THE HARDEST KIND OF FORGIVENESS

The Hardest Kind of Forgiveness

During the ten days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, I try to focus on forgiveness.

As a kid, this meant literally going up to my friends and family and asking for forgiveness for everything I’d done in the past year. I was happy to check that off my to-do list and move on, and even though I didn’t particularly enjoy the seemingly-endless services, I found my meaning in the holidays in that way.

All of that came to an abrupt stop when I first became sick seven years ago, and especially two years after, when such powerful depression and panic attacks hit me that I had no clue how I was going to survive.

When everything was first starting, I begged God to help me, staring up at the hospital room as I lay there alone, having been told that I may die that night of a heart attack or a stroke. I prayed through my surgeries, through the painful recovery process, through the weeks afterwards when every time I bent my knee hurt so badly that I wanted to give up. Through everything, I couldn’t have felt more alone.

And then, after I finally thought I’d gotten better, I was faced with the worst mental health crisis I’d ever experienced, where I spiraled out of control so deeply that every moment of mine was plagued with horrific thoughts I was terrified of. I couldn’t see anything at all without being plunged into flashbacks and obsessive cycles and everything seemed to hurt instead of help. Again, I begged God for help, only to get worse and worse until I finally reached my breaking point.

It was another year filled with intense therapy and heavy medication until I started to feel like myself again, until I wanted to write stories and play games and hang out with friends, until I was able to have a few moments without the incessant and incredibly painful thoughts assaulting my mind. And when I did manage to crawl out of that pit, I found that I was almost completely disinterested in my religion.

Traditions that meant so much to me, like reciting the prayers I’d lovingly learned in school and synagogue, suddenly meant very little. After all, if they didn’t work when it mattered, what was the point in pretending? I felt so fake when I went to services, going through the motions but not actually meaning anything.

I still enjoyed the more secular traditions of Judaism, and the things I’d learned thanks to my religion - like speaking Hebrew - but being more religious left a sour taste in my mouth. It was something I was completely unused to, as someone who’d chosen to spend my time devoted to Judaism. It was like I’d been in a dark room with everything I loved as switches that were turned off, and although the rest were able to come back, my Judaism switch is still turned off.

Nowadays, I only ever go to services on the High Holidays, and when I do, I feel obligated, unenthusiastic, and often, like I’m wasting my time. It’s an unpleasant feeling as I try to find some way to make my religion have meaning. I don’t feel like I can make the same choice as many of my friends, who have abandoned religion altogether; nor do I feel like I can just sink back into the faith I loved as a child. So what can I do to find my way forward?

I finally got an idea when I met with a rabbi at work recently, and we started talking about the High Holidays. Forgiving other people was so easy, I felt, compared to what was going on in my head and my heart that pushed me away from the religion I’d always loved.

“What happens,” I blurted out, “if the one I need to forgive is God?”

The rabbi didn’t miss a beat. “That’s the hardest kind,” she said. There’s no good way to do it, and it doesn’t happen quickly.

I’ve experienced that myself. Years later, even though I’m almost entirely recovered physically and mentally, I still struggle with those feelings of wondering why, after so many years of learning how to beat OCD in the form I knew to the point that I no longer experience compulsions, only to experience two crises so profound that I barely came through alive and sane?

And I fought my way through it myself. Yes, there were people who supported me from the sidelines, like my incredibly supportive family and my best friend, but there were hundreds of times I was besieged alone, where I knew I was being too much of a burden as-is and couldn’t call home for the tenth time that day or take my best friend out of class. It took me a full year to claw myself out of despair, and I missed so much along the way, including enjoying my junior year of college.

Of course I’m aware that plenty of bad things happen to good people, and that this is a question that touches everyone in some way. But that didn’t help when I was alone and hurting. It didn’t make me resent any less that I had always participated in Jewish activities even when I was miserable and had such a hard time making friends, and did what mitzvot I could, and nothing came along to help me when I needed it. It didn’t make me question any less that I have to marry someone Jewish one day, that a religion that confuses me and makes me struggle will dictate who I can love and how I have to raise my future children.

The rabbi I spoke to is right - working through all of these complicated questions and feelings will be far from easy.

I want to do it, though, even if right now it’s more for my family’s sake than my own. I like the idea of carrying on traditions and finding a way to make them mean something to me as an adult who has struggled rather than a child who believes blindly. I want to pass that on, and maybe, that can be the way I find forgiveness.

