HOLDING THE LINE

Holding The Line

For lack of a better word, this week has been intense.

I came downstairs after work one day, prepared for dinner, only to find my dad locked in his office and my mom sitting at the kitchen table, terror in her eyes. She said my dad was working out when he suddenly felt weak, and he felt like he had a fever.

It felt like the floor fell out from underneath my feet. Suddenly, there were so many fears in my head that hadn’t been there seconds before: did he have the virus? Even though he doesn’t have any pre-existing conditions, would he get a bad case? Would he need to go to the hospital? What about Mom, who spends a ton of time with him? And I wasn’t distancing from him either, how was my breathing? And most importantly, I felt the urgent need to call my Nana, who turns 92 later this summer and has heart problems, since he had been in her apartment just four days before.

In the immediate moment, I was able to squash this down and come up with a rudimentary plan for that night. I threw on my mask and ran upstairs to my room, grabbing basic supplies and preparing to stay downstairs with my mom until we knew for sure. When the panic did hit, she reassured me that she would be the one to deliver him food and other supplies, and I gladly volunteered to go to CVS and pick up a pulse ox machine (even though they terrify me) because it got me out of the house. I could sit alone in my car and breathe freely.

Even though I don’t have nightmares often, I wasn’t too surprised to have one that night, but I was surprised when I woke up to sounds of distress. I was sleeping in my parents’ room, and Dad was still in his office-turned-quarantine-room, but Mom was just arriving home from a walk where she’d fallen and gotten hurt. Her ankle looked like a baseball, and even before I could get my contacts in, I was filled with so much dread I had no idea what to do with it.

It fell on me, then, to not only take care of my dad who potentially had the virus, and whose temperature climbed up to 102 degrees that day, but to take care of Mom and of my dog, who is elderly and has problems with fecal incontinence (which triggers my OCD just like his puppyhood accidents), all the while praying to hear Nana’s voice on the phone saying that she was safe and sound.

It was dinnertime when I finally broke. It was Friday, and on Fridays, I love to reward myself for making it through the work week with my favorite food - baked ziti. I knew my favorite place right down the street experienced a fire right after reopening from the pandemic, so I called my backup place, only to hear that they’d taken it off the menu.

It’s such a small thing in the grand scheme of everything going on that day, from the walks and medications for the dog to delivering things upstairs while trying as hard as I could to not breathe even with a mask on, but it broke me. I couldn’t stop crying, and even when we ultimately agreed to get pizza, I was despondent when I picked it up, grumbling the entire time that we’d stopped going to this place years ago because it wasn’t even that good, and I didn’t even want pizza anyway. I convinced myself, by the time I got home, that I would need to make enough trips to bring up multiple slices of pizza and sodas to Dad that I wouldn’t be able to eat while the food was still warm, and I further convinced myself that since it wasn’t what I really wanted, I could spite this stupid situation by not eating at all.

I did end up eating dinner, in the end - my stubborn resolve broke at the smell of garlic rolls - but it still took me a while to calm down. Later that night, just as Mom and I had talked the previous night, I started to confess how the ANTs were piling up in my head, and that’s why I’d been distracting myself all day with everything possible. Often, I had my Nintendo Switch in one hand and my phone in the other, making sure there was something other than anxiety in my head every second.

She asked me if I was doing the right thing that I’d learned in cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) - wasn’t I supposed to be challenging my negative thoughts instead of simply pushing them away? I thought about it briefly, and tried to isolate a thought - and then I found the problem. I was being assaulted by so many powerful ANTs at once that it felt like a tsunami, each individual ANT indistinguishable from the horde.

I learned, in CBT, to write down a thought, classify what kind of thought it was from a list, and reframe the thought in a healthier way. But with so many coming in at once, I needed to escape from the immediate flood in order to be able to focus. In other words, I needed the ANTs to line up rather than pour over me like ocean waves, and once I gave myself time and permission to seek distractions and things that make me happy, I was able to isolate individual things I was worried about and talk through them.

Ever since this realization, even though I’m still staying in Mom’s room as she recuperates and taking care of the dog and making deliveries to my dad while calling Nana a little too much just to make sure she’s not coughing, I have stopped being ashamed of my need for distractions. I’ve taken long walks by myself in the mornings, making up stories in my head and sinking into my imagination while catching pokemon. I’ve cultivated my Animal Crossing island into a beautiful paradise, and when Lord of the Rings Online came out with an expansion that included one of my favorite scenes from Return of the King, I gave myself a whole evening to play it, even though I could have been doing more productive things.

