“That isn’t very endearing, by the way.”

That’s something a man said to me last week. I told him it wasn’t meant to be and I didn’t care what he thought of it either way. I’ve always known exactly who I am and how I’ve grown up. Sometimes, they aren’t necessarily things to be proud of—but I’m not ashamed of them either.

He later told me it was sexy that I was so self-aware of my circumstances. Well, the thing is… it isn’t good or bad—it just is. Dating can seem like a performance sometimes. Auditions to show a potential partner how you’d fit into the role. But that just isn’t very fun. Not to me, anyway. I’ve always loved being my whole self: from the beginning to the end. Not to impress someone or convince them to stay but to let them get to know me, flaws and all.

Radical honesty has never been particularly radical to me. Even then, I used to hate feeling misunderstood. The thought of a stranger’s concept of me not matching my own used to drive me insane. I know how to stand on business but eventually end up spending nights dissecting every negative comment said about me. I used to send explanation after explanation in the hopes that I could silence the gnawing feeling of discomfort in my own head.

I was telling someone new about how I grew up: sheltered and maybe a little bit spoiled. I’ve always known that, but growing up around people who’ve gone through the exact same thing can make it feel a little less significant. That was one of the ways my ex and I were so different.

I was raised as a delicate houseplant, comfortable in the shade I was accustomed to. I was watered daily, maybe even more than I needed. He grew up in the blistering sun, the snow, and all the conditions in between. He was the type to grow through the sidewalk cracks by sheer will alone. There was nothing wrong with how I was raised. I was raised with so much love and concern, but I think all that care also led me to believe I couldn’t thrive outside of an environment that wasn’t curated just for my growth.

My upbringing gave my OCD the perfect conditions to thrive in: choosing certainty over agency, forsaking growth for safety. I was always envious of how independent he was. It never occurred to me that I could find a way to thrive outside of the protected environment of my upbringing as well.

My story seems to always circle back to him. It’s uncanny how perfectly he was my foil. He was the manic pixie dream girl to my main character that needed to realize how utterly dysregulated they’ve become. Much to my dismay, of course, this wasn’t going to be some epic romance about surviving all odds. Instead, it’s a story of self-discovery and overcoming obstacles. I guess you could say this is basically The Odyssey.

He challenged me in ways I didn’t even know I needed, pushing me toward parts of myself I might never have found on my own or with anyone else. I’ve always believed you should never change for a person. I still do. Ironic because I know I’ve changed because of him, just for me. Sometimes, you’re lucky enough to have someone come into your life and give you exactly what you needed—even if they aren’t meant to stay.

Knowing what I know now, I can see how OCD took advantage of how easily I mistook resignation for acceptance. I confused acceptance of my limitations with acceptance of my stagnation. I thought I was protecting myself when, sometimes, I was just making excuses for the parts of my life I was too comfortable to question.

I’m proud of the way I’ve learned to tell the difference now but, even then, recovery requires you to stay uncomfortable—that’s the only way to know that you can handle it after all.

Now that I’ve learned that I can survive outside of the limited conditions I was raised in, there’s nothing stopping me from growing beyond them and becoming someone I couldn’t have imagined when I was still living in the shade. Not in the grand ways I always thought, but in the ones that are steady, consistent, and largely invisible to everyone but myself. I’ve realized that the toughest environment to grow in is my own mind. If I can learn how to thrive there, there’s no person I’d be willing to make myself more palatable for.

Sometimes, I might have to explain myself, or not explain myself at all. I’m learning that being misunderstood isn’t the same thing as being wrong and being wrong isn’t the end of the world.

Now that I’ve got OCD, or at least a diagnosis to prove it, I don’t think it should be any different. I know I don’t have any obligation to tell someone everything about me, especially when we’re just getting to know each other. But I’ve never seen the appeal in hiding who I am, either. Because, like it or not, OCD will always be a part of me. I don’t know, maybe that’s asking too much of a stranger. I love every version of myself and I don’t need to trick someone into getting to know all the different ones, too.

Even the one who has tons of work to do on herself or the one who still gets things wrong. Not even the one with a diagnosis that most people probably don’t understand; the one with a diagnosis that other people might not be okay with.

If that’s the case, I don’t need to show them the “good parts” first to convince them I’m worth the trouble. Acceptance takes a lot of hard work, and I’m not going to make myself more digestible to make someone else more comfortable with the parts of me they don’t understand.

I’ve proven that I can bloom in the wild, there’s no point in stuffing myself into a greenhouse cabinet ever again. Not for me and certainly not for anyone else.

I found myself bawling at an Instagram reel of a bear today. Some woman online had the loveliest home I’d ever seen and, yes, it came with a bear that occasionally wanders the property. The funny thing is, there’s no way this would have made an impression on me last year. I probably would’ve watched it, thought it was cute, and kept scrolling. I cried because I'd suddenly become someone who wanted a home that welcomed silence instead of trying to outrun it.

I had always loved living in the city. Something was always happening one block away and life never had to be quiet. There was nothing I loved more than going to the hottest new restaurant and popping over to the grocery store to buy the limited-edition Oreo flavor or the latest member of the Flamin’ Hot chip family. I loved trendy little cocktail bars and cafés and curated my days around them.

The thought of living forty minutes from the nearest Walmart or a plane ride away from something on the Michelin Guide felt like a sacrifice I’d eventually have to make. One I was happy to make, but a sacrifice nonetheless. Now, ironically, it’s the only thing I want.

I used to live my life looking forward to the next distraction. The next trip. The next escape to a shinier version of my life, where the biggest decision was if we should get a glass of wine or commit to a whole bottle. Looking back, I don't think I enjoyed those things quite as much as I thought I did. I was collecting experiences before they disappeared. Hoarding is a more accurate term because one was never enough.

I knew how to consume a life long before I ever wanted to build one.

I was terrified of settling into a life that wasn’t the right one. The thought of building something permanent scared me because choosing one thing meant giving up every other possibility. I constantly thought maybe the next thing would finally feel like enough.

Now, I know all I ever wanted was home. It’s a shame I just didn’t have the capacity for it yet.

I want a home where I tend to my garden every morning (I can barely keep my the two houseplants I have alive, but dreams are free) and harvest my cherished heirloom tomatoes to make tomatokeftedes for an afternoon snack. A home where I spend my weekends by the lake or a wraparound porch where I can read a book, maybe even write one. None of these things are remarkable on their own. That's sort of the point.

I used to think the good parts of life happened elsewhere—in another country, with another person, through another milestone. I thought life was something you built through the big moments, disregarding all the quiet ones in between. Now I find myself longing for the ordinary instead of constantly wondering whether there's a better version waiting somewhere else.

My ex used to ask me what kind of house I wanted. Nothing ever came to mind. The best I could muster was some goofy dream house with a game room hidden in the pantry and a rope you could swing down to the first floor with. The truth is I couldn’t imagine living a life, let alone what I wanted to fill it with.

That’s kind of hard when you build your life around all the things you’re terrified of, rather than all the things you love. It’s hard to have any energy to pour into yourself when you’re gripping so tightly onto everything you’re afraid of losing. It’s hard to imagine what you’d like your day to day life to look like when you’re so fixated on the future.

I didn't have things I loved. I had things that kept me occupied until the next thing came along. I wasn’t really living a life then. Not really. I was surviving it. Planning around it. Living for a perfect future I was determined to ensure. It's hard to imagine a home when all you've known is to escape the one you already have.

It was just another trap my disorder set for me. I couldn’t just live in the quiet. It always felt like there was more for me somewhere. Always something to solve, something to earn, something to silence the doubt that never stopped. Even when nothing was wrong, my mind convinced me it wasn't enough to live my life. I had to live my best one.

The irony is that in trying so hard to build the best life possible, I forgot to actually live the one I already had.

It’s strange to look around now and realize I’ve built a life that the person I spent decades being wouldn’t even recognize. I didn’t wake up one morning and decide I wanted this life. I just became someone who did—little by little, almost without noticing.

Now, I don’t spend my days daydreaming about the next trip to Greece or my next fancy dinner reservation. I just want to wake up and make waffles in a kitchen that would make Nancy Meyers squeal. Not because it looks pretty enough to post on my feed, but because it feels like a place where my life is actually happening. Where there’s flour on the counter, dirty dishes in the sink, and a half-eaten waffle abandoned on a plate because we got too distracted talking.

I want a home that’s lived in, messy, and filled with all the things I love. A kitchen that smells like freshly baked salt bread even though the oven hasn’t been cleaned in a while. A garden with plants both dying and thriving at the same time because even with my best efforts, I’m bound to slip up sometimes. I want a home that you don’t need to escape from, even when it isn’t perfect.

Somewhere I stop waiting for life to be extraordinary because I found the contentment to just be in it anyways. Maybe that's something only recovery could give me: not an exciting new life, but the ability to finally be present in the one I’ve always had.

Brick by brick, I'm building a life I finally know how to come home to.

I’ve been dating a little more lately. By that I mean collecting Bumble matches and copy-pasting “hey there” to tens of strangers just to see what sticks. Finding connections has always been difficult for me. I’ve always looked for something very rare: not difficult per se, but certainly specific. I’ve never seen the point in settling for less. Staying single for so long hasn’t always been easy either. It came with a lot of doubt—both in myself and in what the universe had in store for me. I wondered if I was destined for a life filled with cats, loneliness, and spinsterdom.

Then I met my ex, who was everything I was looking for. It felt like a reward to meet the exact type of person I always dreamed of for staying true to myself. However, he didn’t quite come with the lifestyle I always expected to lead. My OCD loved that. At the time, the differences also felt like some sort of punishment; some sort of cosmic joke for no apparent reason.

The doubts lingered far longer than I deemed reasonable, and I thought I was just lying to myself to keep us together. Well, if you’re new here, it turned out to be OCD. While that’s been discussed ad nauseam, getting that diagnosis (and everything that came with it) is always going to be a huge milestone in my life.

This time last year, I was still knee-deep in compulsions. It’s strange to think about. I look back and see a version of me I don’t even recognize. I’ve spoken to a couple of people since we broke up but had always reached out from a place of manic urgency to find someone to quell the nagging feeling of uncertainty that comes with this disorder. It was so nice to be “done” with my future, having met my ex. I used to want to meet someone to solve that same feeling of doubt once again.

But this time was different. I always wondered if I’d be okay with only knowing what life was like with my ex; of only knowing that version of me. I figured it was time to finally see what was out there. So there I was, swiping left and right like it was some sort of video game for the perennially single. Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t my first rodeo. I had done the legwork. In the span of a year, I spoke to one guy who openly told me how he purchased someone’s virginity once, another who liked watching girls make out with their dogs, and at least two who asked me if they could listen to me pee within the first few messages.

How did these topics even come up? Well, they don’t. These guys just offered all this information up entirely unprompted. Ladies, I know you know what I’m talking about. It wasn’t until I met him that I found the connection I had been so hard-pressed to find. Let’s call him Matt. Trust me, his name won’t matter for much longer.

