FIGHTING THE FLOOD

Fighting the Flood

My heart was pounding from the second I woke up in my hotel room in Orlando.

I knew it was the day I’d be doing something I rarely ever do - flooding exposure - and like the name suggests, I was adrift in a sea of anxiety.

As a person with OCD, exposure therapy is a technique I’ve used to help me through many fears. It’s typically a long process - to get over a fear of hospitals, for example, I started by listening to sounds I might encounter in a hospital, like beeping machines; read stories in newspapers and online; watched documentaries; and finally, traveled to an actual hospital. The idea is that by working through these small steps, the end product doesn’t seem quite so scary.

Flooding exposure is an entirely different beast. It involves starting at the end, doing the scariest thing first, and allowing the anxiety to overflow - to flood - until you realize it’s not that bad after all.

Needless to say, flooding exposures are far more difficult to handle than regular exposures. Starting at the end of what’s supposed to be a long process for a reason can be traumatizing, and the experience isn’t for everyone, or every fear. Sometimes, it can even make things worse - and yet, I decided to do a flooding exposure on a recent family vacation.

I’ve been an emetophobe for as long as I can remember. Just the thought of vomiting makes me on edge. If my stomach does anything remotely abnormal, it can send me into a tailspin, even after over two decades of working on the fear in whatever ways I could come up with. 

For many years, this fear has restricted what foods I feel I can eat, what activities I prefer to do, and more - but this vacation, I decided to take the plunge and do something I’ve never done before: go on a roller coaster.

And, oh yeah, did I mention I’ve also been afraid of heights ever since an ill-fated encounter with a zipline in my early teens?

It’s basically a recipe for disaster: going up and up and up until you can’t go up anymore, then having that sinking feeling in your gut (the same one that happens right before you throw up) and then your gut plummets for real, and fears can quickly turn into reality…

And yet, some part of me wanted to do it. I was terrified, sure, but it seemed to me like if I could do an exposure like this, I’d be dealing a significant blow to a fear that’s held me in its clutches for far too long. Not to mention, I had a bet with Dad that if I did it, he’d treat me to a fun souvenir. If I chickened out, I’d owe him the money for it instead. Unwilling to lose, I dove into my research.

I picked the coaster carefully - not the giant one that Dad claimed was the only “real” roller coaster in the park, but an indoor one where I wouldn’t be able to see the big drops and might be able to imagine something else. I tried to pick one with a good story, hoping that might jolt me out of my fear for even a moment.

And before, I did what I could to plan. I told my family and friends - my support system - what I was going to do. Some were helpful, and others - who told me that this specific ride made them nauseous - set me off again and again. I began to debate if this was more trouble than it’s worth.

I took a long time debating whether I should eat or drink anything beforehand, and eventually ended up listening to a friend who told me that an empty stomach would be as bad as a full one. I nibbled on a little bread and a protein bar, and added an anti-nausea pill for good measure.

And then, the moment finally arrived. The park was just opening - I was determined to do this first so I wouldn’t be thinking about it all day - and there was barely any line. Dad and I moved quickly, only pausing to read a sign by the actual entrance.

“WARNING,” the sign blared in huge letters. “This ride is a high-speed roller coaster” said the sign, and oh good Lord, am I really doing this?

 “that has sudden and dramatic acceleration and dropping.” ... Yeeeep, Dad was lying, this is a real roller coaster

“The movement of the vehicle also includes spinning” like that ride I went on once as a kid with my dad and uncle and I was nauseous and terrified all afternoon

“sudden stops, and strong tilting and jarring actions.” Yes, part of me knows this language is legally required, but they wouldn’t say it if they don’t mean it…

And before I knew it, I was walking past the sign, past the exhibits that told you the story, and then a car (an honest to God roller coaster car on actual tracks) rolled up.

Dad and I were placed in the first row. Was that good? Bad? I had no idea whatsoever. I just clambered in as best as I could, clutching my phone for dear life, wishing I could hold something more substantial (like the teddy bear I brought, who was sitting in the purse I had to leave in a locker by the entrance).

Only real roller coasters have lockers, I whispered to Dad as a lap bar came down. Only real roller coasters have lap bars. The selfie we took before the ride started showed a huge smile from him and a terrified face for me.