Any one of these complications to normal life would be enough to make me spiral. But with all of them happening at once, it’s essential for me to take time to calm down. Once I’ve been playing for a while - like I did for a while before I wrote this post - I’m able to process what’s going on in a more organized and less panicked fashion.

I hope that my dad will get a negative result on his COVID-19 test since he’s been feeling better, and he’ll be able to move downstairs again and everything will go back to the tentative normal we formed during such crazy times. But in the meantime, I have a strategy - a new combination of distraction and processing that will let me hold the line against the armies of ANTs that are inevitable in tough times.

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 WRONG SORT OF COMPLIMENT

The Wrong Sort of Compliment

I have always wanted a trophy. To me, it’s a symbol of achieving something special in a world where I’m not great at sports, debate, or any other activities that typically give trophies. So, when work started giving an employee of the month award as a trophy, I have wanted to earn it. I take pride in my work and try to do the best job I can, even though I’m a low rung on the totem pole and thus not in the group typically receiving the award.

Needless to say, I was very excited when my department head announced this morning that she had created awards for everyone for this month, to honor the work we’ve done over three months of quarantine. Everyone looked thrilled, and as she went down the list alphabetically, I couldn’t wait until she got to “Ellie” and told everyone what I had earned. I even had my finger on the screenshot button so I could remember the moment forever in a picture showing me it was worth it even with the hardships I’ve been having at work.

But when she finally got to me, she said that the award I earned was called “Hyper Helper.”

I nearly missed the explanation that it was meant to compliment me on my eagerness to jump into projects and help people wherever my help is needed. I was too busy being stunned, then remembering I was on camera and my department head said she was specifically looking for people’s reactions, and I pasted on a fake smile as soon as I could think of it.

The fake smile didn’t last very long, and soon, I was heading on an unpleasant trip down memory lane to every time I’ve been called “too much,” which stems from the fact that my brain goes a mile a minute. I generally have at least one song, two story ideas, and several video game strategies in my head at any given moment, and I feel most content when I am multitasking with a variety of activities, especially since I am on a medication that makes my brain go very fast (a side effect I’m willing to put up with especially since it means I have an easier time chasing the negative thoughts away). I’ve spent years of my life learning how to whittle this chaos down into something acceptable to others.

For months, I’ve been having a problem doing this at work. Because I have room for so much to go on in my head at any given time, I have a very hard time doing nothing, and when I run out of tasks to do at work, I can’t do any of my usual things like playing video games, reading books, watching YouTube videos or Netflix shows, or listening to music to calm myself down. Furthermore, I know that the more bored I am, especially over time, the easier it is for negative thoughts to enter my head.

Being bored at work - where I’m sitting there for 8 hours a day, sometimes with only one hour of actual work - means I’m desperate, and when I get desperate, I ask for more to do. It’s a pattern I’ve had across school, jobs, and more. My dad, an HR professional, told me that this was a way to make myself useful to my colleagues while alleviating my boredom - killing two birds with one stone. I agreed, and have gotten myself involved with several other things since that have helped me feel less bored.

During the process of asking for more work, I made sure to not ask too often, loudly, or annoyingly. I paid so much attention to my tone and the words I used, making sure that they wouldn’t come off as needy or begging even if that was how I was feeling on the inside. After all, work is no place for OCD, and I’ve known that my entire life.

I interpret this “award” to mean that I’m not doing as good as I thought here.

It brings me back to a friend I had during the years of my childhood that were ruled by obsessions, where I had so much trouble fitting in that I was willing to be friends with anyone who would accept me back. I knew a girl named Dee (name changed) who was extremely hyper and annoyed everyone around her, and even me sometimes, but I was desperate, and I tried to see the person under all the intense enthusiasm. I stayed friends with her for years, even though my mom couldn’t stand the way she yelled “Ellie’s mom! Ellie’s mom! Ellie’s mom!” to get her attention, and I don’t have any memories of her that don’t involve repetitive, rapidfire talking for hours on end.

