Bailey T.
Photo by Mina Derebail
If you’re reading this, accept the uncertainty.
When I was younger, I was told I was a “worrier.” Looking back, however, I am acutely aware that my anxiety was never about social interactions, my family, or school. I knew that I could make friends, I knew that my parents loved me, and I knew that I was capable of getting good grades. What I did worry about was whether or not Santa was real, what the firefighters would say when they came to visit our class (I had never met a firefighter before), and whether or not I would be okay when my parents dropped me off at college in 13 years. I was diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder, and my parents took me to a child therapist – a woman we called the “Worry Doctor” – once a week. The Worry Doctor quickly realized that I was scared of things that I did not understand, could not predict, and could not be certain of.
By the time I was dropped off at Georgetown University, I was no longer anxious about living away from home. I realized that I was never afraid of college, I was afraid of the feelings I would experience during that first week in DC. In other words, as a child, I was not scared of being 18, I was scared of not knowing what it felt like to be 18. However, my anxiety did not go away – there were new uncertainties in my life. I was nervous about whether or not I would get playing time on my new sports team, I wondered if I would be as smart as my elite peers, and I felt like I needed to have my next steps after college already figured out. In short, my new and improved fears were about all of the new things I could not be 100% sure about.
While I would not go so far as to say that I was misdiagnosed as a child, my thoughts made much more sense to me when my “anxiety” was formally recognized as Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. As I have since learned, OCD causes a person to have repetitive thoughts, particularly around things that are uncertain. Even worse, OCD tends to target what a person values most. I valued how special Christmas felt, so I had to figure out if my parents were telling me the truth about Santa Claus. I valued being a kid, so I had to figure out what it would feel like to be an adult. I valued field hockey, so I had to figure out if I was capable enough to be the goalkeeper on a Division I team.
What they do not tell you about OCD, however, is how real the fears feel. Imagine if you had a friend that was consistently coming into your room every 5 minutes and saying “Hey, are you sure you did well enough at practice today?” While you would probably not be friends for long, the interactions would likely cause you to replay practice and see if there is any validity in this question. This is where the compulsion comes in. When people think about OCD, they often think about people having to check the locks a certain number of times or clean the same area repeatedly. For me, my OCD manifests itself in reassurance-seeking behaviors. I would replay goals that went in to reassure myself that I had truly done everything I could. If I got in a fight with a friend or family member, I would call on other people in my life to reassure me that my feelings and points were valid. I could not sit with the obsessive, distressing thoughts that my OCD was telling me, so I would look for a quick resolution.
The other thing that they do not tell you about OCD, however, is that the more that you feed into your compulsions, the worse your obsessions become. Reassurance-seeking did not cause my thoughts to go away, they simply put a bandaid over them until the next time that friend knocked on my door. So what did I do?
I will say that I am still struggling with OCD, and it would be a lie to say that I never engage in the “quick fixes” that make my anxiety go away. I have learned, however, that the best way to combat OCD is to show that you are not afraid of it. In other words, I had to stop trying to disprove my fears and instead learn how to accept that they might be true. Maybe I did let in a goal that I could have saved, and maybe I was being irrational in an argument. However, there is an equally important step that follows: knowing that you do not have to do anything with this information once you accept it. In short, you can say “maybe, maybe not” to an obsession without having to take immediate action. By telling OCD that what it is afraid of might be true, you are showing it that you would still be okay if it was. The more that you sit with this “maybe, maybe not,” the more you realize that what you are afraid of is just a string of words that nobody may ever know the answer to.
So, if you’re reading this, accept the uncertainty. Maybe Santa isn’t real, maybe firefighters will be scary, and maybe it will feel uncomfortable to go to college. Maybe you won’t be the starting goalie, maybe everybody around you will be smarter than you, and maybe you won’t have your career planned by graduation day. Maybe all of these things can be true, and maybe you can still hug your Mom, get coffee with your significant other, and go out with your friends. Maybe what you have always been afraid of is the concept of being afraid. Maybe you have to accept your fear in order to move past it. Maybe the next time that “friend” asks you a question, you can simply shrug and say that you aren’t sure.
Bailey T., Georgetown University
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