will help at this point…and I’m not sure that I even want medication at all.

I wish I could say that the daily fear and anxiety that fills my mind, that makes me restless and stressed, that makes me grumpy and a total basket case, that makes it hard for me to go out and do anything or go anywhere, is the worst part of all this, but it isn’t.

The worst part is that it sucks my life away. Little by little, my brain is shutting down to the good things and becoming more and more consumed by this disorder inside of me, completely against my will. Sure people make it clear that anxiety is a part of OCD, but no one really tells you that you may or may not lose the ability to “feel.”

More often than not, I find myself crying at the end of the day, mentally exhausted and yet…I don’t know why I’m crying.  I don’t feel sad, there’s nothing bad in my life, there’s nothing to be overwhelmed about…there’s just an empty void of no…feelings.  Don’t get me wrong, I laugh, I have fun, I enjoy time with my friends, but most of the time it’s all overshadowed by everything else going on in my head that just sucks that happiness and light hearted joy away. I want to feel things. I want to feel light and not weighed down by everything else.

My problem with OCD is really minor compared to others who struggle with this, compared to the people who might make their hands bleed and bleed on a daily basis because they physically cannot stop scrubbing them. I can joke about it with my siblings and friends. But sometimes there’s just those days, days like today where letting the tears drip down my face as I drive home from work feels so much easier than smiling. I don’t want to be depressing, and I don’t want people to feel bad for me. I’m tough and I muscle through this every day with the strength of my Lord and Savior and my amazing, encouraging, parents who try their best to understand what I’m dealing with, along with another woman in my life who I very much respect and who happens to know exactly what it is that I go through. I have an army, and I’m so, so grateful for them.

I’m not hopeless about all of this and I really hope it doesn’t seem that way, I guess tonight I just needed to write, to release my thoughts. Now, if you’ll excuse me…I need to go calm my eyelids down. They’re about to mutiny.

Love, probably the sleepiest.