On OCD, My Mother, and the Ways I Learned to Let Go

Eight years ago, my mom pulled into the gravel driveway of what I believed to be a haunted house and told me and my sister we’d be moving in.

My best friend and I were often bored growing up, and the house that I would eventually move into was a walk away from hers. Three stories tall, the white paint peeled off its sides like flaking skin, browned by dust, dirt, and neglect. As we stood outside it, my best friend would whisper stories that her neighbor told her. That someone died in the house. That the person who died didn’t just die—they were murdered. These stories were a conglomeration of all the ghost stories we’d watched or heard, and I knew that. Tell the same story long enough, though, and eventually fear overrides reason. When I grabbed my best friend’s forearm after I thought I saw someone in the window, I knew no one was there. But we both ran like hell away from the house and from the creeping possibility that our imagination could churn out truth.

My family had only been living in that house a few months when I experienced my first intrusive thought. My boyfriend had just left to go home, and I was falling asleep when, unbidden, I saw myself get up, walk to the bathroom, pick up a razor, and put it to my wrist. This kind of visual is characteristic of intrusive thoughts, which are unwanted impulses or images that can cause severe anxiety in whomever experiences them. I shuddered and hoped the thought would disperse as I opened and closed my eyes.

The next morning, when the thought lingered, I told my mom that something was wrong. I felt wrong. Not knowing yet what intrusive thoughts were, I focused on the subject matter of what I had seen. I told her that I thought I might be depressed.

“Oh Alexa, you’re fine,” she told me, rifling through the mail on our kitchen table, her attention on the envelopes uninterrupted by my presence.

“No, Mom, I’m serious. Something feels wrong.” I stood there a moment longer. Just look at me, I thought. If you just look at me, you’ll see something’s wrong. You can fix it.

When she did look up at me, there was no spark of understanding. “Just go to school, honey,” she said, smiling, shaking her head at me as if I was telling her that I had a bad dream. “You’ll feel better later.”

*

I never saw my mother as the person to tell ugly, thorny things to. She’s someone who wakes up before the sun to exercise. Sweaty and with a smile on her face, she’s in the kitchen saying good morning to you; her hands—nails always painted—cupping a mug of coffee, before the crust is wiped from your eyes. She is beautiful, steady, unrocked, consistent.

I, on the other hand, roll out of bed every morning indignantly and buy a cup of coffee on the way to work, holding it with my nail-bitten, cuticle-torn fingers—hoping the caffeine kicks in by the time I arrive at my desk. I am attractive when the light hits just right. Add in the anxiety. Add in the intrusive thoughts.

*

Last December, I started taking medication after experiencing a surge of intrusive thoughts, and with them, a new obsession that my death—cause unknown—was imminent.

I considered not even telling my mom about it. Her views toward psychotropic medication aligned with those of Tom Cruise and many of her generation. Was I exercising? Was I sleeping and eating well? Was I thinking positively? No? Well, then. Start there. Don’t look to a pill bottle for salvation.

But a few days after I began taking my prescription, I FaceTimed my mom and the words slipped out.

“I went to see my doctor,” I said to the pixilated face on my phone screen. “I told her how I was feeling more anxious than usual, so she gave me a medication I could take for it.”

“For what?”

“For my anxiety.”

“Oh, Alexa,” she tossed her head back, as if to say alright already, enough with the jokes. “You don’t have anxiety. What are you anxious about? You’re beautiful. You work in New York City. Don’t be anxious.”

A few weeks later, I was in the back seat of her car as we pulled up next to the pharmacy window to pick up my medication refill. She turned to ask me what the name of it was, and I told her it was Zoloft.

“Oh, I’m embarrassed,” she said, turning back to face the front. For a moment I thought I had hallucinated her saying it. It was something I could imagine her thinking, but not forming into words.

“Mom, what?”

“I always said my kids would never need to be medicated,” she said in a tone ambiguous enough that I couldn’t decide whether it was meant to be a joke, or stated in earnest.

“Mom—,” my sister and I said at the same time, and in response, she just tsked. “Oh, I’m kidding. I’m kidding. I don’t care.”

For a moment I thought I had hallucinated her saying it. It was something I could imagine her thinking, but not forming into words.

“It’s not funny,” my sister said, speaking for me from the front seat, as I swallowed the swell of shame that rose in my throat, pretending to be unaffected by it, by her. I laughed and said, “Whatever.” I told myself it wasn’t serious. I told myself that she didn’t, couldn’t understand. I was used to telling myself these things by then.

*

Obsessive-compulsive disorder is like a never ending game of dominoes. Intrusive thoughts trigger obsessions which trigger compulsions—the behaviors that sufferers exhibit to relieve anxiety brought on by obsessions. Many, like me, go years without a diagnosis because not all compulsions are as visible as excessive hand washing. Some are more covert, like running through a list of everything that happened to you that week, that day, to check and make sure you didn’t do anything to harm yourself or someone else. It can mean avoiding conversations you want to have for fear they could reveal something you don’t want to know.

According to most experts, there is no cure for OCD. There is only management, and the way to manage is to prevent relief-seeking measures. Whatever your brain distills from your fears might always terrify you, but by exposing yourself to it and letting it be, you can learn to live with it. It goes like this: sit with the thought, don’t move your fingers, arms, legs, let it enter you, let it stay, let it leave.