I don’t know if I’m quite ready to forgive, but writing this blog over the past almost-year has helped me get to the point where I’m ready to try. 

It took me until I was 25 to be ready to try to work through my food-related obsessions. I hope it won’t take me quite so long to be ready for this, but in the meantime, I can do my best to keep an open mind. I can go to Jewish events and try to put aside the resentful thoughts that come first, and try to love what comes next. I can wade my way back in slowly, and maybe I’ll never quite reach the level of devotion I felt in my childhood again, but I can find a meaningful way to be a Jew who questions.

Ellie, a writer new to the Chicago area, was diagnosed with OCD at age 3. She hopes to educate others about her condition and end the stigma against mental illness.

DUNGEONS & DECENCY

Dungeons & Decency

One of my many amazing experiences at DragonCon this year was a brief session of Dungeons & Dragons (D&D), a role-playing game where you create a character and, together with a group of friends (or strangers who quickly become friends), you traverse through an epic fantasy story.

This weekend, I went to a local store to pick up where I left off after DragonCon. I’d never tried playing in a local league before, but everyone seemed very kind and open to new people, and I soon found myself at a table, eager to begin. I was joined at the table by a group leader, called a Dungeon Master (DM), who facilitates the story, as well as one adult player and three kids.

While two of the kids started working quietly on their character sheets, perusing their books to learn the rules, one boy, Adam (name changed for privacy), immediately started getting overexcited. I didn’t think too much of it, assuming he was simply being a kid, but it became clear to me as soon as gameplay began in earnest that there was more going on.

He played the game like I would have as a kid, if I’d known it existed. He focused on the smallest points of the story and obsessed over them, repeating over and over and over that he needed to do certain things in the game and then doing everything he could to achieve his goals even when the DM, who sets the rules, explicitly said no. He took up all the time that would usually be used for interaction between the different people playing, and consistently monologued over everyone else whenever they tried to talk. He broke many spoken and unspoken rules of social etiquette in D&D and seemed completely unable to stop.

I quickly noticed the other young boy poking him in the side and telling him to stop, first casually, then insistently, much as my family tried to do when I was little. I fell quiet, as did the other players. I had no idea what to do, and was silently thankful that it wasn’t my place to decide. D&D, after all, is ruled by the DM. It was entirely up to him to decide what would be done about Adam.

I began to wonder: How was the DM going to facilitate the group to ensure everyone’s happiness?

One option that I’ve encountered plenty of times is simply ejecting the “problem” person from the group. Everyone heaves a sigh of relief and continues to play, but that only reinforces to a child who has likely heard from many other people in his life that he is a problem that he can’t have friends if he continues to act the way he does. For me, who was mostly unable to control this behavior as a child, it told me I couldn’t have friends.

Alternatively, a DM can choose to avoid confrontation altogether, and simply let the one person talk over everyone else for the whole game. This works for the one person, in the short term, but it can also be damaging in the long term. Even though it can be a painful lesson, the person never learns that cooperation and letting other people participate is necessary in working with others, in every situation from school to work to interpersonal relationships. Not to mention, the other players in the game lose what they came there for - a participatory experience - and are less likely to want to come back in the future, meaning the club could lose some members.

In my experience, the incessant repetition and hyperfocusing on a single, specific idea was something I couldn’t control. It hammered at my mind and I simply had to let it out, even if it was the fifteenth time I was saying it in only a few minutes. No matter how hard I tried to suppress everything I wanted to say, it felt so compelling to me that I simply couldn’t keep it on the inside.

The worst part was, I knew it was annoying. I knew what the stares and whispers meant, but I felt powerless to stop myself from giving people yet another reason to not want to be my friend.

People quickly began looking at this boy this way. I was beginning to feel frustrated too, and although I understood that he likely couldn’t help it, it was still annoying to not be able to participate.

The DM ended up improvising a system that worked better than anything I’d thought of, especially in the heat of the moment, that really impressed me and the other group members - and Adam himself, who was able to have fun and be part of the group.

The DM adapted a system generally used in battle scenes, where everyone takes turns describing a brief action their character says or does, and implementing it outside of battle.

Basically, what this meant was that he had everyone roll a die, and we could have a few minutes to do whatever we wanted in order of who got the highest roll. Adam got to take his turn and do and say the things he needed to do and say, but then there was a clear-cut reason for the DM to say “please wait for your turn” when it wasn’t his turn.

