Aidyn W.
Photography by Ally Szabo
If you’re reading this, you don’t have to slay the dragon.
The human brain receives up to eleven billion pieces of information per second. You may not be able to believe it, but I can. I am hyper-aware of every sound, every breath, and everything I see out of the corner of my eye. I’ve always devoured books, research articles, and documentaries. I was brimming with information, but it was manageable, until it wasn’t.
At the beginning of this year, I began to be berated with constant and irrational fear. The information I had accumulated grew so vast that it no longer fit in the back of my mind, forcing itself to the forefront. The likelihood of home invasions, instances of natural disasters, and stories of tragedy all hooked themselves into me. I began to feel like there was no place in the universe where I was comfortable, or even safe. I felt claustrophobic in my mind, and suddenly panic attacks happened once, twice, or even three times a day. I started to do things that didn’t make sense to make me feel better, like sleeping under my bed or counting every time I breathed that somehow convinced me I was safer. I shut out my friends and didn’t go in public unless I had to get food or go to class, feeling that every place was a threat. My eyes were so puffy from crying all the time that a classmate asked me if I was having allergic reactions. My world became smaller and smaller until one day it was only my dorm room.
“It's conclusive, you have OCD,” the psychiatrist I had gone to see over fall break said blankly, and handed me a prescription I had to fill. There was no way, I thought. I was not at all like the portrayal of OCD I had seen in the media. I imagined the detective archetype, so particular that he noticed just a scrap of something out of place, and ran to his wall of evidence connected by webbed string to tack it on. I was messy and extroverted, and not a lot of small things bothered me. She had to be wrong.
I lay awake at night, analyzing every moment of my life and googling symptoms, desperately trying to find evidence of who I was. Suddenly I was the detective, hysterically holding up memories and stringing them together into one big picture. And when I stepped back and looked at it, I saw a much different portrait of the girl I had been. In kindergarten, I refused to wear turtle necks with my school uniforms since I thought they’d choke me. When the firefighters came to talk to my third-grade class I didn’t sleep for a week, convinced that my house would catch on fire. In sixth grade, I wrote down every single thing I ate to be positive I was eating exactly enough for a twelve-year-old. I looked at all the pictures in my phone of me throughout my life and realized it had been here all along. And I felt sick.
Everywhere I went I felt the diagnosis branded on me. I hated what it seemed to say about me. Obsessive: you never know when to stop. Compulsive: you have no control over anything you do. Disorder: you are abnormal, in a bad way. I had no idea who I really was, and it scared me.
When I got back from break I went and talked to a past teacher I was close with. I told him how confused I was, and that I felt out of control. What scared me the most was the concept that I would never be “better.” That I was inseparable from mental illness. To my surprise, he said he had OCD too. I was right, it would stick with me and contribute to the highs and lows of my life, but it offered me an opportunity “If you don’t know who you are, you get to have the fun of finding out,” he said before I left his office.
The medication helps me manage my OCD, but it will never go away. It is as much a part of me as my name. When people write about mental illness, it is always a story told in the past tense with a beginning and an ending. That’s probably because the reality that some things are never conquered is too scary. My brain will always be a little too active, a little too full of information. I will always be more hyper-aware than others, and maybe I cry more than others too. I will never slay the dragon because I am the dragon, but the truth is, I was never supposed to. It was never my job to pick myself apart and throw away the pieces that weren’t as polished and pretty. But it is my job to be kind to myself. To appreciate what makes me different while acknowledging what challenges I face. To slowly make my world bigger and bigger, and to have the fun of finding my place in it.
Aidyn W., Villanova University
Connect With Us
To follow IfYoureReadingThis at Villanova on Instagram, get in touch with our chapter, and learn about more resources available to Villanova students, visit our chapter’s homepage.