Matt was interesting, well-read, and handsome to boot. He loved hearing about my hobbies and told me about his own. We listened to each other’s favorite songs, spoke about the dangers of social media, and he said I told him the coolest thing he’d heard that day. Could it be? A decent guy who wasn’t just trying to wrangle me into a not-so-ethical Ethical Non-Monogamy relationship?!

Matt was enthusiastic about me in a way that didn’t make me feel like he just wanted to see my boobs. He was excited about how excited I was about everything I was into. I wasn’t feigning interest just to be polite, the way we often do on these things. We hit it off so effortlessly that we were baffled by how easy it was. Good conversations can be so difficult to find where I’m from, and this man even knew what pici (my favorite fat spaghetti) was, for God’s sake! It got late, so we bid each other good night, and he told me he couldn’t wait to show me his bouldering chalk bag soon. I brushed my teeth, got into bed, took my insomnia medicine, and that was that. Now, this is where the story really begins.

The pill that had knocked me out against my will the night before was no match for my OCD brain once it found itself something new and shiny to latch onto. Suddenly, all I could think of was him. This man I had spoken to once.

The initial connection may have been valid, but I knew the chain of thoughts that followed wasn’t. But that didn’t stop me from letting them run rampant anyway. I started to review the conversation like it hadn’t just happened ten minutes earlier. I imagined how our lives could look together from the little I did know about him. I thought about the past in comparison and wondered what our future could look like. I knew it was batshit crazy, but my brain didn’t care. My OCD insisted it was harmless, just a little crush paired with a writer’s imagination. Well, that’s how it started with my ex, too.

Rare connections have always been my brain’s kryptonite. They’re something I’ve only experienced a handful of times before, which makes them all the more potent. I realized this time was no different, no matter how much I knew better or how much work I had done on myself. It starts out with a few silly daydreams (innocuous, if not completely mortifying) and then surreptitiously turns into a full-blown, clinical-grade obsession. And then the real feelings start building. That’s when you’re really in trouble.

I always thought it was all me. That I was just deeply in love when it was reciprocated or incredibly pathetic when it was all in my head. Now I realize it’s just another feature of this lovely disorder once again. The funny thing about OCD thought loops is that they aren’t all bad, not inherently. But they almost certainly will come back to get you in the end if you let them.

Even when you’re in a healthy, committed relationship, the thoughts eventually accumulate in your head and create a relationship imbalance that your partner has no clue about. You subconsciously build up expectations he can never live up to and standards he’s never even heard of. You start to prioritize him and your relationship without a second thought, convincing yourself that this is what love looks like. I suppose it might be. But for me, that imbalance became the root of so many of my compulsions. When you have this disorder, it’s easy to mistake one for the other—to confuse love with obsession, devotion with compulsion.

That’s the tricky thing about OCD: it can look wildly different from person to person. Sometimes I wish I had another theme, something that left my heart out of it. Angel numbers or moral scrupulosity, maybe. Occasionally, I’ll get jealous of people who avoid the word “butter” like the plague just to make sure their entire family stays alive. But I know it’s all the same mechanism. We’re all on the same boat even if our compulsions look nothing alike.

I’ve lost a lot of sleep to imagined threats of cancer (colon) or early-onset dementia (my tooth fell out once), lost years of my life to thinking about the inevitable (and graphic) deaths of my loved ones, and couldn’t so much as touch a menu without having hand sanitizer on hand for fear of contracting COVID and consequently spreading it to my entire apartment building. So, trust me, I know ball.

Yet, somehow, relationship OCD has been the one theme that’s been seemingly impossible to kick. This brief encounter and the spiral that followed show just how much of a hold it has on me even when I’ve done the work.

Dating has become the ultimate ERP for me. Exhausting, check. Excruciating, check. Embarrassing when it doesn’t go your way, check. I could get tempted to forgo all of it and chalk everything up to “normal human emotions.” I could keep dissecting every conversation. Reread every message. Wonder whether I like someone enough, whether they like me enough, whether this could work, whether I’m wasting my time, whether I’m settling, whether I’m being too picky, whether I’m ignoring a red flag or inventing one. I could even stop dating altogether.

Maybe I could settle with someone safe and practical to avoid all the hard feelings that come with real risk. I could spend six months trying to solve a man and troubleshoot the hypothetical future we have in store. Raging relationship OCD gives you the qualifications to do exactly that.

But the thing is…

I don’t want relief.

I want progress.

Maybe sticking it out is the real measure of my recovery. Not finally finding the right person or feeling safe from the discomfort of an uncertain future. It’s whether I can let my values win against my fears this time. Whether I can live without trying to control the uncontrollable. Whether I can stay open to the possibility of romance without letting the thought loops devour me. Whether I can put myself out there without losing myself to my OCD again.

Because I do have a choice. Not in whether the thoughts come, or whether OCD shows up, or whether something hurts. But in what I do next. It isn’t instant, and it isn’t fair, but it is a choice only I can make.

I used to think that meeting the right person would mean I could finally relax. I know better now because that period of relief lasted all of two months. I had everything I ever wanted and even that wasn’t enough. There is no person who can make uncertainty disappear. No relationship that can guarantee a future. No amount of chemistry or compatibility that can tell you exactly how something will end. That would be asking too much of one relationship; one person. I learned that the hard way.

What happened to Matt, you might ask? Well, he unceremoniously blocked me the very next day. I’m sure he had his reasons. I actually figured he had a very practical one. It doesn’t matter. Like I said, this story was never about him.

Once upon a time, I would’ve been crushed when I no longer saw his name on my phone screen. I would’ve wondered what I said wrong or how I could make sure this would never happen again. I would’ve compulsively told myself he was trash, that I deserved better, and that I shouldn’t even give him a second thought. I would’ve begged the universe to just tell me why this didn’t work out. That’s what always bothered me the most. Not necessarily that things don’t work out—not all the time, anyway—but why they didn’t.

This time around, I was sad in the way you get when you die right before you clear the level you’ve been desperate to beat for days. And then, just like that, I packed my breakfast burrito (homemade, of course), went to the bouldering gym, and ignored the fact that I was listening to his favorite song as I warmed up.

I know that this is progress.

I didn’t think things could ever be this way. I never imagined a version of me who didn’t punish herself for her mistakes, real or perceived. I didn’t think I had it in me to let go of questions when they could no longer be answered. I didn’t think it could be this simple to drop a lingering possibility or a waste of potential. Every week, I’m surprised to find a new version of myself I didn’t think possible. That alone is worth all the trouble that recovery entails.

I think I’ve come to realize that dating with a diagnosis will always come with a disclaimer. At least for a while. Not for the men on the other side of my phone, not even for the ones I might actually share a meal with one day. But for myself.

I need to remember that my values should always come first. I need to commit to putting my well-being before any single relationship. I need to remember that only I can take accountability for my recovery. Even when it’s hard. Even when it’s lonely.

The right person will understand that need for autonomy. He’ll understand that sometimes I’ll have to take a step back and sit with all the silly, complicated feelings without asking him to resolve them for me. He’ll understand that maybe he’ll never understand all of the things that come with dating someone with OCD—not completely, anyway.

I don’t think he needs to. I don’t need someone who can understand every thought that passes through my head. I thought I did but now I want someone who trusts that I’m doing the work to understand myself and wants to be there for me in the ways that I need; in the ways that are healthy for me.

I don’t know if I’ll ever find some version of that man. I don’t know if I’ll fall in love again. I don’t know if the next person I go out with will be the person I spend the rest of my life with, or if they’ll just be another Bumble match I’ll meet once and never think about again.

But I do know this: with recovery, I’ll be okay regardless.

P.S. Matt, if you’re reading this (Ariana, what are you doing here?!), you suck for ghosting, but I also appreciate it immensely. Enjoy my parting gift (the introduction to The Japanese House and memories of my sparkling personality), and I hope that every time you see a pair of nunchucks, you think of me!

I went back to the bouldering gym for the first time since my injury today. What started off as a pretty awful climbing session ended up teaching me something I don’t think I ever would’ve recognized a year ago.

Last week, I ended up losing my balance on my very first climb (in my favorite corner wall, no less) and smacking the wall face first. After the fact, I just kept climbing. Even after the initial shock, I still managed to make it to the very top.

It wasn’t until I looked down and saw my busted lip that I realized how much it hurt. Blood dripped down my teeth. My lip quivered (I never thought I’d be able to use that word) in pain. Naturally, my brain immediately did what it always does as I frantically ran my lips under the bathroom faucet. I imagined all the rental shoes that had surely scraped against those walls, the residual chalk that might’ve been mixed with who knows what, and whether I was about to contract a fatal case of tetanus or maybe even hepatitis?

Less than a week later, my lip was fully healed without any effort. I can confirm that despite my worries, I did not get any blood-borne diseases. I considered it a low-grade exposure; my first real chance to prove to myself that I didn’t need any reassurance this time around and that a tiny cut wouldn’t kill me. I’d been excited to be back for days. And yet the second I got on the wall, my body wanted absolutely nothing to do with it.

Intrusive thoughts are nothing new. Every single time I get up on the wall, all I can imagine is plummeting to my immediate death. Granted, the walls are only about ten feet tall, so that is wildly unlikely but, as you know, OCD doesn’t care about logic. When you’ve got a lifelong fear of heights along with a serious obsession with death, every time you climb is an exposure.

Nothing makes my heart race more than a complicated route to find my way back down. Every drop forces me to let go in a way that doesn’t feel natural to me. But eventually, you make it down safely and you’re reminded that it was never that scary after all. This time, something felt different.

My body seemed to think the danger wasn’t only in theory. It seemed like my very proximity to the wall was enough to set off the alarm, and not even being firmly on the ground could turn it off. Even as I was safely recovering on the crash pads, I couldn’t stop myself from shaking. The danger felt so real and visceral but it didn’t make any sense. It was interesting to feel the disconnection in real time. I guess while my mind was ready, my nervous system clearly wasn’t.

For years, I would’ve tried to make sense of that hesitation. I would’ve assumed that because my body was screaming, I must’ve been terrified. I would’ve taken it as a sign that bouldering wasn’t worth the risk and anxiety. But taking risks is exactly what helps you realize that sometimes your body isn’t on the same page as your brain. Its only life experience that can help you learn that your brain isn’t always on the same page as your values. Sometimes your nervous system is simply running on old information—and the work is in letting it catch up.

It got me thinking about how complicated the human body really is. There are so many different parts of us operating at the same time. I used to think of myself as one singular thing. Just me. I imagine most people still do. If your body is healed, then you’re healed. If your brain understands something, then surely the rest of you should act accordingly.

But that’s the thing about trauma—your wounds don’t need to throb for your nervous system to remember them. It doesn’t always have to hurt to leave a mark. Your lizard brain doesn’t really care whether something is statistically safe. It cares about the possibility of danger and the slightest chance of harm is enough to send it scrambling for safety.

Your intellect can understand something years before your nervous system does. Your values can point in one direction while your habits pull you in another. Never mind what that’s like when you’ve got a brain that likes to go rogue on occasion. Your body can remember dangers your mind has already ruled out.

