- I know it's illogical,
objectively, I know nothing bad is going to happen,
but I still can't stop.
Hi, my name is Rachel.
I'm a Video Producer.
I'm an imperfect environmentalist.
I love animals, I love cooking,
and I have Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.
If I could describe OCD in one word,
it would would be, exhausting.
OCD can look really different for a lot of people.
I feel like there's kind of this preconceived notion
that OCD is someone who washes their hands a lot,
and they need everything to be super neat,
and tidy, and organized.
But that's just not the case for everybody who has OCD.
It can be intrusive thoughts.
Like maybe when you're driving your car,
you're afraid you're just going to suddenly swerve
into oncoming traffic.
There are different types of checking compulsions.
There's contamination OCD, really hot right now,
and many other types as well.
So my OCD started around when I was eight or nine years old.
And it really started with a fear of bad things
happening to the people I loved.
So if my mom was late from getting home from work,
or my dad was flying for a business trip,
I would have to touch objects
around the house until it felt right.
And the risk was, if I didn't do it,
my mom would get into a car accident,
or my dad's plane would crash,
and then it would be my fault.
I used to ask my mom for reassurance constantly,
which is a very common OCD compulsion.
For instance, if we are cooking together
and I accidentally touched a piece of food,
while I was stirring a pot, I would ask her if it was okay,
and I needed to hear her say it was,
otherwise I thought I could poison my whole family.
I used to assign significance to different numbers.
So two was bad, three was good, five meant death.
It's so strange hearing myself talk about it out loud
because it's like, what does that even mean?
So around this time my mom took me to therapy,
and that's when I was officially diagnosed with OCD
and put on Luvox.
I remember mostly just playing card games with my therapist,
and not really taking the practice seriously.
And after a couple of years of this,
I just wanted to hang out with my friends.
And I felt like it was manageable enough
where I didn't need to be going to therapy anymore.
Since going to therapy when I was a little kid,
I have gone back a couple of different times,
in college and after college.
But then I would find that the therapy
would be too expensive or I would move.
And I would just take a break from it
and fall back into the same patterns.
OCD is an anxiety disorder,
and the anxiety and the compulsions really go hand in hand.
So the way it works is I'll have an anxious thought,
maybe I'm anxious about a presentation I have to give,
or a difficult conversation I have to have with somebody.
And then I'll try to relieve that anxious thought
by doing a compulsion.
And for me compulsions can look all kinds of things,
walking in and out of the doorway,
retracing my steps, touching different objects,
or specks of dirt on the floor,
rewriting, and rewriting, and retyping, and retyping,
touching my elbows to the back of my chair or to my bed.
Folding and refolding my clothes
when I'm putting away my laundry.
Taking my hair up and down, and up and down,
until it's perfect enough.
Picking little pieces of fuzz off of the furniture.
I'll often have to change the shirt I picked out for the day
because I'm afraid it's unlucky,
and it means I'll have a bad day.
Or avoid certain tiles when I'm walking through the kitchen.
The most time consuming thing is really just the touching,
and the touching, and the touching.
But I would say my most frustrating compulsion,
is my need to reread over and over again.
It's something that I really struggle with,
because it's not such a black and white compulsion.
Sometimes it's natural to need to reread,
because maybe you zoned out,
or you need to better comprehend something.
So any gray area for OCD is a very slippery slope,
because it just makes it that much easier
to fall into these compulsions.
OCD has absolutely been a challenge for me
when I was in school, and now when I'm working.
And really it's because it just eats up time.
Reading always took me longer in school
because of the rereading,
especially when I was taking a test,
that I was anxious about.
When it comes to work now,
I definitely struggle with OCD when I'm editing,
I have to reopen and reclose Windows, over and over again.
I will purposely drag the mouse back on the timeline.
It's like, I'm trying to make it more difficult for myself.
And shooting can also take me a lot longer
because I will have to take the same shot
over, and over, and over again
until it is up to my standards.