Putting this more restrictive structure in place did take away from some of the player-to-player interaction, but it ended up working really well. The people at the table who were quietly unsure of what to do started to find their voices, and we started coming together as a group. The two other kids at the table joined in on Adam’s shenanigans towards the end, and it made me smile to see the other kids opening up to him and including him.

Even though the situation felt insurmountable at first, I was thrilled that the DM was able to find a solution that worked for everyone. It was refreshing to see that there was a middle ground between excluding Adam completely and letting him take over everything the group was doing, and it gave me hope that more and more people can find this middle ground and help kids like Adam (and me) find their place within a social group.

Ellie, a writer new to the Chicago area, was diagnosed with OCD at age 3. She hopes to educate others about her condition and end the stigma against mental illness.

TOO MUCH, OR NOT ENOUGH?

Too Much, Or Not Enough?

TW: Abuse, medical imagery, trauma/PTSD

Spoilers for Fire Emblem Three Houses: Black Eagles Route.

An interesting debate rose in a group of new friends from DragonCon the other day: should a potentially triggering story in a video game be censored?

It started when we were discussing a recent update to Fire Emblem Three Houses, a video game for the Switch that brought us all together. In the update, one character’s dialogue has been changed to remove some details from a story of childhood abuse. When the issue was first brought up, my friends were outraged at the idea of censorship.

Someone provided evidence of the change to Bernadetta’s tale about her father (spoilers for B support) - the dialogue went from "To train me to be a good, submissive wife, he'd do things like tie me to a chair and leave me there all day, challenging me to stay quiet." to "To train me to be a good wife, he'd do things like tie me to a chair." As soon as we saw the evidence, several strong opinions began to form.

Some people said it weakened Bernadetta’s story, making her seem dramatic or like a “crybaby” for showing such strong effects of what now seemed like a weaker trauma. (In the game, she is paranoid about others’ motives towards her, terrified of social interaction, and prone to hiding in her room.) Other people said it was a slippery slope that would lead to “ruining” several other stories, including those at the center of the game’s plot. And then, in a separate chat, my best friend brought up the fact that such a specific story of abuse as was presented in the original line could be triggering to people with a history of abuse.

As the debate evolved, I wondered: what is the line between telling a story that people might identify with or might be used to further understanding of mental health issues, and a story that could damage the very people it’s trying to help?

As a person living with a mental health condition, I know I can’t speak for everyone, but I can speak for my own experiences with the game. After all, my past significantly influenced how I experienced another story in the game that connected to me more personally.

At the beginning of this game, a player must choose between three houses, each led by a student from a different land. I didn’t have a particular leaning towards any of the house leaders, but since my friends were beginning with either Claude or Dimitri, I decided to start with Edelgard to see what was different.

I progressed through the game, until I reached Edelgard’s first cutscene (spoilers for C and C+ support): the player is walking through a hallway at night, only to hear the unmistakable sounds of someone having a nightmare or night terror. When the player checks up on Edelgard, she hints at trauma in her past. Later, she reveals the story of how, when she was younger, she was subjected to a series of painful, bloody, experimental surgeries, which lingered in her mind just as the physical effects remained in her body.

I was absolutely floored. The language she used - “waiting in the darkest depths for a glimmer of light,” “cutting open our very flesh,” “lives devastated” - reminded me so much of my own trauma from seven years ago that I was shocked. When I found out that the surgeries she endured were called “blood reconstruction surgery,” I felt even more of a connection.

Of course, there are differences between the story of a fictional Imperial princess undergoing a fantastical version of a surgery and my own experience, but the similarities couldn’t be ignored: surgeries that I remember and was awake for, where I felt enough pain to recall it vividly years later, that gave me nightmares and flashbacks and much worse things afterwards.

At that point, I wanted to see her story through. She quickly became my favorite character, much to the chagrin of my friends who played the other routes. She was an antagonist there, and even though she made some pretty poor life choices later in the game, I couldn’t help but appreciate her motive of using her power to create a world where no one would have to endure an experience like that again.

Even with these poor life choices in mind, I still loved seeing Edelgard in action. I loved how she used her past experiences to make her stronger, and how she fought to stop her past from controlling her present with varying success. I might not agree with the means she used to reach her ends, but I greatly enjoyed the idea of her working towards a world where this sort of trauma would not harm people.