It’s an interesting feeling, being so in tune with your body that you can tell which part of you is speaking. It reminded me of when I first had to learn how to separate myself from my thoughts. Or choose my values beyond my OCD. It’s a nice change to forgo the usual need to analyze everything and just let these contradictions exist for once.

Just because one part of you is convinced of something doesn’t mean the rest of you believes it just yet. It requires a lot of time, patience, and commitment to sort these things out. Sometimes, that means moving on doesn’t look anything like how you expected it to.

Maybe that’s why grief lingers after acceptance. Why breakups still hurt after you’ve done the work and processed the emotions. Why people find themselves bawling over events that happened decades ago. Why recovery can feel so awful even when you’re doing everything right.

Sometimes your mind has crossed the finish line while the rest of you is still halfway around the track. The work is finding the patience to wait, the resilience to keep going even when you start to get tired, and the self-compassion to be proud of yourself even when you don’t cross the finish line at the same time as everyone else.

I guess that’s what recovery has been teaching me all along: trust. I’ve gone through so many different phases of this journey, and there were so many moments where I wished I’d understood something sooner. I spent so many nights sobbing over how I acted or obsessing over why I couldn’t just understand these things when it mattered. Now I know I simply didn’t have the hardware for it yet.

I thought information was enough. But recovery isn’t just downloading new software. Your entire operating system has to change. Sometimes, all you can do is wait for the new iOS to download, phone plugged in, and wait for it to finish. You can stare at the progress bar all you want, but that won’t make it load any faster.

Without recovery, I didn’t have the capacity to give myself grace. Without slowing down, my nervous system couldn’t learn that it didn’t have to work so hard. Some lessons aren’t learned because someone explains them well enough. They’re learned because they’re lived through.

With enough time and consistency, your body can finally realize that life can be different; that life can feel different. Maybe that’s what trust really is—not forcing yourself to move before you’re ready, but training little by little until you are.

You can’t rush your nervous system into healing. The work is in showing up anyway. In letting your body gather enough evidence that it’s safe. In repeating the same ordinary thing over and over until one day it no longer feels extraordinary. Until one day, every part of you finally arrives at the same conclusion.

The past week has been one of the biggest milestones in my recovery. For the first time, possibly ever, I finally gave up my digital checking compulsion. I stopped trying to predict the future. Stopped trying to figure out what everyone was doing at that very moment. Stopped searching for proof my life was completely ruined. It was strangely easy, almost natural. Every time the urge came calling, I’d label the thought and redirect myself back to whatever I was already doing. Eventually, it stopped feeling like I was resisting something at all. But after two weeks of being the poster child for perfect OCD recovery, I cracked.

Normally, that would’ve been enough to ruin my whole week. I can recall so many nights spent sobbing into my pillow, convinced that I just wasn’t trying hard enough. Self-compassion just wasn’t on the menu at the time. Now that I understand more about how my brain works, I know it wasn’t something I was capable of back then.

I always held myself to a higher standard, convinced that was the only way I’d ever get better. I’d lived like that for as long as I could remember. The moment I fell short of my own expectations, I’d check out entirely. There was always another angle to inspect, another possibility I missed. The checking never made me feel better, though. It just made me feel responsible for finding a certainty that didn’t exist.

I’d have treated this as proof that I’d undone all my progress. That I’d somehow found my way back to square one. Instead, I decided to treat it like an exposure. What surprised me even more was how naturally that felt, too.

I think I even gave myself permission to slip. Not because I wanted to check, but because I wanted what came after. The guilt. The uncertainty. The horrible feeling that something was unresolved. I wanted to see if I could let it exist without immediately crucifying myself for a moment of weakness.

There’s a dangerous element to giving yourself that permission, though. I think I could’ve white-knuckled my way through it if I’d really wanted to. It wasn’t an overwhelming urge so much as a quiet whisper. The kind that tells you you’re only going to look for a second. Just enough to settle your stomach and give you a little hope that tomorrow will be a little easier.

Funnily enough, I really do think allowing myself that brief moment is what proves that I’m growing. Not because checking is suddenly healthy, but because it no longer carries the weight of my entire recovery. There was a time when one mistake would’ve opened me up to a world of shame that I would’ve lived in for weeks. I would’ve treated it like evidence that I’d never get better. That all the progress I’d made was just a lie I was telling myself.

This time, I didn’t spend the next six hours trying to undo it. I didn’t declare recovery dead on arrival. I just kept going. If I could travel back in time and say that to last year’s version of me, I’d probably give myself a conniption. I probably wouldn’t even believe I got myself to stop checking entirely.

It’s a strange feeling. Murkier than certainty, but lighter than panic. I can’t quite tell whether I checked because the compulsion won or because I chose not to make the checking itself the thing I was afraid of.

It almost felt like a rite of passage instead of the usual metaphorical staring contest with OCD. For so long, recovery felt like a game of who could hold their breath longer. Me refusing to check. OCD refusing to leave. Waiting to see who blinked first. This time, it didn’t feel like either of us won. It just... ended.

Maybe that’s the new milestone. Not the lapse. Not even resisting the urge. But realizing that recovery was never going to be measured by how perfectly I performed it. Maybe this, too, is a rite of passage. The inevitable moment where you stop asking whether you’ve failed and start asking whether you’re willing to begin again.

Recovery has always been messier than I imagined it to be. It still hurts, though. The compulsions may have quieted down, but the memories haven’t. Sometimes I’ll get hit with these visceral flashbacks of the little things I no longer have access to. I used to think having such a good memory was a blessing. Now it feels more like a curse.

It’s uncanny how I can remember exactly what it felt like to walk to the neighborhood grocery store by his place. The weight of my shopping tote digging into one shoulder, stuffed to the brim with the special green tea that promised to lower your cholesterol with every sip. Another little Easter egg I couldn’t yet recognize as OCD. I can almost feel the beads of sweat dripping down my face from spending all day in the Okinawan sun. I recall listening to Addison Rae on repeat while munching on my favorite mochi donuts after a thirty minute walk to get them.

It’s moments like these that catch me off guard. I don’t just remember what happened. I remember every feeling that came with it. It's strange grieving things that once felt completely ordinary. Those are the breadcrumbs OCD likes to use to trick me into checking just one last time.

But this time feels different. The familiar pull is still there but there’s also this feeling I can’t quite name. It’s uncomfortable, but not unbearable. Sad, but not catastrophic. It no longer feels like a necessity to my survival. I’m not trying to convince myself I’m okay, either. There’s just a quiet admission of sadness. But that’s all it is: a feeling, not a command. Even writing this doesn’t carry the same frantic need to reach a conclusion.

When I first imagined what moving on would feel like, I thought it would arrive all at once. I pictured some cinematic moment where I’d wake up and realize I’d stopped missing him. That I’d stopped caring. That I’d finally become the person I’d been trying so desperately to be. Maybe that’s what it’s like for others.

Instead, it happened like this. I checked. I felt guilty. And then I made breakfast. That would’ve sounded impossible a few months ago. I can stay jealous of how simple moving on is for others or I can acknowledge that some things will always be a little trickier with OCD—and it’s nothing I can’t handle.

It was only a few months ago that I was crying to my ex, begging him for reassurance that I could actually get better; wishing for the depression that came with a mental disorder to dissipate. Back then, I thought he was the only one who saw me at my rawest. I saw him as the only person who ever challenged me to be different. Now I can see something I couldn’t see then.

He was my best friend. Maybe even my soulmate. But he was also my safety person, and, ultimately, I have to choose between the familiar support I was so accustomed to or I can choose recovery. It’s sad and unfair but the truth is living with OCD is unfair—and that’s alright.

For so long, I thought recovery would look like never checking again. Never spiraling. Never feeling nervous or uncertain. I thought healing meant becoming someone who no longer had OCD. Maybe healing is something much less glamorous than that.

I’m sure that isn’t going to be the only time I slip. Making mistakes are just a part of life especially when OCD can be so loud and unceasing. The vivid memories I’d rather not remember might always stay with me, and I’m going to have to make space for that.

Recovery isn’t in erasing the past or all the bad habits that came with it; it’s in living in the present and making the right choice even after you’ve made the wrong one. Maybe that's all recovery ever was. Not never making the wrong choice, but refusing to let one wrong choice become your whole life again.

So the next time my OCD is loud, I'll probably check. I'll probably feel guilty. And then I'll make breakfast anyway.

Not to alcohol or drugs or anything with an age limit. No, nothing like that. Something far more mundane and a little more complicated to explain.

I found myself sobbing in the shower today. Not for the usual reasons, you know, the promise of impending doom and dying alone and whatnot. But because I realized how much I miss reassurance. Of all the things I’ve articulated about recovery, I think that’s the one thing I haven’t gotten a chance to mourn yet.

I miss how it used to feel when someone I loved would tell me everything that made me special. How he’d casually remind me that he’d never met anyone like me, or that he’d give up Valinor for a brief lifetime with me.

I miss how I would’ve called my mother after smacking my face on the climbing wall yesterday and hear her begrudgingly say, “No, you’re not going to get tetanus,” for the fourth time in fifteen minutes. Eventually, I’d believe her—for a few minutes, at least.

I miss asking my friends the questions I already knew the answers to, not because I couldn’t figure them out myself but because hearing someone else say them out loud felt more legitimate than listening to my own voice.

Most of all, I miss the privilege of giving in whenever my brain wanted to solve every potential misfortune that could befall me between now and 2045. I’m endlessly jealous of people who still get to comfort themselves without having to consider the implications, too.

These days, comfort comes with a black box warning. Not because reassurance is inherently dangerous. Most people thrive on it without a second thought. But for me, every attempt to address my worries comes with a cost.

Every answer risks becoming another question. Every moment of relief teaches my brain that maybe the danger was real after all—that the alarm was worth responding to and it will be ringing another sixty-seven times. Comfort stops being comfort the moment it starts validating a false emergency. It stops being healthy the moment it starts to fuel dependence.

It’s not that I don’t want to hear those things anymore. Quite the opposite. I still catch myself trying to negotiate with my sadness, subconsciously offering up reasons to feel better, imagining the exact response that’ll finally dissolve the lingering discomfort that comes with not being in control.

The only difference now is that I know better. A part of me wishes I didn’t. I’d certainly feel better for it. That’s the frustrating part. I know reassurance works. It works almost every time. For a few minutes.

I know that if I sought it out, it’d soothe me. It’d scratch the itch. It’d silence my brain just long enough for me to believe I’m safe and loved and not going to die from colon cancer at age 35. But that’s not what’s actually happening. Reassurance is just one of the many things OCD so easily twists into addiction.

The relief is real, but it comes with a price. Before long, your brain starts fiending for another hit. Eventually, the same answer doesn’t feel convincing anymore, so you ask again. Or you ask someone else. Or you rephrase the question. Or you venture into Reddit hoping someone has already posted the perfect response to the one thing keeping you awake at night. Soon enough, it’s four a.m. and you still aren’t sure if the mole on your right boob is cancerous or not.

