The Girl who Cheated Death: My Hell with OCD
My life feels like I’m a Final Destination protagonist.
As I write this to you, there is a sensation in my left forearm. This sensation is hard to describe. It is a slight tension beneath my muscle. You have cancer. My brain tells me. That’s a tumor, you have cancer, you have to get to a doctor RIGHT NOW. “I’m literally just trying to write a Medium article.” I’m exasperated, but it’s hard to argue against. It better be good, because with your prognosis, it’ll be the last one you ever write.
The tension seems to get tighter, and my brain perfectly traces the “tumor” for me. My rational mind has completely dissolved. My brain must be right. Maybe if I go to the doctor now, they can catch it in time. Oh, I am sure to die within in the year.
My imminent death and magical thinking has plagued me since I was very young. I remember the first time I was ever home alone. I made the mistake of watching a particularly violent episode of Monk. I began to obsess that someone was going to kill me. I refused to move out of eyesight of the door until my mom came home. It was hours. Each second more convincing than the next that I, at age 9, was going to be murdered. While one may call this an overactive imagination, my “overactive imagination” became debilitating. I still have never been the same since seeing Final Destination.
More innocuous obsessions would happen sometimes when I was even younger. I have this vivid memory of being five years old, marching up and and down the stairs, a track playing over in my head. How will my fate change if I go upstairs? How will my fate change if I go downstairs? Then, panic. How is my fate changing by just remaining here?! Eventually, someone opens the door. “What are you doing?” They ask. I have been saved from my mind once more.
I seemed to “catch” whatever bug was going around the school and was frequently accused of faking it. Could’ve been so, but I certainly didn’t know it. I refused to brush my hair and could spend time skin-picking for hours, to which people replied: “Just don’t.” But I couldn’t. I thought something was wrong with me, of course there was, but I thought it was an inherent flaw of my character, that I had been born with a faulty soul.
When you actually cheat death
I have been in a real near death situation, however. It is the fall. I’m 9 years old—it is months after the Monk incident—I put on my too big boots and my coat that won’t unzip and I am home alone. This is a near deadly combination.
I climb my favorite tree. I have climbed this tree many times before. I sit in it for awhile. Watching my dog zigzag through the yard, cars passing by. Then, I decide to jump down.
Immediately, my coat is snagged and the broken zipper catches me at my throat. I begin to scream, flailing around, my bare back hitting against the tree. My dog runs over. He barks at me and then runs to the cars, then back to me. But no one stops.
After what seems like hours(definitely more like minutes), something tells me to look up and careen my neck in a certain way. I do so and I am released from my trap. I promptly run inside. Incredibly shaken.
The rest is a blur. I tell my mom and sleep for the rest of the day and most of the following. For the next year, I cannot laugh or properly bend my back. Eventually, it subsides into memory. And, surprisingly, I never develop a fear of trees or climbing. I didn’t need a near death experience to constantly feel like I cheated death or to confront my mortality. That came built in.
You don’t grow out of it
I am still scared of Bloody Mary. I removed all mirrors from my room in fifth grade and have never returned them. I have subsequently avoided any mirrors in any other bedrooms I’ve slept in. I once demanded a friend remove her mirror or I would sleep elsewhere. I also demanded she put her dolls where I couldn’t see them. Luckily we were younger at the time. She wasn’t scared of Bloody Mary, in fact she wanted to “summon her”. I declined.
Nowadays, I’m not scared of Bloody Mary because I believe in her existence, I’m scared of her because I believe in the power of fear to trick my mind. In other words, I’m scared of my mind scaring itself.
“Nothing to fear but fear itself.” Damn straight. It’s the least useful fear there is and the most persistent.
I do not like horror movies. I have never liked horror movies. Friends always used to think I was the least horror sensitive person there is because I would a) talk through the whole thing, b) make fun of it or c) not react. It is true that few movies have thoroughly scared me in the moment(besides jump scares). However, after the movies ends and my friends go to bed, suddenly, the silence turns threatening and my adrenaline begins pumping.
I lay awake at night. There’s a zombie outside your door. “Zombies don’t exist, that’s impossible.” There’s a zombie outside your door. “Really? We’re a top student, we study history, we study science, I assure you, there’s NOT a zombie outside my door. There’s a zombie outside your door. My heart is thumping. Come on, just check the door. You can’t sleep if you don’t know for sure. “I can and I will, I’m not indulging you.” There’s a zombie in your bathroom.
I glance over at the bathroom door. It seems awfully dark. Maybe I should just check…“No, there are no zombies, you’re just working me up until I start worrying I’m gonna see shit!” A zombie ate your roommate and you’re next.
At this point, it is well past 2 AM. Melatonin has not worked. Defeated once again, I go and check the bathroom. Nothing. As I turn around—don’t turn around!!!—a surge of panic and I flip on the bathroom light. I go to the front door and open it. Nothing. I shut it. The zombie’s not there yet, you’ll have to keep watch. “No, but I’ll check the stove for good measure and call it a night.” I check every knob. I have a brief “premonition” of me and everyone in the apartment building dying in a gas fire and I try to head back to bed. Don’t close your eyes, zombies…My brain prattles on as I somehow drift off to sleep.
“Why was the light on in the bathroom?” My roommate inquires. I just sigh and laugh it away. I then tell her we have to leave right now if we want to get to school. “We don’t have to leave that early, that’s absurd.” She then retreats to her room. After she has shut the door. Smell that gas? The neighbors are gonna accidentally burn down the apartment. Better get out now. Should’ve tried harder to get her to leave. “I’m not going to die.” A shaky resolve I don’t believe.
A diagnosis
I was officially diagnosed with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder in the summer of 2017 despite presenting “severe” symptoms in late childhood and adolescence. Predominantly, I was always sort of slapped around with the label of “weird”, “silly”, “Nervous Nellie” and “imaginative.”
The diagnosis came as a shock to most people—especially those who had used the above labels to describe my “uniqueness”—but it didn’t come as a shock to me. I was briefly medicated, but found it ultimately unhelpful.
My diagnosis did not lead to understanding by others, however. I am still called “silly”, “weird” and “neurotic” as if they are character defects instead of part of an illness. The most frustrating thing I’ve been told is: “I think you’re obsessing about your diagnosis with OCD and presenting more symptoms because you’re obsessively trying to prove you have it.” Besides being mildly insulting, that is, quite literally, a symptom of OCD.
Surviving in the face of invented death
While my symptoms ebb and flow, they are something that is always present. In fact, OCD is being studied more frequently in how it relates to neurology and as a neurological condition instead of solely as an anxiety disorder.
Some nights, I must sleep facing the door, lying on my back, with my leg half out and a certain blanket, because if I don’t, my brain says, I may wind up another home robbery tragedy. Some nights, I sleep very well, drifting off without so much as a concern. I can’t always predict it, I just have to learn to roll with its imagined punches.
People say you should read obituaries and meditate on your own mortality. I don’t need to read obituaries(although I do need to meditate) in order to be confronted with the reality of my death. I am confronted by it when I simply sit down or walk up a flight of stairs, always aware that just one misstep…
Life is incredibly fragile. Every turn, it feels like I have cheated death once again. But when I am free from that voice, and I hole up with a cup of tea and my cat, I sit with how lucky I am to have survived 21 years of happenstance. In those moments, I look around me with a renewed sense of consciousness.
And I am truly glad to be alive at all.