It inspired me enough to make a last-minute change to my DragonCon cosplay roster and purchase an Edelgard cosplay, something simple yet incredibly fun to wear. I ended up getting into so many wonderful conversations with people about the game, acting out favorite scenes, and taking plenty of photos with new friends. I couldn’t have loved my cosplay experience more, especially since Edelgard fits perfectly into my favorite archetype of characters - morally ambiguous people in power who are the heroes of their own stories but villains to many others.

For me, the fact that I thought about my own story when I read Edelgard’s dialogue helped me enjoy the game more. But I’m also over seven years removed from my experience, and have undergone years of therapy and CBT to overcome the symptoms of trauma. The details of my memories are less sharp, the pain feels more distant, and unless I’m having some sort of problem with my leg or the metal inside that requires me to go to a doctor, I can forget it even happened at all.

But just as I can’t speak for the whole mental health community, I also can’t speak for others who have gone through trauma - and just because it was empowering for me to see a character who’s dealt with challenges like mine doesn’t mean it wouldn’t be triggering or even harmful for others.

I do like the idea of a character like Bernadetta whose personality is almost entirely shaped by the abuse she endured, but there are plenty of players who could have experienced abuse close enough to hers that it would be upsetting to them.

At the same time, however, I could understand what some of my friends were saying: the majority of people don’t have trauma like this, and censoring traumatic stories makes them feel even rarer and perhaps even stranger. Without more stories like Bernadetta’s in the world, it can be easy for people to never learn about trauma or its aftereffects. It can perpetuate the stigma that mental illness should be kept secret, which is also very damaging.And yet, it’s not worth it to harm people just to educate others, or for the sake of a good story - so what can be done?

There is no perfect answer to this question. It depends on the type of story involved, how common the trauma is and thus how many people it would affect (the story that connects me to Edelgard is likely far rarer than parental abuse), and how it’s presented. It’s a complicated balance between educating people not living with mental illness and protecting those living with it. And even at the end of our long discussion, no one had any concrete answers.

The best compromise we could think of was to add a trigger warning for abuse, like I did at the top of this post, to the game. With its current warnings for blood, violence, and suggestive themes, a potential player with trauma in their past wouldn’t know that there’s a story here to avoid. If they knew and chose to avoid it, they might miss out on something others find interesting, but they also have the option to protect themselves from something harmful or at least prepare for the possibility of negative thoughts cropping up.

In the absence of such a warning, I can understand why some of the language dealing with specific types of abuse was removed from the game. It feels like the best compromise that could be done after the game’s release to tackle the most severe incidents like this, while still leaving other stories like Edelgard’s intact.

Navigating problems like these are part of what makes talking about mental health so difficult, but it’s my fervent hope that as more time goes by, society can reach a greater understanding of this balance and come up with solutions to suit everyone in the best possible way.

Ellie, a writer new to the Chicago area, was diagnosed with OCD at age 3. She hopes to educate others about her condition and end the stigma against mental illness.

A GERMY VICTORY

A Germy Victory

A few weeks before DragonCon, I learned that one of the five host hotels - the Sheraton Atlanta - had an outbreak of Legionnaire’s Disease.

I’d never heard of Legionnaire’s before, but a quick Google search told me that it was a rather unpleasant disease with potentially lethal consequences. Even though I’d felt nothing but excitement for DragonCon until then, I began to feel nervous.

It was the legacy of the days when the thought of germs occupied my mind all day, even if no one around me was sick and I felt perfectly fine. Often, I felt the need to ask an adult - usually my mom - if she thought I was sick, or if my forehead felt warm, or if this cough sounded like it warranted attention.

Online, dozens of people in my various DragonCon Facebook groups started making Legionnaire’s memes and posting every update from the hotel and the CDC. For a while, the source of the disease was hard to find, and we assumed the hotel would be closed. It was a comfort to think I could simply avoid it, but a week before the convention, the hotel reopened.

Like many people I saw online, I wasn’t convinced that the disease was eradicated from the hotel. I was relieved that the source was found, but the source was the air conditioning that would definitely be turned on high. And there was no way to avoid it entirely, as it was my job to pick up my badge and Dad’s while he was at work, and the badge pickup was at the Sheraton.

Briefly, I imagined the germs that might still be dormant in the air conditioning of the hotel, spraying out into the crowd. People coughing, sneezing, getting worse, having to go to the hospital. It was just plausible enough to worry me, although I’d accepted that I’d just have to do it.