You’ll do almost anything to make the uncertainty disappear for good. It never does. The part that taunts me the most is that reassurance isn’t inherently bad. That’s what makes giving it up so painful.

But that’s the thing about compulsions, they never start out bad. They usually begin as perfectly reasonable attempts to feel safe or loved or in control. Most people lean on reassurance every day without a second thought. It’s one of the ways we care for each other. We tell our loved ones they’ll be okay. We calm anxious friends, and they return the favor. It’s a perfectly normal thing to give and receive. OCD just has a way of taking something perfectly healthy and corrupting it into something you can’t live without.

It’ll tempt you with relief, then definitively convince your brain that relief was only necessary because the threat was real. It teaches you to distrust your own judgment and outsource your sense of safety to whoever or whatever will give it to you. Before long, you’re no longer seeking reassurance because you’re scared. You’re scared because you need reassurance.

So now, every time my OCD tries to lure me into doing the exact opposite of what my recovery needs, I have to stop myself mid-thought. Not because those words wouldn’t be true. Not because the people I love wouldn’t mean every single one of them. But because I know my OCD can never be satisfied.

This disorder is insatiable. The only way to stop it is to let it stay hungry. The part that hurts the most isn’t even giving up other people’s reassurance. It’s giving up my own.

Before my diagnosis, I could usually talk myself down and call it self-soothing. I could tell myself I was overthinking and enumerate all the reasons my worries were all so ludicrous. I’d tell myself I’d laugh about this tomorrow and I wouldn’t think about it a second longer. That if the worst really did happen... well, I couldn’t tell you because I would just tell myself it would never happen.

Somewhere along the way, indulging in reassurance started meaning losing my sense of reality—especially one that wasn’t tied to someone else’s. Every attempt to comfort myself became another attempt to convince myself. Every reassuring thought was immediately followed by, “Yeah, but what if..?”

Recovery has asked me to grieve something most people never have to think about. The ability to be comforted. And somehow, the kindest thing I can do for myself now is refuse it.

I had never experienced a panic attack before I started Lexapro. Now they’re a bi-weekly occurrence. The last few months have been unlike anything I’ve ever felt before. And still, if given the choice, I’d make the same decision all over again.

Before I started medication, I thought recovery would feel like relief. I thought the right pill would quiet my brain enough for me to finally get on with my life. I wasn’t alone in believing that. We talk about antidepressants as though they’re magical little shortcuts, something people take because they can’t be bothered to cope on their own.

I know people are desperate for relief. Not long ago, I was one of them. I started taking medication hoping for a reprieve from my brain’s glitchy thoughts, only to realize, and later accept, that recovery isn’t about getting rid of those thoughts. It’s about accepting their inevitability. Recovery was never about making the thoughts disappear. It was about learning to recognize them as white noise and let go even if they just might mean something after all. Reading that is easy. Living it is another story.

I only got here because I finally chose discipline over instant gratification for what feels like the first time in my life. Not because I'm lazy or soft, but because this disorder convinces you that you can't handle the hard parts of your life. That if something feels difficult, you should find a way around it. That if you don't want to do it, then you shouldn't have to.

What I've realized now is that discomfort isn't the enemy I thought it was. Our brains learn through prediction errors—by discovering that the things we feared were survivable all along. Recovery isn't about avoiding discomfort or making it disappear entirely. It's about teaching your brain that it can outlive it.

Sitting through the feelings hurts like hell, but it teaches your brain that you can handle it—and that’s worth all the agony recovery makes you go through. It teaches you that life isn’t something you curate around your fears. It’s something you learn to live through: the good, the bad, and the things you never imagined you’d be able to survive.

What I didn’t realize is that taking medication is, in itself, an exposure exercise. For people with OCD, it’s particularly cruel because it requires making a decision without knowing the outcome. You accept side effects you can’t predict, changes you can’t control, and the possibility that it might not work at all.

I’ve seen countless spirals online from people with Health OCD who can’t decide whether to start medication. Don’t ever wander into the OCD subreddit. I can almost guarantee it’ll become the ground zero of your next compulsion. A quick Reddit scroll turns into communal rumination before you even realize what’s happening. Every comment becomes another possibility. Every possibility becomes another what if. What if it turns me into a zombie? What if it causes internal bleeding? What if I regret the whole thing and I’m doomed to feel these side effects for the rest of my life?

I’ll admit that the reason I even considered tapering off a month ago was because I got caught in that same spiral. Even in recovery, it’s so easy to get sucked into the relentless catastrophizing. I brought it up with my psychiatrist, subtly seeking reassurance about staying on it even though I knew it had helped me immensely. Now I’m on the other side of that conversation, choosing uncertainty anyway.

I’ve decided to get off Lexapro. It just wasn’t the best fit for me. While Lexapro didn’t work as much as I had hoped, it helped me get here. For that, I’ll always defend medication to people who don’t understand it. Finding the right drug for you can be life-changing. People don’t realize just how differently our brains can work, and sometimes medication simply levels the playing field. It gives people with brains wired a little differently the chance to see beyond OCD’s glitches and false alarms—but only if they’re willing to do the work, too.

For the first time, I feel proud of the way I’ve been showing up for myself. Even on the days when all I have the energy to do is feel guilty for not being motivated enough to be better than this. It’s a lot of mental juggling, being kind to myself while simultaneously pushing myself to do things I desperately don’t want to do. But that’s recovery.

It’s not without its costs, though. Some nights, I’m too terrified to even close my eyes, worried about the graphic nightmares waiting for me on the other side. The highs are subtle to everyone but me, and the lows are intense yet invisible. I miss rest. I yearn to feel peace again.

Instead, I lie awake wondering what’s going to keep me up this time, spinning through a roulette wheel of side effects waiting for it to land on something new. I never thought bones could itch, but it’s one of the things that keeps me up at night these days. My bones itch, my eyes are puffy, and I get the appetite of a werewolf the moment the clock strikes twelve. At times, the distress is a welcome distraction from the familiar thoughts that spent years gnawing at me. I watch the hours go by, willing myself to sleep, but there’s comfort in the familiarity of the discomfort. It also helps that I know that with time and patience, there’s a better version of me at the other side of this. Growing pains couldn’t be a more fitting name for it.

OCD has always disguised itself as caution. It wants to keep you safe from anything difficult, risky, or uncertain. Recovery puts you right in the middle of those things. In that sense, SSRIs became a perfect metaphor for recovery itself. You willingly walk into uncertainty without any guarantee that it’ll be worth it. You endure the difficult parts, hoping they’re the price of getting your life back.

The funny thing is, my progress with SSRIs goes well beyond the prescribed benefits. Somewhere along the way, I stopped trying to outrun discomfort everywhere else, too. I’ve been sober for almost a year now. Before, I would’ve told you alcohol helped me get out of my shell. Looking back, I think all it did was help me avoid discomfort. I spent my college years drinking four days out of a week. I used to say my greatest fear was becoming an alcoholic—not because of the alcoholism itself, but because it meant I'd never be able to have another drink.

Ironically, I genuinely feel better without it now. Not because life has become easier, but because I finally stopped needing it to be. Medication didn’t cure my OCD any more than sobriety did. Neither erased the uncertainty or sadness that comes with giving up your compulsions and the comfort that came with them. They just gave me more opportunities to practice living alongside them.

Even with all this progress, I still wake up with crushing chest pain on most days. My bones are still impossibly itchy when I’m tucked in and desperate to doze off. I still don’t know whether tomorrow will bring another side effect, another intrusive thought, or another reason to question whether any of this was even worth it. I still wake up feeling terrible and low for no reason sometimes. A year ago, I would’ve tried to make those shitty feelings go away before getting out of bed. Now I just get up, anyway.

Catssidy, or Cassie for short, came to me at a very interesting time in my life. I had just started seriously working on my recovery after a difficult breakup and a surprise OCD diagnosis. A lot of that involved saying yes to all the things I always wanted to do. Without listening to OCD’s insistence that I’d kill this poor, unassuming creature in my sleep, I finally decided to foster a cat.

Apart from my childhood Siamese cat, I had no experience taking care of a cat, so I made sure to do tons of research so I’d know what to expect. Every Google search and anecdote prepared me for a shy, independent, and aloof new companion but Cassie was nothing like that. From the jump, she was sweet, affectionate, and loving. She lived for cuddles at any moment of every day and personal space was merely a suggestion. She offered so much trust from the very beginning, and we’ve been attached at the hip ever since. She followed me everywhere—and I mean everywhere. She even started sitting on the toilet while waiting for me to finish my shower.

However, despite being so sweet and lovable, she still had the instincts of a wild animal. She had a tendency to lash out whenever she didn’t get the attention she so desperately wanted. She’d go absolutely feral if I walked away from her or ended a cuddle session a little too early for her liking. Eventually, she got so bored that she started treating me like a hunter treats its prey.

I had also been going through a lot, so I wasn’t always able to give her what she needed. I started tapering off my SSRI recently and have spent a good chunk of that time stuck in bed. She’d spend hours curled up beside me while I lay there binge-watching Apple TV’s entire comedy roster. Then, without warning, she’d sink her teeth into my arm as if she’d suddenly remembered she was a predator. Just as quickly, she’d seem to regret it and realize that she was a house cat, not a tiger.

I never really blamed her. I started to understand that a lot of her behavioral issues were rooted in her biology. I used to joke that her anxious attachment style was ruining our relationship, which only made me realize how alike the two of us really were. It’s a little funny to realize you share the same nervous system as a stray cat. I’d see myself in the way she’d follow me from room to room and it reminded me of how I always wanted to be right next to him to feel like nothing was wrong. Luckily, unlike Cassie, I have access to therapy and Lexapro.

It’s only now that I realize what it must have been like for my ex to let me go. I know it sounds absurd to compare myself to a street cat, but sitting here with Cassie curled up beside me, I finally understand something I never could back then. Loving someone and being able to care for them are not always the same thing.

Despite what OCD will have me believe, I loved him a lot and he loved me just as deeply. What we had was every bit as unique as we thought it was. That was never the problem. The problem was that I needed more than he could give at the time, and now I’m staring at a cat who needs more than I can give. No amount of love or motivation to be different changes the reality of that.

She can’t help her animal instincts any more than I could have controlled my undiagnosed disorder at the time. I think I knew that already. Saying it out loud this evening just made it harder to ignore. Whether it's single cat syndrome or OCD, sometimes the people who leave aren't rejecting you. Some problems don't need someone to blame. They just need someone willing to acknowledge they're there—and walk away even when it’s hard.

Despite what all the relationship advice will tell you, sometimes caring deeply for something isn’t enough to make it work. Much to my dismay, loving it means accepting that someone else can give it the life you can’t. Before my diagnosis and everything that came after, I subconsciously believed that love should conquer all. If he wanted to, he would. You know, all that jazz. We’re conditioned into believing that the right person will stay through everything you throw at them.

But there’s something I learned in OCD recovery that reminded me of recently: even in recovery, relapses can be incredibly difficult for partners and family members to witness, let alone live through. We can't love anyone into staying any more than they can love us into getting better. It’s a bitter pill to swallow, but it’s also what frees you from the constant what if’s that OCD tempts you into analyzing.