All of those memories went through my head on that Zoom call, as I focused on clapping for other people’s awards. Why couldn’t I be the one known as calm in a crisis? It’s probably because I get stressed on high-stress projects, and even if I get the work done well and on time, my anxiety kicks in. Another award was for bringing happiness, something I like to think I do when I stock the snack area, donate books, and share fun collectibles with my teammates.

Other names included balancing projects well, doing things quickly, and balancing real life with work. I would have loved something like that. I would have loved to be known as just a helper, and if they wanted to do alliteration with another word beginning with H, I could see “happy” applying - after all, I do a much better job of faking happiness when I know I have to do it in advance.

But the title I earned is “Hyper Helper,” and I have to use the background representing the “award” for the next month on all of my team Zoom calls. I hope that seeing it repeatedly over the next few weeks will help me get over at least some of my sensitivity, but I’m afraid all it’ll do is remind me that I failed, once again, to be normal. For now, all I can picture is my childhood friend yelling “Ellie’s mom! Ellie’s mom! Ellie’s mom!” A friendless girl doing things so annoying that no one wanted to be around her unless they were forced. Is that how my coworkers see me?

I’m ashamed for my mom to read this, and perhaps picture that in her head. I’m ashamed to show my face around my colleagues and even though I’m pretty sure I’m the only one reading this deeply into my “award,” I feel like this is just another blow in the fight I’ve been having to make my work more tolerable. For today, I managed to not cry about it, and during the quarantine, I am in the wonderful position where if I’m bored at work, I can entertain myself with no one watching.

I’m also working with my parents to figure out something to do when I’m back in the office, where I don’t have to beg for more work and never receive any. I don’t know exactly what it’ll look like, but I have some ideas I’d like to explore. After all, I do have a lot of interests that occupy space in my head that I can put to good use. I hope I can figure out a rock-solid plan, because even with my germaphobia, my worst fear about going back to Chicago is going back to being bored for 7-8 hours a day, 5 days a week.

I wish there was a way to be more open about this at the workplace, to be honest with people about why I can’t be bored like this, to explain the probably-strange behavior of asking for more work multiple times when I know many people who are feeling overworked. But I feel I can’t be honest, so in the meantime, I’ll grit my teeth and pretend it’s a smile whenever I have to use the colorful background, and hope for a time when my job better matches my speed and focus.

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.

THINKING IN GRAY

Thinking in Gray

It’s three months since I came home, and every day, my mom has bemoaned the gray hair that has infested her head. We’ve talked about how much she misses hair dye over our walks several times a week, and sitting on the couch last night, as she said she had finally scheduled an appointment to get her hair colored, she asked me a question:

“Is there any gray in your head?”

I misunderstood at first. I’m in my 20s and have never seen a single gray hair on my head. But she meant something else entirely, and clarified: Can someone like me think in shades of gray instead of seeing the world in black and white?

All-or-nothing ANTs have been my most common negative thoughts since I first started tracking them, and as my mom noticed, they make their way into every area of my life. I can be thrilled to meet a new friend, thinking the social problems that have plagued me are finally over, only to doubt I can ever make a real friend when people cancel plans. Although I’ve lost over ten pounds since coming home, I’m still nearly as unsatisfied with my weight at the beginning of the quarantine, even though I’m very close to my goal. And I went from yearning for DragonCon to happen against all odds to anxious that it wasn’t being canceled fast enough.

Usually, these thoughts don’t affect much in my life. They’re there a lot of the time, but they don’t often influence my behavior. In terms of the quarantine, though, it’s a lot harder to not behave based on these thoughts.

When I think about returning to Chicago, I’m excited and scared, anxious and anticipatory. Since it’s unlikely that my workplace will be one of the first few places opened during Stage 4 or beyond, I will probably be coming back before the office is open, meaning I’ll have to make the choice myself. I’ll have to balance several factors like which places are open and whether I’d be able to see my friends and the guy I’m sort-of dating so I won’t be lonely when I go back and will be able to try to resume my old life.

I’ve decided, for now, to hold off on any thoughts of moving back until at least the second week of July. After my dog celebrates his 14th birthday, I will have to make a decision that involves seeing shades of gray. How can I balance my need for social contact with my fear of getting sick? How will I tell when is right to go back if I’ll be lonely if I do it too soon and lose the everyday contact I have with my family, or too late and jeopardize my friendships with people who I haven’t seen in months?

