It’s a Freaking Pandemic: Be Gentle With Yourself and Your Mental Health
We didn’t need anything else to obsess over, but here it is.
I remember when I was first diagnosed with my generalized anxiety disorder and OCD, about ten years ago now. (Depression, too, but that’s a story for another day.) I actually felt good about it. There was finally a name for my crazy, a reason why I couldn’t stop checking all the doors and windows multiple times a night to make sure they were locked, a reason why it took me forever to fall asleep at night, imagining all of the horrible outcomes of any decision I made that day, or ever.
There was a reason I couldn’t settle my brain, had to step over the invisible string that connected my fingers when I was a kid, why I counted the syllables and beats of spoken or musical phrases on my fingers, trying to start each phrase so that the last syllable or beat would end evenly on my thumb, reworking it again and again until I had it right.
I still do that, count syllables and musical beats. I count a lot of things, not out loud of course. It’s a benign behavior that actually helps me calm down, and my therapist has helped me come up with other successful strategies to combat the debilitating behaviors and intrusive thoughts that come with these disorders.