Cassie’s asleep beside me as I write this, completely unaware of the decision I’ve had to come to. Eventually, she’ll probably curl up in someone else’s lap the same way she curled up in mine. She’ll follow them into the bathroom and peek into the shower while they’re washing their hair. She’ll demand attention she doesn’t need and bite them when she still doesn’t get enough. She’ll also be the sweetest cat they never expected to welcome into their lives.

It’ll be hard for both of us. I can’t imagine waking up without her incessant barrage of meowing outside my door. I’m going to miss how she’d play with my hair while I clumsily fumbled my way through whatever inverted pole trick I was attempting that week. I might even miss how she’d watch me from behind the kitchen counter, waiting for the perfect time to pounce. But I know that despite the difficulty that comes with letting go, she’ll be happier for it—and that’s what she deserves.

I used to live in a house by the ocean. Perched on a cliff, it had a veranda that looked out over the water. As a child, I would climb the balcony rails and stare into the sea. One day, my parents were horrified to find me there, only a few steps from a plunge into the deep water below.

I was a remarkably well-behaved little girl, so this became part of my childhood lore. It was one of the few times I was ever punished. They made me stand in the corner and the sheer shame of doing something I wasn’t meant to do brought me to tears. They handed me a tissue to dry my eyes, and I promptly tore it into tiny pieces. It must have been a hilarious sight: a four-year-old’s act of defiance against a Kleenex. My parents could barely contain their laughter. It’s still one of my mother’s favorite stories. In recovery, I came to realize that what stayed with me wasn’t the punishment. It was the shame.

Back in high school, we had these passports that marked every time we misbehaved. I’ve never been much of a rebel but I still recall the heaviness I’d feel when I’d get called into the principal’s office for wearing socks that were a little too short. Apparently, showing ankles as a Catholic school girl is a serious moral concern. Even though I knew how ridiculous it all was, I still couldn’t shake the strange guilt that came with being reprimanded. We didn’t have a course on Catholic Guilt™ but if we did, I know I’d be top of my class.

This tendency followed me into adulthood. I’m attuned to the slightest tone change and can detect a shift in someone’s demeanor from a mile away. There isn’t a room I’ve entered that I haven’t immediately read and responded to accordingly. That can be difficult when you’re also naturally argumentative and outspoken but one trait never cancels out the other. I’m always happy to be a contrarian until the guilt hangover inevitably comes after.

I always chalked it up to being a born overthinker. Later on, I learned about attachment styles from an Instagram reel and figured it was that all along. But now I recognize shame and guilt as two of the most pervasive OCD traits I’ve struggled with my whole life. I’ve never been able to put an argument on pause or resist the urge to apologize for something that isn’t my fault. The uncertainty always seemed too loud to ignore. It’s a vicious cycle, really. Because these thoughts are so natural, we assume they’re simply part of the human experience. As it turns out, not every human goes through one-sided litigation over how rude they were to the bank teller that one time three weeks ago.

I had known this intellectually for a while, but this afternoon reminded me that understanding something is completely different from feeling it in the moment. I had said something insensitive to a friend and quickly apologized, but that didn’t stop me from thinking about it for the rest of the day. This time, I knew it was OCD, but that didn’t stop the feelings from showing up when I was doing the dishes anyway.

So, for the first time, I didn’t send a follow-up apology. I didn’t conduct the routine “are you mad at me?” survey. I just kept scrubbing and scrubbing, letting the thoughts exist without trying to solve them. I felt a strange sense of wonder at my first real bout of OCD guilt since my diagnosis. As I was drying my last bowl, I thought to myself, “How lovely it is to feel my progress in such a concrete way.” What doesn’t feel good is the nagging thoughts of discomfort that come even when you know it’s just the OCD talking.

Looking back, it’s all so obvious now. The month-late apologies to my boyfriend for taking his mom’s side in a disagreement one random afternoon. The debilitating guilt over letting my mother buy me an extravagant bag in Italy back in 2015. The days spent replaying some offhand interaction that everyone else had long forgotten. Don’t even get me started on how much guilt I carry when I fail to respond appropriately to the crossing guard because I had my AirPods in while he was speaking to me.

It isn’t just me, either. I’ve noticed how often guilt appears in other people’s stories too. Different obsessions, same underlying fear: that we’ve done something wrong and need certainty that we’re forgiven. It’s comforting to know I’m not alone, but I’d still rather we all be spared these ridiculous self-inflicted depositions. Unfortunately, this is all just par for the course.

With recovery, I’m learning to forgive myself for the strain I put on my past relationship. I’m learning that friendships are a two-way street and it isn’t my job to constantly investigate whether I’ve done something wrong. I’m learning that mistakes belong in the past and that I’m perfectly capable of starting again.

Was it easy to stop myself from asking whether my friend was mad at me this afternoon? No. The OCD still whispers that I should ask her about it just once. But here I am, writing this essay instead. For someone who has spent most of her life looking for reassurance, that feels like progress.

Hilarious, I know. Now, before the well-deserved criticism for using AI for such an insipid task, I’ll have you know I’m at a ridiculously low point at the moment, so give me some grace.

As I was sending a photo of my hand, I recognized the sheer absurdity of the entire thing. There I was, asking specific, almost scientific questions about its methodology as if I needed to cite sources. Well, that’s the pinnacle of OCD.

This disorder will make you act in the most contradictory ways imaginable. In this case, I was asking a computer—a clanker, if you will—for reassurance about my entire future through one of the most woo-woo practices in existence: palmistry. It didn’t help, of course, that the reading was exactly what I wanted to hear.

That’s the thing about reassurance. It doesn’t have to be true; it just has to feel true—even just for a moment. OCD will have you doing things you don’t believe in, chasing answers you don’t trust, and seeking certainty in places you’d normally laugh at. It makes you look for evidence where faith is inherently required. Not because you’ve suddenly changed your mind, but because the disorder is always whispering the same thing: what if..?

Today, the thing I’d been dreading finally happened. But strangely, it felt almost cathartic. The pain that found me today felt different. OCD doesn’t let you have many clean endings or fresh starts. It certainly doesn't let you move on simply because you want to. It keeps dragging old memories into new days, convincing you that every chapter somehow remains unfinished.

No matter how badly I want to focus on the future, my mind remains fixated on what came before, examining details, searching for certainty, trying to solve something that may never be solvable. So, yeah, recovery looked a little messy today. It meant making a few questionable dietary decisions, staying in bed a little longer than I’d like, and accepting that I don’t really get to move on the way most people do. Ultimately, it means letting myself be sad instead of trying to indulge in some sort of half-baked plan to move to Spain as a quick fix to dull the sadness.

Recovery also means starting again tomorrow. No matter how hard it feels. No matter how much I don’t want to. Recovery means working on myself even when it feels pointless. It means believing that so much of life is trusting that there’s still so much of it. wrote that in a note months ago and I have not gotten it out of my head since.

The funny thing is that Gemini couldn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know. The future is still uncertain—it always will be. Life doesn’t come with an answer key. There’s no magic checklist that guarantees a soulmate, a perfect daughter, three dogs, and a house on the lake by age thirty-five if I follow three easy steps. Tomorrow will still arrive whether or not I lose sleep over it today. After all, if the future can’t be known yet, then it can’t be ruined either.

You imagine every possible ending in graphic detail. There’s one version where he leaves you for his best friend, another where he realizes he doesn’t want to be with someone who doesn’t play a killer game of D&D. You think about calling the catering company to cancel the wedding if he died a day before you could walk down the aisle. Then there’s the more realistic—if entirely unearned—possibility that he simply changes his mind one day. You sit with the grief of things that may or may not happen. Those nights made me feel a little like Marissa in Tijuana: drunk on despair, bottomed out at the bar, waiting for proof that it isn’t all going to shit. You know it isn’t rational and you don’t believe a word of it but you do it anyway.

Then it finally happens, and you go through it a million times again. OCD traps you in a kind of mental Groundhog Day, where your worst fears and memories replay so often they begin to feel inescapable. Before that, you mourn things while they are still yours. Somewhere along the line, your brain convinces you that vigilance is necessary to keep you safe—that if you worry enough, confess enough, check enough, maybe you can solve the problem before it happens. Now that the haze has cleared, I realize that’s not how life works. That’s what recovery has been teaching me: not how to prevent being devastated, but that I can survive it.

When I first started taking Lexapro, I’d get unbearably cold at night. The only thing I owned suitable for sleeping in was his, and I ended up wearing it for weeks on end. He had this old sweatshirt from when he was a teenager, and I was so charmed by the paint stain on the sleeve that I had to keep it for myself. That feels like an entire lifetime ago—when we were still new, and I had no idea what the next year would bring or what that sweatshirt would eventually come to mean. Now the side effects are back and, while the chills feel familiar, I’m learning to endure the cold without his tattered blue sweatshirt—or his reassurance.

There is something deeply eye-opening about realizing how debilitating your OCD actually was. Not because you didn’t believe it then, but because you can suddenly see how different life feels when you finally understand your own mind. For years, I thought I was just sensitive, careful, and devoted. No one tells you that OCD can disguise itself as devotion.

I remember how all of this used to feel so visceral. Every thought explosive in its urgency. I genuinely believed that if I didn’t resolve every thought that popped into my head immediately, it was only a matter of time until my life collapsed in on itself. It sounds dramatic now, but that is truly what it felt like—even during the happiest periods of my life, especially then. This disorder has an uncanny way of turning joy into a liability.

But it feels different now. I feel different now. I’m still devastated, but this time the pain feels grounded. Grief is still grief, but it no longer feels like an emergency. I don’t think time alone did that. I think recovery did. Because the casual cruelty of unmanaged OCD is that time doesn’t necessarily heal all. With enough time and rumination, grief doesn’t always soften; it can deepen—like something left to ferment in the dark.

With recovery, little by little, your mind becomes yours again. Not perfectly. Not all at once. But enough to let you realize one day that you’re stronger than your deepest fears after all. Suddenly, you’re no longer powerless to your thoughts, no matter how relentless they may be.

Getting through this without giving in to my compulsions has been one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. It feels a bit like getting on a ride without putting on your seatbelt. There’s no safety protocol anymore. But unlike a rickety rollercoaster at a second-rate state fair, you eventually learn you’ll be just fine. It’s hard and painful, but it only makes you stronger for the next wave of ups and downs that come with OCD.

You opt out of the false sense of comfort that comes with your compulsions. With enough tolerance, trust, and endurance, you become an entirely different person in the process. But that doesn’t mean I don’t hate all of it.

I hate that my mind comes with its own set of rules. I hate seeing people hold hands and wondering when that will happen for me again. I hate having to accept that some things will always be a little bit difficult for me. I hate that my mental state was rotting from the inside out.

I hate how recovery often asks you to live through exactly the things you’ve been obsessing over for months, maybe even years. I hate having to relive memories on a loop, especially because that’s all they are now: memories. There are certain lessons OCD will simply never allow you to learn gently—and that’s kind of the point.