When I was younger, I used to be so terrified of friends
finding out that I had OCD,
or that I was on medication
because I thought they would think
something was wrong with me
and they wouldn't like me anymore.
I remember the summer before 8th grade,
I finally told my best friend, Jenna,
but only because we were going to summer camp together
and you couldn't hide
the fact that you were gonna be taking medication.
And when I told her she just had the best possible reaction.
Really, she just felt bad that I was so afraid
to come to her with it.
Now, as I've gotten older,
I am much more comfortable talking about my OCD,
and I'll pretty much talk to anybody about it
that I feel relatively comfortable with.
I can be really good about hiding my compulsions
around people I don't know very well,
but if I'm with a really close friend,
and I'm anxious enough,
it's very hard for me to hide.
When the pandemic started,
my OCD really just spiraled out of control.
This was just the combination of being so afraid,
and being so isolated, and I just knew I needed to get help.
One of the best treatments for OCD
is Exposure Response Prevention, or ERP,
which is a type of cognitive behavioral therapy.
And a lot of times people will couple this therapy
with medication.
The way ERP works is you will set up a situation
in which you are very triggered to act on your compulsions.
For instance, I might have myself unload the dishwasher,
because that's a situation in which I will often spend time
readjusting the cups in the cabinets.
And the point is to just carve out a window of time
where you resist doing the compulsions
and then just sit with the anxiety.
It's all about letting your anxiety come down naturally,
without acting on the compulsion,
so you can retrain your thought patterns.
And by doing that repeatedly,
you're continuing to weaken the control
that it has over you.
I would say that most people don't know OCD
can take up to an hour of my day,
depending on how anxious I am that day,
objectively, I know nothing bad is going to happen,
but I still can't stop.
Touch the edge of the carpet,
or you'll have a terrible first date.
Straighten out your shoes
or your best friend's plane will crash.
Ask your mom for reassurance,
or there'll be a new COVID variant.
It's just always something.
And logically, I know whether I touch an object
or don't touch an object,
it has nothing to do with anything,
but in the moment it's like,
wow, you really won't do this one thing
that's gonna take two seconds,
that will save your parents or end the pandemic?
The exposure therapy could be challenging
because I've seen myself make significant progress,
really quickly.
And it's almost like if you start a new workout routine,
and you're super motivated in the beginning,
but then after a while I get tired,
and I'll have a really stressful week.
Will slip up once and I'll slip up again.
And then suddenly I'm just back down the OCD rabbit hole.
Because I've had OCD since I was so young,
it feels like such a normal part of my life.
It's not until I take a step back
and look at what I'm doing.
It feels so silly.
It's like I'm spending hours upon hours of my life
touching and counting so that bad things don't happen.
But really the worst thing is that I'm just wasting my life.
I did cut back on my medication pretty significantly,
about five years ago,
because I was wondering if I was really being myself on it.
But since the pandemic,
and since I've started going back to therapy,
I decided I am gonna go back up on my medication,
because I do think it helps me,
and I don't need to be ashamed of that.
I also meditate almost every single day.
So adding that in has been a huge help.
I am still working on this regularly,
and I just have to realize that I am going to have setbacks,
and that I can't be so hard on myself.
But overall, I feel like I'm in a much better place
than I was a year ago.
It may not sound like a lot to some people,
but I read six books in 2020,
which is a really big deal for me.
I'm so lucky to have an amazing support system
of friends and family,
that I don't have to hide this from.
I want people who have OCD to feel less alone.
And to know that they're not the only ones
going through this.
And you're not crazy, and you're not weird,
even though you may feel like it's sometimes.
OCD is a part of my life, but it's not my whole life.
It's not who I am, and it doesn't control
what I can accomplish.
Don't be afraid to reach out to your friends and family.
Don't be afraid to ask for help,
because even if it's not perfect,
it can become a lot more manageable.
(soft music)