By, a Recent High School Graduate
Mental health is inextricably linked to my entire life. It is the background undercurrent, the backlight that shapes my experience and perception of everything.
Ever since elementary school, I struggled with mental health issues that I could not place or name. It was a collage of feelings and emotions that didn’t make sense to me, just a deep sense of wrongness that flowed and flowed. Although it is hazy, I remember the weight on my soul, the feeling of being commanded by voices that weren’t mine, of having to share space with other beings in the one place a person is promised sanctuary: their own mind.
I remember being so afraid as a kid of being seen as defective in the eyes of my immigrant parents. I remember how painfully gray everything felt, sapped of color and soul. And so, for most of the life I can accurately recall, I hid it from everyone.
I didn’t ask for help when it festered and demanded more rituals, or when the voice began to control my thought patterns themselves. I spent most of my life feeling isolated and alone, putting up a facade of who I thought the normal version of myself would look like. I pretended to live as if I had never become mentally ill.
At the time, my identity was tied so closely to my ability to perform in school, to be “smart,” to be the version of myself people expected. My friendships, my family connections, all of it was built on a version of myself that felt gone forever. I was rotting on the inside, and nobody could see it.
I lived in a mental prison that got smaller and smaller over time, until it pressed upon my body itself. I had intense contamination fears that made me feel terrified in my own house. I lived tiptoeing around arbitrary lines drawn across a thousand different places and moments until I was not always comfortable in my own skin.
By late high school, I only had tiny pockets of freedom left, stranded and alone in a world nobody else could see or understand. Had I not gotten help, I cannot imagine how different the trajectory of my life would have been.
That is why mental health is important to me in the same way life is important to me, in the same way breathing and a beating heart are important to me.
My life has changed completely within the last couple years of high school. Up until junior year, I was still decent at hiding my symptoms of what I now know is a severe form of OCD: Contamination OCD. But it was starting to bleed into everything. I could not read without it interfering. It changed my breathing patterns, the way I moved, the way I gestured, the way I thought, the way I talked, and the words I wrote.
It controlled me the way a puppeteer controls a marionette. I could feel string after string being added, another vector of lost autonomy.
Then came a day when I broke down internally. I could not go on living like there was nothing wrong when every day told me the opposite. I knew I needed therapy, but I had no method of getting it. I was extremely afraid of what my parents might think, especially given their background and expectations for me. I didn’t want to disappoint them in what felt like the biggest way I possibly could.
By winter break of junior year, after extensive research, I made a choice. I needed to learn what I had and what I could do about it. I needed the color to come back. I needed the feeling of being a full self to come back.
I chose to ask my parents for help, even if it meant everything had to unravel.
To say this was difficult would be an understatement. Words cannot fully describe what it felt like to attempt vulnerability after being alone, truly alone, for so long. My parents, up until that point, had never even seen a sliver of who I really was. Opening up ambiguously about needing therapy, without sharing every specific detail, was still not a full connection, but it was one of the most terrifying moments I have gone through.
I had imagined that moment many times over many years, but I did not expect it to be so quick and anticlimactic. I expected to see them try to hide their disappointment. Instead, my parents were far more receptive than I imagined. Although they did not, and still do not, know the full extent of my condition or how deeply it impacted me before, they were willing to pay for weekly therapy sessions that changed my perception of life itself.
I have become, in many ways, a new person. I am not the version of myself who never had OCD. It still exists, and it still affects me, although to a lesser extent. I have made peace with the fact that I may carry this for the rest of my life.
But after therapy and reflection, I am optimistic for the first time in years.
I can see the colors again.
OCD can feel isolating, but no one has to navigate it alone. CATCH offers resources to help our community better understand OCD and support those who are struggling.