Sure, I still have regrets. I regret the years I lost to thoughtless paranoia. I regret how I believed I was always one mistake away from my downfall. Living that way exhausts you. It shrinks your world until all that remains is the pursuit of safety—a finish line that keeps moving no matter how hard you try to reach it. Oh, how I wish I wasn’t born like this sometimes. But I am getting better. Slowly. And maybe that should be enough. At least for today.

I know I deserve love, even when it doesn’t come easily. I know I am worthy of good things, even when my brain tries to convince me they won’t happen. I am an entirely different person from who I was ten months ago. Recovery has changed me in ways I probably don’t even realize yet. There’s so much power in recognizing that I am not my OCD. It has been messy and exhausting at times, but I got here.

As I’m marinating in my residual grief, binge-watching The OC in tears, I know this is not the end. For once, that thought doesn’t feel like something I need to prove. I don’t need to know the future. I don’t need to solve it. I just need to be open enough to let it happen.

I woke up today in a Lexapro-induced haze; this latest dose adjustment hasn’t exactly been easy. As I instinctively reached for my phone, I realized I was no better than I was before—not in the ways that matter now. Not in the ways I actually need to get better. Not in the ways that slowly hollowed out my relationship from the inside out. I had just woken up and immediately checked my phone for some sort of inane update I didn’t need. My need for information was incorrigible. So what is it about this particular part of my OCD that I can’t seem to kick? I know that it’s bad for me, but I can’t quit it just yet.

I can feel myself slowly reverting back to older versions of me: sleeping in too late, leaving my poor cat to starve*, subsisting exclusively on instant noodles and potato chips, letting dirty plates pile up in the sink until the kitchen turns into a cockroach settlement—and I hate myself for it. I’ve dropped the habits I worked so hard to build and picked up the ones that nearly ruined me the first time around. I know healing isn’t linear, but I also know something has to change.

There I was again, searching for an answer I already know doesn’t exist. Or worse, searching for one I know will only hurt me. I literally did it just now, while writing this. Looking for reassurance disguised as “curiosity.” Looking for information I pretend doesn’t affect my well-being just to chase some impossible sense of certainty. Even admitting that makes my stomach drop. Apparently not even the thinly-veiled promise of online anonymity is enough to silence the shame.

At first, I thought the only thing I needed to deal with was my fear of losing control. However, uncertainty, at least in this case, was never just about the fear of what might happen. It was also about the agony of what I didn’t know for sure. My brain could take the smallest informational gap and stretch it into something completely unrecognizable. My friends’ daily routines. My boyfriend’s weekend plans. The tone of a one-off text message. My mother’s deepest secrets. There was nothing my mind couldn’t turn into a full-blown investigation given enough time and silence.

Like a Trojan Horse, this compulsive need to know things slipped quietly into my life disguised as curiosity. By the time I realized it had taken over, it was already embedded deep in my subconscious, filtering the way I experienced everyone and everything around me. Every unanswered question started to feel loaded. Every unknown became something to solve for sport.

The worst part is that it didn’t even always look so pathological. Sometimes it just looked like an overactive imagination. I’ve always been the kind of person who remembers tiny details, notices inconsistencies, and connects dots nobody else sees. A lot of it was harmless. Some of it was probably even useful. But OCD has a way of taking perfectly normal instincts and twisting them into compulsions. Into rituals you don’t even realize you’re performing anymore. Into addictions. It’s as simple as that: I am an addict—and nothing will ever really change until I do something about that.

I think the core of my disorder has always been this insatiable need for information. As usual, I just thought it was a cute little personality quirk: not being able to sleep until I found out if two actors from a cancelled television show were still friends, going through thousands of tweets just to say I read it all, zooming into a photo I had already seen a thousand times before, endlessly refreshing Instagram accounts just to see if anything had changed in the three minutes I was away. It sounds ridiculous when I say it out loud, but that’s the thing about compulsions—they rarely come with a name tag.

I find myself trying to get random bits of information the way other people would reach for another hit. My brain convinces me that if I can just find the missing piece—one more article, one more Reddit post, one more detail I must’ve overlooked—then maybe I can finally go back to real life. Maybe I can finally stop wondering if I have cancer. Except the relief never lasted very long; it only stayed until my mind found another loose thread to pull at.

And the internet, unfortunately, is the perfect playground for someone like me. Infinite information, infinite access, infinite opportunities to ruin your own day. There will always be another rabbit hole waiting patiently at three in the morning, when your defenses are low and you run out of reasons not to Google it just once. OCD loves nothing more than an environment where answers appear to exist just one more search away. I know that when I’m healthier, my relationship with the internet will probably become better too—less codependent, less reactive, less addicted to the false sense of reassurance it spoiled me with.

I don’t really wonder why I’m like this. Every few years, my daddy issues just rear their ugly head in a new and inventive way. I’ve had this gnawing need for information for as long as I can remember. At first, it was charming and precocious: climbing kitchen counters to find my Christmas presents early or reading my mother’s receipts line by line like I was in the FBI. But eventually it turned into rifling through my father’s belongings, trying to uncover the things my parents didn’t think I was strong enough to handle. I spent so much of my life being treated like I couldn’t bear the truth that, years later, I’m still trying to prove that I can. Maybe not to them, but definitely to myself.

I think that’s the part of this disorder I still haven’t fully let go of. Somewhere along the way, information became synonymous with safety. I started to equate knowledge with agency. If I know everything, then nobody can blindside me. Nobody can humiliate me. Nobody can keep me in the dark again. Except omniscience is impossible. There will always be secrets and surprises, and there’s no real way to protect yourself from uncertainty.

There’s always another question. Another detail missing. Another thing my brain insists I need to know before I can live my life. OCD is greedy like that. It takes the most human instinct in the world—the desire to protect yourself—and turns it into a bottomless pit no amount of information can fill.

At some point, I need to ask myself when enough is finally enough. How long am I going to keep one foot inside this disorder while swearing I’m fully committed to recovery? What exactly will it take for me to let go of the illusion that certainty is protecting me when it’s actually keeping me sick? I don’t know yet, honestly. But I hope I figure it out soon.

*For the record, I’m exaggerating for dramatic effect. If anything, Catssidy the Foster is perfectly plump and well on her way to obesity.

**Veronica Mars is my all-time favorite show and she would totally relate to this essay.

I went on a trip to Italy with my mother once. We stayed in one of those hilltop villas with long winding stairs down to the ocean and, one afternoon, I let some strangers in with me through the hotel stairs. The guilt plagued me throughout the night. By 2am, I had convinced myself that armed robbers were going to break into the hotel and kill us all—a grisly seaside murder that read like a White Lotus plot line all because of a silly girl who didn’t want to seem mean to a few strangers.

I reasoned with myself all night. They probably belonged there, tourists taking a shortcut, just too tired to make the full climb. Why would armed robbers be wandering around the Amalfi Coast waiting for an opportunity to rob a tiny boutique hotel? None of it worked. That’s not how it operates, but I didn’t know that yet. OCD doesn’t care about probability. It cares about possibility. Once it enters your mind, it digs its claws in and refuses to let go. Soon enough, you’re living in a Final Destination movie—and you’re convinced it’s all your fault.

It’s a hilarious thought now, but I stared at the door the entire night, convinced I had personally orchestrated our deaths by committing the grave moral failure of being too polite. I realize it was OCD all along. It’s interesting how deeply these things seep into your psyche. This was long before I had any inkling that something was wrong—and yet the signs were always there.

It’s funny how something so utterly bizarre can seem possible in the moment. Little by little, the moments come. At first it’s almost cute—a funny little quirk, a story you tell people at dinner parties while laughing at yourself. Then the thoughts start to seem a little more likely. Then the moments suddenly turn into your whole life. Eventually, the disease gets so sophisticated that it makes your happiest moments feel like the most dangerous ones.

Getting diagnosed with a mental disorder late takes away years of your life and leaves you with these strange flashbacks viewed through an entirely new lens. One day, the moments you dismissed as quirky anecdotes suddenly show up in a psychiatric questionnaire and you realize you’re no longer the same person you were before. Suddenly, there’s a name for what you were going through and it all makes sense. Finally. But that realization doesn’t magically undo the false beliefs that you held true for years.

I can trace them backwards now. The mini pharmacy I carried around on trips in case I contracted dengue fever. The constant requirements for proof of life. That one time I became convinced I forgot to lock the Airbnb, which obviously meant someone had stolen all our things and my boyfriend would dump me right on the spot. The strange certainty that every bad thing happening around me could somehow be traced back to me. I spent so much of my life believing I was simply “anxious,” “careful,” or “neurotic,” when in reality my brain had quietly been turning every small decision into a potential catastrophe.

One of the most common traits with OCD is inflated responsibility—the persistent belief that you are somehow responsible for preventing harm at all times, even in situations that make absolutely no logical sense. Sometimes OCD convinces you that a tiny mistake will quite literally be the death of you. It’s an exhausting way to live. I’ve read stories from people convinced something terrible would happen if they didn’t hold their breath for 37 seconds or tap a surface a certain number of times. From the outside, it sounds absurd. I thought so too, once upon a time. But I’m no better; the mechanism is all the same. Somewhere deep down, there’s this belief that everyone’s fate is somehow sitting in your hands—and you need to do everything humanly possible to save them.

When you think of OCD, you never picture it this way. I didn’t, at least. To the uninitiated, it simply looks like an overactive imagination and a healthy amount of concern—except it’s never all that healthy, is it? For me, OCD looked like telling my mom to drive safe because if I didn’t, she’d inevitably end up in a four-car pileup. Or insisting my boyfriend go straight to the ER because I was convinced he had developed sepsis. The poor man ended up in urgent care at 2am because I had already convicted myself of manslaughter over some unsafe drinking water. It turned out to be a run-of-the-mill case of traveler’s diarrhea.

For years, I thought this was just what caring deeply felt like. Maybe I was wired this way, or maybe it’s inherited anxiety from an equally neurotic mother. I moved away for college, a rarity in my culture. I remember her calling me twenty times by noon, asking for my exact location with the urgency of someone tracking a military convoy. I didn’t realize there was a difference between love and fear until the fear devoured me. OCD is difficult to recognize when it dresses up as concern—especially when it looks like the way I was raised.

So, what does that mean for me in recovery? I guess it means noticing when my brain starts creating entire Greek tragedies out of something as mundane as an unanswered call or a missing reply, and choosing not to believe it. It means rethinking all the little ways I feed the fear. It means finally allowing the uncertainty to exist alongside me. It means realizing that I don’t have that much power—and that’s what makes me free.

Looking back now, I can still picture myself staring down those winding stairs, convinced I had doomed us all. It still feels surreal how possible it seemed at the time. It was never really about logic or statistical probability to begin with. OCD doesn’t care how unlikely something is—it only cares that it could happen. Recovery means accepting that uncertainty is not an emergency, probability is not reality, and fear is not intuition.