I arrived home a few days before, mostly to enjoy the company of my mom, Nana, and dog (who ran over with his tail wagging when I showed him my new cosplays), and when I got home, I saw that Dad had the very amusing idea to put a Giant Microbes version of the Legionnaire’s bacteria on my bed.

The gift meant a lot more to me than the dad joke it was intended to be. I understood that he had faith in me to go to the Sheraton and pick up our badges and be fine mentally as well as physically, and I took this token of faith with me to downtown Atlanta on Thursday afternoon.

And just like everyone else at the convention, I started my journey at the Sheraton.

If I’d been in a similar situation when I was a kid, I’d have done one of several things: try to hold my breath as long as humanly possible, rinse out my mouth at a water fountain safely away from the building, cough into my elbow repeatedly even if I had no need to, and if I had to open my mouth to speak to the check-in clerks, I’d have probably spit just a little in the corner of my mouth. All of these steps would be to get rid of the germs that I couldn’t see but I would know were there, and even then, I’d be thinking about it all day and beyond. I’d carefully watch myself for symptoms, even the slightest tickle in my nose or throat or feeling of fatigue enough to send me into a whirlwind of anxious thoughts.

I won’t deny that I was a little nervous to enter the Sheraton, even though I knew that they wouldn’t be open if people could still get sick. But germs, as I knew from my compulsions, are hard to get rid of, and there were so many people packed into the room that the odds of someone being sick - from a germ at the hotel or one they brought from somewhere else - were high.

But I still did it.

While I was there, I breathed, I talked with people, and I even showed off “Leegie” the plush virus in line, who was a great hit. I got my badge and Dad’s - he accompanied me the other days, although he didn’t cosplay - and even stayed in the building for about another hour to purchase some official con merchandise. I talked to people in line, shopped, explored, and by the time I left, I wasn’t even thinking about Legionnaire’s Disease anymore.

Nor, in the ensuing days, did I think much about all the coughing, sneezing people around me. At a convention of 85,000 people, plenty are going to be sick, I’ve learned - and getting sick afterwards is a very small sacrifice compared to the joy I feel during these conventions. “Con crud,” as it’s commonly known, was something I expected, and even though I don’t particularly like being sick, I wasn’t obsessing over it.

As things turned out, I didn’t end up getting sick after DragonCon. Several of my new friends did, even people who I spent a great deal of time with, but I never felt sick. Even without doing any of the compulsions I would have done as a child, or even something more reasonable like drinking extra orange juice, I didn’t get sick.

It took me many years to learn that lesson, and many more to be able to apply it to the point where I can ignore people around me who aren’t feeling well. It’s harder for me when people are nauseous or vomiting thanks to my emetophobia, but in general, I have learned to stop thinking of my potential illness ahead of my actual happiness.

After all, that weekend, I had much better things to think about - rushing to Tolkien and Fire Emblem photoshoots in my two new cosplays, shopping in a four-story mall filled with nerdy merchandise, being the first person on the dance floor at the Tolkien-themed dance party with my friends from last year, talking about an amazing new video game with new friends, competing in a Pokemon Go tournament, doing a Galadriel-themed photo challenge, and much more.

There was simply no room for OCD to ruin my weekend, and it shows me how far I’ve come - and how much farther I can go in the future, as I continue to follow my goals with the help of friends and fandoms new and old!

Ellie, a writer new to the Chicago area, was diagnosed with OCD at age 3. She hopes to educate others about her condition and end the stigma against mental illness.

EASY

Easy

TW: Food, disordered eating

There were seeds in the bread.

It was a simple mistake: the server had given me multigrain bread instead of the plain for my tomato soup from Cosi. I’d even eaten some of it while I was looking at my computer screen, not realizing that it was wrong. I knew, from the bites I’d already taken, that there were no nuts in the bread, nor was there anything else that would make me sick.

And yet, it still became an ordeal.

I tried to be brave and finish the slice. I usually thought the portions of bread were too small, but this one felt gargantuan. I made it through a few bites, noticing all the different shapes and textures of the seeds until I finally decided to stop torturing myself and go back to the restaurant. I left with a slice of plain bread in hand, which I promptly devoured.