I wished, in that moment, that I could stop the ride, go to YouTube and listen to sounds of roller coasters and watch some videos and not have it be me on that ride at that moment, but the car kept rolling, and we slowly began to go up.

The ride came in flashes: the car spinning so I can see the one behind me; the shouts of jubilation mixed with screams and at least some of those are mine; the way my hand tightens on my phone and the other tightens in Dad’s hand, which he will later joke went purple from the pressure; those blessed few moments where the car would slow down or even stop for a bit of story before hurtling off again. The time when the ride goes dark and the car just drops and I can feel it in my whole body and question everything, was my preparation enough, was I about to…

Eventually, the ride slowed, and the car re-emerged into the space where more riders waited. I unclenched my hand from Dad’s as the lap bar raised, and my shaky legs stood. My steps grew more confident. I’d been thinking, worrying, planning, fretting, everything for weeks and I’d finally done it!

I grabbed my purse back out of the locker, making for the souvenir shop as I stepped back out into the sunshine. I walked right past the conveniently-placed trash can, not feeling the need to throw up that morning, or any other time that day. I smiled as if I knew I could have done it all along, as if my bravery was more than the need for competition and the determination to prove that I could be the winner.

Souvenir in hand, I knew the day’s score - Ellie: 1, OCD: 0!

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.

Choosing to Love Myself, OCD and All

Choosing to Love Myself, OCD and All

The other day, my mom said something that completely stunned me: “I love the way your brain works.”

It’s not something I think often. In fact, when I think about my brain, I tend to think negatively. I think of OCD as something that sets me apart from other people, and not in a good way. It makes me doubt whether my friends and family really want to spend time with me; it makes me wonder if I can ever live a “normal” life; and it makes me imagine what life might have been like if I never lived with mental illness.

I don’t remember a time before my diagnosis. Every memory of mine is somehow etched with OCD, whether for good or bad. Most of my childhood, it was negative, and now, even after conquering so much, challenges still rear their ugly heads at me and make me question all the progress I’ve made.

But Mom, who’s had to deal with the brunt of it, especially when I was too young to know what to do with my obsessive thoughts, saw it otherwise.

She said this when I was explaining a new story idea to her. It’s something I love to do - call my family when inspiration strikes, and guide them through whatever world my head is in at the moment. I don’t do it every time I’m inspired - the idea of bothering people still lingers in the back of my mind - but it’s always a thrill.

I asked her what, specifically, she loved about my brain. Her response was the actual way I think - the way I connect all sorts of unrelated things and weave them together into stories and more.

I know exactly where that came from. It’s how I made the connection, in my childhood, between touching a Snoopy figurine in my room a certain number of times in my room and throwing up. It’s how I reasoned my way through every one of my compulsions, putting things together that didn’t go together. And, at the same time, this thought process has been the driving force behind every one of my stories.

“What if?” is a common beginning for story ideas, the seed that allows creativity to grow, and yet, it’s the same thing that’s caused so much trouble in my life.

One comes with the other. My conversation with Mom made me think: what if someone could choose between getting some sort of talent that also came with a hindrance, or if they could simply choose to be like everyone else?

I wondered, if a choice like this was possible, what my “normal” life might be like. I imagined the things I saw other people experience: summers at camp, arms around friends who would stay for life; long days at amusement parks and cookouts; enjoying a variety of extracurricular activities and growing up with pets and a thousand other things that I never got to experience as many other kids did.

But at the same time, it’d mean giving up the exhilaration of a new story idea; the way I love to live in my head and explore countless stories in worlds far beyond this one; the pride I feel when I manage to get words on a page and someone likes them.

I didn’t quite know how to reason through this can of worms I’d opened, so (in true Ellie fashion) I wrote it out in a story. In the tale, a character with a talent as a blacksmith and jeweler has a dream where he is faced with the choice between a life with that talent but also with significant trauma in his past, and a life with none of that.

The more I wrote, the more puzzled I became. What was the right choice for him? And what would I do, if given a similar choice? Would I choose a mind I could love under any circumstances, or would I stick to what I know and have learned to live with?

At the end of the story, the character is glad that it was just a dream and he doesn’t have to choose. It’s an impossible choice, after all - and it’s the sort of quandary that can distract from living the best life possible with the cards you’ve been dealt.