I’ve only been on Substack for a month or two and, in that short time, I’ve found such singular connections here. There’s something strangely intimate about this space—how quickly we can lay out our vulnerabilities and be heard by the people who needed to hear them too. We begin conversations with our deepest fears, casually showing strangers across the world what our darkest days can look like.

In real life, so much of what truly needs to be said gets sanitized for cocktail conversation. To be proper. To be sensitive. To be tactful. Here, however, we barely wince at a stranger telling us about their latest psychotic episode or how damaged they are from their divorce. Identity is one thing, but what is it about real life that makes us blur out our imperfections for the people supposedly closest to us?

Learning that I had OCD, and then actively working toward recovery, has fundamentally altered the way I interact with everyone in my life. Once you become aware of how much of your disorder has been unwittingly encouraged and enabled by well-meaning loved ones, it becomes difficult to connect the way you used to. Organic conversation no longer feels as easy. It is human nature to reassure and validate the people you care about, especially when they’re struggling, but recovery complicates that dynamic in ways that are difficult to explain to the average person.

This became especially apparent when I decided to hard launch my mental illness and bare my soul on Instagram. For someone who posts fairly regularly, you’ll barely find anything real or meaningful on my feed. My Instagram is usually reserved for cooking content, vacation pics with annoying captions, and the occasional internet boyfriend thirst meme (usually Tom Blyth in the evil blonde wig), but this time I made an exception. So I headed over to Canva for the first time and poured my heart out into a cute little carousel template. After all, I owe my entire diagnosis (and subsequent recovery) to the Instagram algorithm—it felt fair to pay it forward. I genuinely hope I helped at least one person by talking about my experience. But, boy, does it feel lonely.

My friends love me. No, they really do. I got a slew of supportive comments filled with heart emojis and declarations of pride. But when it comes down to it, I can count on one hand the people who even know what this experience has done to me. For all the people who left public declarations of their support, not very many have reached out to me directly to talk about it. Not because they don’t want to, but because they don’t know how. Any messy version of my recovery seems to be off-limits and discussing it would require acknowledging something much heavier than something you can ask at a children’s party.

Hannah Elise wrote about how illness can begin to feel like a burden, and that’s exactly what this feels like now. It’s also what stops me from talking about it more openly. We live in the same city while our inner worlds exist on entirely different continents. I know we’ve all got a lot going on in our lives and I have no idea what their minds look like, either. I’m sure we’d all love to let each other in—at least, I do but that vulnerability also feels like a burden. Like a responsibility, even an obligation. I think a lot of us instinctively pull away from that kind of intimacy because it asks something of us emotionally that we may not know how to give.

Lately, I feel like I exist in this strange in-between state where my mind has become incredibly loud and psychologically complex while the world continues on as usual. We go to brunch and talk about who just got pregnant. We send each other Harry Styles reels. We make casual conversation about vacations and relationships and whether Sam Levinson hates women (he does). Meanwhile, there are entire parts of ourselves we hide from the people we speak to every single day.

There’s something profoundly lonely about realizing that the biggest thing that has ever happened to you is largely invisible to everyone else. I think that’s why spaces like this matter to me so much. There’s comfort in discovering that other people have also quietly become strangers to their former selves. OCD is deeply isolating because so much of it exists in invisible corners of the mind. Ironically, recovery is not all that different. In some ways, it can feel even lonelier than being in the thick of the disorder itself. But I suppose that’s just one of the quieter costs of getting better.

I’ve eventually realized that my fears, no matter how plausible they seemed, were never actually as important as my OCD convinced me they were. But just because your obsessions aren’t “real” doesn’t mean there isn’t a massive, soul-crushing weight (and some faulty brain wiring) behind them.

When I first got my diagnosis, everything finally clicked. I felt relieved. I finally had a reason behind all my shortcomings: a fresh “problem” to solve. While that may sound productive (maybe even inspirational?), any fellow OCD sufferer knows that is OCD in a nutshell. Can you imagine being excited about a mental illness diagnosis just because it gave you a “fun” new project?

That’s exactly what I tried to do: I tried to outthink it. I stopped checking my locks and ditched my “How Not to Let the House Burn Down While You’re Away” checklist like it was nothing. Hearing that OCD is incurable initially made me feel like a leper, but I’m an only child; I was raised to have exactly the right amount of delusion to think I was special enough to outmatch human biology. I was convinced I’d be the first person in history to ever be “cured”.

So, I did everything right. I went on my hot girl walks, I sat with the discomfort, and I performed solo rounds of ERP like my life depended on it (it felt like it did). I avoided every compulsion in sight, tallying all the days I was compulsion-free. I deleted Reddit off my phone and replaced doomscrolling with deadbugs.

Spoiler alert: even that was OCD in disguise. That’s the most exhausting part—the fact that everything can be a compulsion. Even the recovery. Every time I gave in to just one more Google search, I’d lose an entire evening to a self-shaming spiral, eventually deciding I just needed to 'try harder.' Subconsciously, I think I felt I was above having a mental disorder. I figured that with enough can-do spirit, I could simply bootcamp my way out of a chronic condition.

Eight months later, the intrusive thoughts are just as pervasive, but I’m a little more immune to the noise. I can tell the difference between an OCD thought and my own; I can actually feel the shift. I’ve ditched a good number of my compulsions, but I haven’t eradicated them all like I’d planned. I know now that this—this messy, imperfect middle ground—is what recovery actually looks like. It’s not about purging every trigger; it’s about accepting they exist and refusing to let them run the show.

So, here I am, “thriving” in recovery. But what people don’t tell you is that thriving actually feels like shit. I’m doing amazing, I really am. I’ve discovered new passions and live with an entirely new lease on life. I’m starting to tolerate boredom without needing to plan a grand European vacation just for the dopamine hit. I’ve rewired my nervous system to the point where I no longer feel like I’m on the way to getting my organs harvested every time I’m in an Uber. But I still feel awful. Doing the work is hard, even when you’re doing everything right—especially then.

Rom-coms lead us to believe there’s a satisfying climax where the heroine gets her shit together, defeats her evil nemesis (usually in the form of a tall, bitchy blonde), and the “happily ever after” makes the struggle worth it. It feels naive, at my big age of 32, to still expect any rhyme or reason to why things happen. I want a narrative arc, but the mundane reality is that things don’t happen for a reason—they just happen. Life isn’t linear, and neither is healing.

I don’t think a single person in my life realizes just how depressed I am. That doesn’t fit the black-and-white narrative we’re conditioned to believe. Some days, the intrusive thoughts are so relentless that I think maybe if I wasn’t here, the noise would finally stop. To be clear, that’s not something I want, but even the thought of it is a brief respite from OCD’s broken alarm bells.

When I mentioned upping my Lexapro, my mother was baffled that I wasn’t trying to get off it entirely. She didn’t realize that the meds, much like my decision to give up my beloved dirty martinis, weren’t a crutch, but an investment in my mental health. She doesn’t see the mental turmoil that’s behind every new achievement she’s so proud of. Sobriety and medication are just other sacrifices I’ve made for my recovery, yet there’s so much more behind it that people don’t see.

Support can be incredibly specific and limited. In my experience, you’re often left to choose between well-meaning reassurance (OCD poison—don’t do it, reader!) or silently suffering on your own (I wouldn’t suggest it, but I’d be a hypocrite to dissuade you). I’ve had to find a third option: a community where resonance is natural and understanding is effortless. If you’re resonating with this, know that every message or comment from a virtual stranger has been a reminder that I don’t always have to carry this in secret. It’s a strange, digital intimacy we share: one that few people in 'real' life will ever truly share with us. For that alone, you’ve been a part of my recovery and that means the world to me.

Most people don’t understand OCD. They think it’s about color-coding pens or using packing cubes on vacation, not the daily risk assessment it takes to just pick a restaurant or make it out the door without a mental breakdown. It’s an isolating disorder, but it does make you better for it. Eventually. Maybe, I’m not exactly there yet.

Nobody sees the invisible labor that goes into OCD recovery, and that gets lonely. I’m lonely all the time. But I’m learning that the loneliness is just another part of the process. My biggest takeaway in recovery is the brutal value of acceptance. Accepting the disorder. Accepting that my brain is just wired different. Accepting that sometimes, it’s going to feel like hell for no reason at all. Accepting that life isn’t fair, and there is no way to control it—and weirdly, that’s the only thing that makes it feel worth living again.

And on the days where even that isn't enough? A Taco Bell chalupa might make the darkness feel a little less depressing, even if only for a moment.

This post isn’t sponsored but I’m desperately trying to be. Taco Bell, hit me up.

When the trailer for Eternity first came out, I couldn’t be happier. Vintage clothing, hot guys, a whimsical yet slightly philosophical plotline—sign me up. I also happened to be with my ex at the time. Even more important, I still had undiagnosed OCD, ROCD to be specific. When I finally saw it on Apple TV, I balked. I hovered over the play button longer than I’d like to admit, then backed out of it entirely. I told myself I wanted to save it for when I could really sit down and pay attention. I think I always knew why I was afraid of it, though. There is nothing scarier to someone like me than having to make the perfect choice for all eternity. Now not-so-freshly single and still unsure of where my life was headed, the movie felt like a reminder of everything that used to make life feel impossible.

In case you didn’t know what it’s about, it follows a woman named Joan who, in the afterlife, is given a choice: spend eternity with her second husband, the man she built a full, long life with, or her first husband, who died young and was preserved in memory as something unfinished, almost mythic. I’ve come to realize this is what I’ve had to grapple with every day ever since ROCD (relationship OCD, for the uninitiated) sank its claws into my psyche. The thought of deciding what to do to make sure I was happy for the rest of my life wasn’t just a passing fear. It was a constant, low-grade emergency. It still is, on occasion. But the problem with an undiagnosed mental disorder like mine is the inability to differentiate a fictional movie plotline from an actual problem.

I’m sure everyone worries about the big decisions—who to marry, where to live, what kind of life to build. But for me, those questions were never open-ended. They felt like tests. Like there was a single correct answer, and if I didn’t find it, I’d have to live with the nagging, irreversible knowledge that I got it wrong. I lived in a Choose Your Own Adventure game that determined my entire life’s trajectory.

I still see my ex in everything. I see him in Joan’s first husband, the one who passed away before getting to live a full life with her. That’s the future I was so determined to avoid that I did everything in my power to stop it from happening, as if preemptive grief could somehow change the outcome. Never mind the fact that he wasn’t actually fighting a war and there’s nothing I could’ve done from the gym anyway. But that didn’t stop me from envisioning the bleak life of a widow on the leg press machine.

And then there’s the second husband, the one she actually lived with. The one who stayed. The one who became real in all the unremarkable ways that long-term love inevitably does. I see my ex there too. In the small arguments I once took as proof that we were fundamentally incompatible. In the quiet routines I dismissed because they didn’t feel as special as we were “meant” to be. I treated those moments like evidence of my inevitable unhappiness instead of signs of a quiet, contented life. The truth is, I wasn’t capable of having that yet. And while I can understand why now, it’s still one of my biggest regrets.