It gets easier. It does, until a new obsession is born, and then sitting with it feels just as difficult as the first day you did it. But you have to do it. You have to keep doing it.

*

The morning after we picked up my medication, I sat across from my mom in a different kitchen inside a new house, years and miles away from where I experienced my first intrusive thought. I watched with a weak smile on my face as she dusted cookie dough with flour and pressed reindeer stencils into the pliable mixture.

“Why are you so quiet?” She asked me suddenly.

I had spent the previous night crying with the door closed, unwilling to tell her how much what she said hurt me. Her words reflected the prevailing attitude of our town. It’s a small one, not New York City, and people don’t speak openly about mental illness, much less the drugs they take to keep them in check.

I still wasn’t used to saying the word my mom repelled from: Zoloft. It took seven years, three therapists, and joining writer Twitter before I felt comfortable sharing my own experience. But that didn’t lessen the sting of her words. Her response triggered one of my most distressing obsessions that kept me from sharing with her the extent of my mental anguish. That were I to introduce her to who I really was, I would see on her face the confirmation of what I feared: she wished her daughter was someone else.

I looked at the tray of molds on the counter and considered brushing off her question with a neutral response. “I’m tired.” “I’m not.” “I’m just watching you.” Any of those three options would protect me from a painful conversation. 

If you tell her the truth, she’ll no longer love you. Sit with the thought, they tell you. Sit with it, observe it. Let it stay, let it leave.

I still wasn’t used to saying the word my mom repelled from: Zoloft.

“That hurt my feelings yesterday,” I said, finding her eyes. “What you said.”

She put her hands flat against the counter and looked at me, lost. “What I said,” she said, rotating her eyes toward the ceiling, seemingly in search of the source of my accusation, the words that had circled in my head each hour since she said them. “What did I say?”

“About never wanting to have a kid on medication,” I told her, an edge to my voice, angry I had to repeat it. And then seven words left my mouth before I could stop them, housing a suspicion that, if confirmed, I didn’t think I could come back from. “I feel like  you’re ashamed of me.”

Her forehead came together in waves, and I saw something in her eyes akin to fear. She hadn’t meant to cause me pain. Perhaps she didn’t know she could. And here I was, telling her she had.

“My whole family has anxiety,” she told me. “Grandma did. She didn’t say she did, but she did. We all knew she did.”

“You never told me that,” I said, relief bubbling in my chest at the prospect that it had never only been me.

“We never talked about it.”

*

To shape narratives, there are facts you unconsciously push out of the frame of focus. My mother was the person who found me my first therapist when I was in high school. She didn’t know why I needed her, but she found her. She drove me to her office, and an hour later, came back to pick me up. Sometimes she would ask me how it went, sometimes she wouldn’t, but she took me there. She acknowledged there were things I needed to say, but which I couldn’t tell her.

I’d always read her questioning my anxiety as a denial of it—what could I possibly have to be anxious about? But maybe her questions were also simply questions. I’d always assumed she couldn’t understand me, but maybe she had been trying for longer than I thought. I just wasn’t receptive to recognizing it when I was seeing her through the lens I assembled from my own fears of inadequacy.

I watched her go to the fridge and take out a second ball of dough. She used to make these Christmas cookies with her mother, my grandmother. “No one makes them as good as grandma,” she used to tell me and my sister. She put the dough down between us and took the plastic wrap off of it before asking me about my medication. Whether it was working. I answered her while thinking of those virtues I ascribed to her: steady, unrocked, consistent. As I watched her hands with two chipped nails rolling out the dough, I could think of moments which formed exceptions to each one.

*

Growing up, I strived to fill in blanks wherever I could with my own narratives. It didn’t occur to me that not all blanks are meant to be filled. That wisdom is often rooted in unlearning what you think you know.

There are ways I’m different from my mother. She’s a fire sign, and I’m a water sign. But we both run on a clock that’s perpetually twenty minutes past our appointments. We both believe that knocking on wood prevents misfortune. We both show inconvenient sweat stains on our clothing, whatever the fabric, whatever the weather. We both feel self-conscious smiling for the camera and don’t know what it means to act candid.

I knew all these similarities, on a basic level, much like I knew that old house was never actually haunted. But to admit to myself that my mother and I had just as much in common as we didn’t would have disrupted the narrative my anxiety encouraged me to weave: that she couldn’t understand me, so it was useless to ask her to try. Letting go of that narrative forced me to confront a reality that there were parts of my mother I missed, just as she had missed parts of me.

We moved out of that house four years ago, and now when I drive by it, I no longer see the stories my friend and I fabricated. Left, right, and center, in every room, is where I was plagued by intrusive thoughts and anxiety. But there, too, in the front living room is where my friends and I sat playing Pictionary with lukewarm beer until three in the morning. Upstairs in my sister’s room is where I spent so many odd days of my last summer before college, head propped on her mattress, watching MTV, watching TLC. In the kitchen is where my mom sat with her coffee, telling me to have a good day at school. Telling me not to worry. Telling me I would be fine.

The story of that house—and the woman who moved us into it—has changed for me. Sometimes stories do that if you sit with them. Observe them. Let them stay. Let them leave.

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