It’s been a while since I’ve been on here and it seems as if I’m always complaining about my life. In the last six months, I’ve been dealing with disability-based discrimination.
I make no secret that I have OCD. It is rather severe and I am medicated to make it easier to deal with. However, even with the maximum dosage, it doesn’t completely take away the intrusive thoughts or the compulsive behaviour. When I get triggered (usually by a thought that I did something wrong) I do the compulsion (redoing what it was “I did wrong”). And there are times when I don’t realize that I’m doing a compulsion until I’m in the middle of it or someone mentions something.
I always mention this when I’m going to be working with someone or in the same space as someone as it is something that is very prevalent in my life. To know me is to see OCD in action.
As far as disabilities go, OCD is relatively invisible. If we met on a street, you wouldn’t immediately guess that I have OCD. This is where the trouble comes in.
There are a lot of people that I’ve met who feel invisible and mental disabilities are non-existent. When I’m in a compulsion, their advice is “just don’t do it”. Basically, that’s the same as telling someone with depression to “just be happy” or with Tourette’s “just stay still”. If it were that easy, don’t you think we would have already done it?
I’ve dealt with OCD unknowingly my entire remembered life. I was an elementary student who was terrified of being expelled. I had to do and redo my homework so that I wouldn’t get expelled. And I thought everyone had these same fears but they were just better at dealing with it than I was. I didn’t know it was abnormal to be so afraid of everything (being expelled, parents dying, friends turning against you, etc).
But, at least when I was a child, I grew up in an amazing place with amazing people. Yes, people would ask why I was wearing my jacket indoors in the middle of summer but my people would just say “Oh, she just does that, don’t worry about it.” I was weird, but I was allowed to be weird.
I guess that’s part of what makes this difficult for me to deal with. I have seen and experienced that I am a functioning human with OCD. But the person I’ve been dealing with these last few months doesn’t act like I can be. When I would get stuck in a compulsion or a thought spiral, I would hear their comments and grunts of disapproval.
So I tried to change. But when your brain is wired differently, that’s really hard to do. So I went back up in my medication. When I was having a bad day, I would avoid this person because I knew they would have something to say about it. I stopped drinking coffee to see if that would decrease my anxiety and lessen my triggers. I started going to therapy every two weeks hoping to get more skills to be more normal. I stopped interacting with friends and social media because I put all my energy into trying to be different.
And you know what, it didn’t work.
I had my husband, my family, doctors, and therapists all telling me that I wasn’t doing anything wrong. But I still felt like I could do better and be better. It felt like a “me” problem when it wasn’t.
So, I did the only thing I could do, I ended that relationship. I was made to feel like it was all one-sided and that I wasn’t going to get any better because they didn’t feel like they were doing anything wrong.
I have now cut them out of my life for the time being.
I’m rebuilding the person I was then into a new stronger me. I’m still not 100% but I’m getting there slowly. I have books that I want to review (some of which are awesome and some I DNF’d), posts that I want to write, pictures I want to take, and life I want to get back to living.