I knew, in my head, that there was nothing wrong with the multigrain slice, and I should have eaten it rather than wasting the half-slice I had left. But with food, my OCD fights back the hardest, and some days, the fight is too hard to win.

My OCD manifested as emetophobia (the fear of vomiting) as far back as I can remember, which meant that anything unexpected in my food - like seeds in bread - was completely unacceptable. When I was younger, I wouldn’t have let this mistake happen out of the degree I inspected my food, but even now, it still causes panic in me if I eat something I didn’t mean to by accident.

I was so anxious during my childhood that I was only able to eat the same exact thing every day: plain cereal for breakfast with milk on the side; a plain bagel for lunch with some snack mix or an apple after school; plain pasta with canned vegetables and a scoop of strawberry yogurt for dinner. If I had to deviate from my routine for even a single day, I got anxious - and if there was any chance of my food being contaminated or not what I was used to, even if it was as simple as butter on the pasta, my anxiety soared.

It took me years to start trying new foods in earnest, and even more to work with a nutritionist to try a diet where I was getting the necessary nutrients for my body. I’m proud of my accomplishments so far, but there’s still something inside me that craves my old routine and misses it if I eat something different even for a day.

After my work with a nutritionist, most of my easily-visible food anxiety has departed. But I can’t seem to shake my anxiety at a common discussion starter: “Where do you want to go for dinner?”

When I was younger and someone said this, not knowing about my habits, I would panic and demand to go to a place where I could eat. Now, I keep those feelings on the inside with some carefully formulated phrases in case people want to go somewhere I can’t muster the courage for: “I had a big lunch.” “I’m just coming to hang out.” “I’m happy eating later.” “I really don’t care.” 

Truth is, I do care, but I’m afraid that if I express my rigid eating habits, I’ll find myself friendless. After all, many people are willing to eat foods I like the first time, but for people who find repetitive food boring, their interest wanes over time - in both the dinners, and me.

Last weekend, I stayed silent as my friends tossed around ideas. Korean - maybe I can deal with that, there’s rice and noodles and vegetables, right? But no, they’re moving on to Greek, where I don’t know what’s vegetarian, and then burgers, which definitely aren’t vegetarian except for veggie burgers and I don’t like them, and then to so many other options that my head is reeling. I practically cried out in relief when one person suggested pasta, and everyone went along with her suggestion as my heart rate went back to normal.

“Why don’t you like trying new foods?” another friend asked at the table when I say how much I appreciate eating pasta. “It’s so easy.”

My fork with comfortable, easy pasta hovered in my hand.

“Easy” would be the farthest word from my mind as I recall the long night sitting at the kitchen table because I was too afraid to take a bite of fish sticks, the time a girl in my class held me down and forced me to take my first bite of pizza, and the panic when I found out that I would have to eat at a Mexican place on a job interview.

 It’s not what I think of when I recall working with my nutritionist on eating a single bite of a new kind of grain or a new vegetable, even if that one bite was all I had. It’s not what I think of when remembering the time I was too scared to try Persian food on my own and my best friend went out to a restaurant with me to try the new dishes piece by piece.

As an emetophobe whose thoughts cycle through my head, trying new foods is anything but easy. It represents years of pain before I could even start trying, followed by years of eating new foods one bite at a time, keeping some and abandoning others and fighting hard to learn to eat new foods and maybe enjoy them.

Every day, I find myself facing some version of this challenge. Sometimes, it’s that my bread has seeds in it, and the texture disgusts me or the thought that I’ve already eaten some and it may make me sick infests my head. Other times, it’s the days when I do end up at restaurants where I scan the menu endlessly for anything I feel comfortable eating, and decide on the fly which excuses will work best with which people. It can be the lightly mocking remarks from friendly coworkers commenting that I’m eating the same thing again or the not-so-friendly mocking from others who comment cruelly on my food choices, as if I’d choose to eat like a “freak.”

OCD is not a life of “easy.” OCD is a life of trying as hard as I can on the inside to make my new ventures look easy on the outside. It’s a huge difference, and one that I share with my friends and with my readers as an attempt to teach that what might look easy to some is most definitely not for others. Some things that I find easy, like making a phone call, petting a dog, or commuting to work, are this hard for other people. If we can try our best to be kind to what other people find hard, it’d make the world a much easier place for people like me.

Ellie, a writer new to the Chicago area, was diagnosed with OCD at age 3. She hopes to educate others about her condition and end the stigma against mental illness.