I was diagnosed with OCD at eleven as most of you know but I started to show symptoms at an early age. One of the most prominent emotions was “checking”. There are several ways I would check. One way was asking my parents the same question repeatedly. “Everything will be okay right?” At night when I was tucked into bed: “I don’t have to use the bathroom right?” When we went on vacation: “You packed my bathing suit, right?” After I was done eating: “I don’t have anything on my face right?” You get the idea.
Then it merged into physical checking. Checking where something was mostly. Checking if I had followed all the rules in the homework assignment. Checking my homework was in my backpack. Checking if I had a red pen, yellow highlighter and two sharpened pencils. I couldn’t deal with uncertainty. It was the enemy.
Fast forward to my twenty eighth birthday. I am at a point in my life where I can say I am more powerful than my OCD. I’ve been going weeks without checking. Sometimes I can postpone it till the evening and then postpone it to the morning and before you know it I’ve gone another day. It goes days on end. In the past sometimes I could hold out five minutes, ten minutes. Now Im so much stronger. This didn’t happen overnight. It took years of resisting, giving in, feeling guilty, feeling weak. It was (well, still is) a battle of wills. And mine was stronger.
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