The fact that my dog’s birthday is coming up gives me some time where I can fall back into this old pattern - after all, there’s no chance I’m moving back before then. But every day after that is going to be a choice, and it’ll depend on so many factors that it can’t be a simple black and white choice.

If no one is making the decision for me, like what happened when work shut down along with the entire city of Chicago, I find it hard to not oscillate between extreme thoughts along this spectrum. For example, “If you go back too late, you’ll never have friends like you did before” could be true, as could “if you go back too early, you’ll jeopardize the progress you’ve made with coping mechanisms by overeating out of loneliness.” It really does seem like the middle is an unobtainable territory and I’ll have to swing too far on one end or the other.

In CBT, I tried to learn about thinking gray. I tried to teach myself to think things like “I may not have the ideal job at first, but I’ll learn and get experience on my resume” instead of “I will be stuck forever in a horrible job.” I’m going to do my best to apply this technique to the gradual reopening of the world, but it’s complicated when, as Mom implied, I have a harder time thinking in gray.

Black and white thoughts come easily to me thanks to my history of childhood obsessions. I never thought something bad “might” or “may” happen if I didn’t do a compulsion. There was no gray, and I had only one choice - to do whatever I felt compelled to do before the bad thing happened. As I got older, these sorts of thoughts transformed into my all-or-nothing ANTs that plague me still.

I’m not sure what these thoughts may turn into next, but for now, I’m going to try to be as flexible as possible. When the time comes, I’ll do my best to listen to reliable news sources, local friends, and work to determine what time would be best for me to return. Maybe I’ll even try some old CBT practices involving writing alternate thoughts, scenarios, and more. In the end, I will make a choice, and in this situation, it will have to be something other than black and white. It’ll be one of my first experiences choosing gray, and I hope it’ll be the first of many more to come as I continue finding ways to expand the rigid world I’ve made for myself.

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.

WHEN LOOKING BACK HURTS

When Looking Back Hurts

This week, inspired by my grandma’s move, my family started going through our attic. We tore into old garbage bags filled with old art projects and stories, laughing and enjoying ourselves as we went through old memories. I was particularly amused to find my first-ever fanfiction that I had completely forgotten about, written two years before I ever read or saw Lord of the Rings, written in my familiar, childish handwriting.

I was initially disinterested in this process, but I quickly became very involved, tossing my phone aside and digging through everything eagerly. I was especially excited to see the fanfiction and other stories I had written, but I felt a lurch in my chest when I found a story I had no memory of, written in honor of Rosh Hashanah.

The prompt appeared to be using characters from the Arthur book series in a Rosh Hashanah story, but even from the teacher’s note on the cover, I could tell I hadn’t written a happy story. The teacher praised my use of foreshadowing when I said “Don’t dip too many apples or you will get sick,” and I knew what I was in for before I even saw the vividly-detailed picture of Arthur throwing up on the cover.

The story only takes half a page to reach the inevitable conclusion of my obsession-riddled mind, and it gets worse from there. I shuddered as I put the story aside, not realizing how the way I always process my emotions in writing must have begun in childhood.

I started getting involved in the process again, finding more school projects. But even as the ages of the papers got younger, nothing changed much with me. A yearbook from the end of my four-year-old class was filled with things I didn’t want to see, like saying that I love my mommy and daddy because they take care of me when I’m sick (I was almost never actually sick as a child, although I was convinced I was sick almost all the time). At the end, there is a page titled “Me and My Friends,” and in every picture, I am alone.

All it took was that - and the next item, my first-grade report card that said I need to learn how to be “a little less excited” - to send me on a very unpleasant trip down memory lane.

It sent me to the most painful times I’ve heard that I’m “too much,” the times I’ve been left behind by friends, the times I’ve been called all sorts of names and made to feel like an outsider from childhood through today. I could feel the papers sitting on the pile staring at me, and I didn’t feel peace until I forced myself to think about times when I have felt included, mainly in my current D&D group and my group of friends from DragonCon.

Also this week, my friend Annie (name changed for privacy) came to me upset one evening when a minor incident with someone she loved brought her back to one of the most painful moments in her life. It might seem strange to feel triggered by something like this, but for both Annie and I, even a much smaller example of a feeling was enough to send us back in time.