For me, hearing things like what Mom said to me makes my lack of choice easier too. I know she wouldn’t have chosen for her only child to have to struggle so much, but she can love me anyway, mental illness and all. And it only makes sense for me to do the best with what I’ve got, and also help other people along the way.

Loving myself, OCD and all, means accepting that some things I imagined might never happen, and that’s okay because other wonderful things will take their place. I might be imaginative instead of adventurous, and have three close friends instead of thirty, and neither of those things are problems. I’m inspired by how Mom sees me to try to see things in that way, especially after a week when I’ve come down harshly on myself for experiencing negative thoughts regarding myself and my friends.

After all, in the absence of that fantastical choice, the best I can do is choose to be happy with what I have, knowing that I’ve got what I need to make a different, yet equally meaningful, life.

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.

LESSONS OF ANXIETY MODE

Lessons of Anxiety Mode

Last week, I started playing Dragon Quest XI, a new game in a series I’ve loved for years. I started a new save file, only to see options for several challenges to add to the difficulty of the game. Most of them involved not being able to use items, or other gameplay-related things, but one of them was far from anything I expected.

“Shypox,” as the challenge is called, was described this way: “Uncontrollable embarrassment will plague you on every step of your adventure. There’s no telling when this crippling affliction might flare up next!”

To me, this sounded like the game had an anxiety mode specifically focused around social anxiety. Even though I don’t personally experience social anxiety, I was curious to see what playing this mode would be like and if the representation was accurate from what I know as a friend to several people who live with it.

It didn’t take me long to realize the two main aspects of this new mode of gameplay:

First, every time the player character tries to speak with another character, from a farmer to a king, there is a chance that you will be unable to get the words out. The game specifies a reason for each time, a specific negative thought that got in the way of saying hello. It could be anything from wondering where you’re supposed to look during a conversation to remembering an embarrassing incident that distracts you. In each instance, you shy away from the other person, and a small depressing jingle plays. You then have to attempt to talk to the person again, at which point it could work or a different negative thought could come.

Second, these thoughts aren’t limited to conversations - they’ll pop up in battle, sometimes in the most important moments, and make it so that the player character can’t do anything that turn. It didn’t take me long to lose a major battle thanks to this, and I soon realized that playing in this mode would require an entirely different strategy than “normal” mode.

Although I’ve seen mental health conditions portrayed in video games before, I’ve never seen a game portray it so pervasively. The “shypox” affects everything about gameplay, from the life-changing moments for the character to the everyday interactions with passersby. It’s the only game I’ve encountered that doesn’t “turn off” the anxiety at key moments so the character can do what needs to be done - sometimes, you will fail at a challenge because of anxiety, even if it’s the worst timing. That makes this feels the most real out of the games I’ve played that attempt to give the player an experience of anxiety.

As a player of real life’s Anxiety Mode for over a quarter of a century, here are some lessons from the game that also work quite well in real life:

Some things that may seem easy to you are not easy for other people. Everyone’s anxiety manifests differently, and it’s important to consider that when someone seems hesitant to do something you consider easy.

Each individual incident of anxiety is different. Just because someone has worked through one thought or one stressful idea doesn’t mean that will help with any others. Not all are of equal strength, either - some thoughts are easier to dispel than others, and the ease of dispelling them may not make much sense.

Patience, and the willingness to let the person try again at a task they’ve failed, is huge, and can lead to great success.

Negative thoughts can and will come at the worst times, and people living with anxiety have to be resourceful and come up with other ways to beat the “boss battle” or current life circumstance.

These thoughts also don’t make sense all the time - they can be really inappropriate and come at the worst moments. If someone appears to be zoning out, consider that they might be dealing with thoughts like this, and deal with them tolerantly.

In real life, there won’t be indicative music that plays when someone is anxious. If you think someone around you may be experiencing an anxious episode, consider reaching out to see if they want help. This might take the form of actively helping them with something or distracting others around them so they don’t feel like the center of attention during a tough time.

People who fail to do a specific task once, or even more than once, are not failures as people. Trying again is key to living with anxiety, and supporting people who may need multiple tries at something can be really helpful.

And, most importantly, even if anxiety is in your programming, you can still reach incredible heights. Just ask the protagonist of my game, who I’ve named Elian (another member of the Ellie squad) - anyone can be a hero!

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.

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.