But what hits the hardest is just how envious I am of the small milestones I wasn’t yet capable of experiencing. I am so jealous of couples who get to be bored together, who get to accumulate time without questioning its value every five minutes. I know I still have a life ahead of me, but like Joan, I can’t help but fixate on all the possibilities I haven’t even lived yet, no matter how unhealthy that is.

I’m speaking to someone new now, and it’s going well. Casual, connected, a little impractical, but that’s nothing new to me. Yet I can feel my brain trying to turn it into something else entirely. Trying to line it up against my past. To cross-reference him with every trait my ex had. To check whether it measures up in ways that don’t even make sense outside my own head. Comparison is the thief of joy, but what do you do when your brain doesn’t just compare, it obsesses? When it replays, categorizes, and demands certainty from something that is, by nature, uncertain? Well, you’re supposed to resist it—but that’s a topic for another day.

I worry about how healthy these Substack essays are for me. When you’re wired like this, reflection has a way of turning into something else entirely. What starts as processing becomes checking. It’s difficult to differentiate introspection from rumination. That’s one of the things that truly tore us apart. He hated my need to revisit the past to make sure nothing had changed and to travel to the future to confirm that it would all be worth it.

There is no partner on earth who can withstand being measured against every possible version of a life you could have had instead. No relationship that feels safe when it’s constantly being tested against hypothetical alternatives that don’t have to get dragged down by reality. No person who can truly be happy while living in a fantasy. Fantasy is effortless. Real love is not.

What I’m starting to understand with OCD recovery, slowly and not without resistance, is that the problem was never choosing wrong. It was believing that there was a perfect choice to begin with. My life is more open-ended than the movie this essay was written about, so I suppose I’ll just keep waiting for the sequel.

My late father, bless his heart, loved me as best as he could but he was not meant to be a parent. He first told me I had a 9 year old half sister when we were out at dinner at a restaurant. He could be callous, selfish, and thoughtless—you know, typical dad stuff. I spent a chunk of my formative years pretending I didn’t care about whether or not he would show up. My mother, on the other hand, was an absolute saint. She always put me first and I thought that that’s what it was to be a good mother. She did everything to shield me from difficult truths and made sacrifices just to make sure I never knew what it was to struggle. It’s ironic that, in the end, her love for me is what’s sending me to therapy. I know, I know. My steak is too juicy and my lobster is too buttery or whatever it is they say on the internet. But, as it turns out, there is such a thing as too much love. If I were a houseplant, I’d die of overwatering and way too much sunlight.

When the future I planned to have collapsed on me, I realized just how much our dysfunction was a road block to the person I should’ve been all along. I picked up her neuroses and anxiety and inability to let go of control. It’s such a cop out to blame her for my own bad habits, isn’t it? But I think part of the work is acknowledging the good with the bad and setting them straight even when it’s hard.

I used to think that if you could give that much of yourself to someone, then that must be true, deep, and sincere love. In fact, I thought it was the only way to really love someone. But now I’m not so sure. Her love suffocated me, and like some sick emotional inheritance, I did the same thing in my relationship. I’ve seen what happens when love becomes indistinguishable from control, from fear, from the inability to let go. I’ve lived inside it. I’m still learning how to breathe outside of it.

Coming from a culture of normalized coddling and co-dependence, it never crossed my mind that maybe what I was taught to call love was just fear in a different font. Fear of losing control. Fear of being alone. Fear thinly veiled as concern. It never crossed my mind that maybe I was never taught what healthy love actually looks like. Only what it feels like when it’s constant, consuming, and impossible to get away from. I don’t blame her for that and I love her so deeply. But I also can’t ignore what it’s done to me.

I don’t know if this means I’ll never have children. After all, for a couple that said they didn’t want kids, we had a long list of names for the daughter we’d never have. I think being with him made it easier to imagine children because he was so capable, even though I never felt that I was. What I do know is that, for the first time, I’m questioning the kind of love I was raised on instead of subconsciously recreating it.

I used to think I’d magically grow into the idea of motherhood. I always felt pressured to know for sure. But now I realize I’m still learning the difference between nurturing something and overwhelming it. I’m seeing the value in letting your loved ones stumble and get up on their own. Hell, I’m living it as we speak and refusing to let her pick me back up—or at least trying to. Until I get that right, I think I’ll stick to being the only thing I’m responsible for keeping alive.

At the risk of making myself that OCD girl on Substack, my glitchy brain makes everything thing feel like the end of the world. The relentless nature of the disorder also made me forget all the other circumstances that led to what may be the most difficult 8 months of my life so far. But reading an article here (s/o to Alina, if you happen to be reading this) made me realize that there was so much more outside of my shitty mental health that led to the demise of my relationship—with my ex and with myself.

Meeting him was a whirlwind. It felt like an anomaly at the time. It still does. It was so real and intense that neither of us could act normally and follow a pace that reflected that. I mythologized a lot of the relationship. It was hard not to, we were never wrong about each other. Unfortunately for us, connections like that often come with tragic endings as well. Well, this is exactly what I mean. I always thought of us like a pair of star-crossed lovers… and who can sustain that kind of mythos?

Soulmate connections always seemed elusive to me. Neither of us even believed in the concept before meeting each other. We felt so lucky to know each other. We were so different on paper but, in some strange way, we understood each other perfectly. From the first day we met, it was so easy and undeniable. I needed us to be endgame. I was hyper-fixated on our future and all the little ways I could make sure of it. But the grandness of that relationship eclipsed everything else in my life. Once I got my diagnosis, it was easy to blame it all on my brain. I wasn’t wrong, I had textbook OCD. It was actually laughable how obvious it was. But, as it turns out, there was so much more to the story.

We progressed quickly. We met, he left, we spoke endlessly, we got together, fell in love—all in a span of a month. But there were so many parts of myself that was still left undiscovered. It was so easy for the dysfunction that came with my disorder to set in because I had been hiding from so much of myself. I was always jealous of him. Jealous that he knew exactly what he wanted out of life. Jealous that he had a career that fulfilled him. Jealous that he had an unshakable nervous system. Jealous that he could love me so deeply but still carry on with his life. I never considered that maybe that was possible for me, too.

I was afraid of what I wanted and terrified to consider what I needed. I got stuck in a place where I didn’t know what I wanted but I also felt like I needed to be sure of it right then and there. I thought maybe this was love. Maybe I didn’t need to know much more about myself. I liked who I thought I was and he already loved me for it. It seemed unnecessary to try to be anything else. I was happy to be his silly little girlfriend with no interests, no hobbies, and no energy to do anything but exist in his world. I was looking forward to graduating to be his silly little wife with all the same passions (read: none). In fact, I thought that’s what it took to made things work for our circumstances.

Then, suddenly, the worst happened. I was no longer in the running to be the love of his life. I had obsessed about this almost as immediately as we got together. I imagined how devastated I’d be for months. And I was. I was crushed. I still am. In a way, I think I’ll always be a little broken-hearted about how we ended up. What I didn’t expect to find at the end of it was an entirely different person than I thought I was. Interests! Hobbies! The ability to do the dishes even before they had waited in the sink for months! All the things he told me could be possible for me, too.

Don’t get me wrong, I know that my new Lexapro prescription has done wonders for me and my newfound personality. But as clichéd as it sounds, hitting rock bottom helped me discover things about myself that I never would’ve expected before. I started pole dancing on a whim and fell in love. My body was suddenly capable of things I never thought I could do. I’ve evolved from someone who only listed grocery shopping as a hobby to someone who makes everything (and I do mean everything) from scratch. I became someone who wasn’t so afraid of vulnerability, someone who could write about anything and everything—for no other reason but to write. I’ve turned into someone who tries new things and actually enjoys it. I discovered that there’s so much joy to be had in the present. I just need to be there for it.

Before we got together, I thought about how heartbreaking it would be if he and I ended up like the couple in Past Lives. That’s actually what first pulled me into the article that led me here. Now that it’s happened, I realize it might have been exactly what I needed. For this reason alone, he’ll always be my soulmate—even though he may not be the love of my life.

I still don’t know exactly what I want out of life, and that’s okay. I crave a slow burn. I want to take my time and get to know who I am and who I want to be. I’ve spent most of my life wanting to skip ahead to the ending, but I guess the real work is learning how to live through every part of the movie.

Then again, it’s something I deal with every day. I wake up with it and go to sleep praying it leaves me alone for the evening. In a way, I’ve unwittingly let it be my whole personality for years. It’s not all bad, though. Most days, I think I’m doing great–thankful for the chance to know myself in a way others hardly do. Getting that diagnosis truly changed my life. It gave me a chance to forgive myself and unlearn all the unhealthy habits OCD gave me in the first place. But when it is bad, it feels like there’s just no way out of it especially because you know what’s happening in your brain.

The writing has been on the wall–I just didn’t know what the writing meant at the time. It was there when I screamed outside the vet begging my mom to tell me my dog would definitely make it through the night. It was there when I cried in secret for months, convinced I had Lupus because that one character on the medical sitcom I just watched had it. It was even there when I skipped a friend’s proposal because I was sure I was going to get explosive diarrhea on the hike. Sexy, I know.

Well, there’s nothing sexy or cute about this disorder. Like most of the world, I always thought OCD meant surgery-level hand washing or purchasing 32 rolls of toilet paper every grocery trip. I had no idea that the constant stream of doubt I was living through had a name. I’d be sitting in the car with a boyfriend or my best friend, racking my brain for something to say because every minute of silence felt like our connection was just slipping through my fingers. I constantly felt like I had something to prove. I still do, sometimes. It’s hilarious because growing up as an only child has buffered my self-esteem for this exact occasion. Yet, the doubts still kept marinating in my mind.

“Was I just as funny as when they first met me?” “Did he think I was stupid for not picking up on the sarcastic adult diaper model joke?” Silly things like this haunted me every day. I felt responsible for keeping the connection alive. It never really occurred to me that I was the only person who was worried about it to begin with. Actually, maybe it did and maybe that made me spiral and analyze a little more. I wish I knew sooner that I didn’t have to. But that’s the work, isn’t it? Accepting nagging regrets and complicated feelings and living through the sad days, regardless. Sitting in the discomfort and not ruminating yourself to tears at the gym over the possibility of a future dead husband abandoning you to live alone for the rest of your days.

Now that I’m out of the spiral, it’s not the perfect moments I yearn for the most. It’s the hours together trying not to fall asleep while watching 30 Rock or the nights out I missed because I was too in my head about walking in too late. When you have OCD, you have a million tabs open in the background while you barely exist in the real world.

Even in recovery, I live in a world that’s different from everyone else. I’m still in between two realities: what is and what could be. For a while there, I thought I could do it. But I was spreading myself too thin. Existing in the real world but staying firmly in my imagined one. Now, I’m sober, medicated, and ready to live a life outside my own head–⁠even when the mental simulations keep calling out to me. It’s hard work and the days get so lonely but it’s also… freeing?

I always felt like I needed to know where my story would end up. I felt like I had to decide if I’d be happy for the rest of my life on a random Tuesday. Learning that I never needed to know how satisfied I’d be with my life this time in 2034 has let me live life for right now–⁠or at least try to.