Annie, who knows I have experience with cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), asked me if I had any techniques for this. I rummaged through my old CBT materials until I found my list of automatic negative thoughts (ANTs), but none of them matched what was going on with us. As she described it, it was like there was only a break of a second between the trigger in the present and the memories of the past, and there’s so little time in between that it can be very difficult to stop the process.

I knew exactly what she was talking about, and as I was looking at the four-year-old yearbook, all I could think about was a recent time when someone told me that the only reason I was tolerable to be around was because, unlike other mentally ill people, I could control myself. I felt like an animal, only good because I was a trained one, and those memories poured out of my mouth. Annie shared with me too, telling me everything that hurt her so long ago that even a small incident took her right back to.

She asked me, again, if I had any ideas - but I don’t know the answer to this question. There’s nothing in my CBT worksheet that says what to do for myself or others. There’s no specific way to stop the thought process that jumps from a current trigger to a past incident.

What works best for me, and what I told Annie, is to find a way to counteract the thought in the present. For example, the last time my “I’ll never have real friends thanks to my mental illness” thought entered my head, I logged onto Discord and found my group of DragonCon friends playing a video game. They called out to me happily when I entered the voice chat, and a couple hours of gaming later, I had almost forgotten what I was so upset about in the first place.

Looking for growth can be another way to start moving forward. I’d never write another story like the Arthur one I wrote, because I have learned how to process my emotions in a healthier way. I would never have another lonely “Me and My Friends” page because I reach out to people every day to keep my friendships strong and challenge myself to find new friends by engaging in new activities.

There’s nothing Annie or I can do to erase the memories of something that should have been beautiful, but ended up tainted. There’s no easy fix, and although moving forward is the only way to carry on, there will always be a part of me that wonders - even in the middle of a happy group of friends - if I am truly welcome, if I am allowed to talk about my interests, if I can fit in like everyone else.

For anyone else struggling with these feelings, I’ll leave you with a comment from a recent meeting with my improv group. I joined the Zoom call early, and started talking with the only other person there. She said she had been thinking, in advance of our show that got postponed, and she realized that two of us in the class really blossomed as the class progressed.

I wasn’t sure how to interpret that, but when she said I was much more approachable and seemed much more comfortable once I started sharing more about myself and my interests, I couldn’t help but smile. I had let the “too much” thinking get to me when I first started the class and, caught up in memories, I kept myself walled off from others. It was only when I started to get past my own fears that I was able to take concrete steps to actually fix them.

Take a look for moments like this in your own life. Find things that contradict your triggering experiences, and try to jump there instead of the more painful parts of your life. It’s much easier said than done, but even working a little bit on interrupting the destructive thought process can lead to a far more fulfilling 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.

IT'S FINE

It’s Fine

I’ve been trying all week to think of something to write about for this week’s blog entry.

I don’t usually have problems coming up with things to say - I’m often very chatty with people in real life, including about mental health problems. But this week has just been a little too much to think outside the box.

I’ve helped my Nana move into a new apartment, and thoughts of her getting sick with coronavirus thanks to her exposure to the movers, technicians, and various people in her apartment complex have run rampant through my head. It only makes it worse that there’s no way to tell for two weeks, and that every step of the process was riddled with complications and trouble.

Lately, I’ve been hearing a lot of people saying that they’re feeling a similar way. Between the ongoing pandemic and protests across the country, many people’s resting anxiety level has been higher than usual. Adding the complications of the move on top of that - plus various shenanigans at work - has made my week particularly hard.

It’s easy to feel bad about getting stressed about little things during times like these, or to wonder why it’s harder to muster inspiration for writing or other types of projects. It’s easy to feel like I should be able to handle each individual thing with a smile, no matter what else is going on.

But for me, an increase in my resting anxiety level means that I’m more likely to fall for my own ANTs; intrusive thoughts are likelier to enter my head in the first place; and my friends who are usually around as a support system are often facing their own problems if my major stressors are more environmental than personal.

I’ve had some success with forming a routine at home, but the uncertainty of the world right now is making it harder to do the things I usually do. As someone ambitious who considers giving in to my mental illness even a little bit as a failure, it’s been hard for me to accept that I need to be kind to myself when things aren’t normal.

“It’s fine to not be fine” is advice I’ve gotten before, and although I’ve ignored it in the past, I’m trying to work with it now. There are so many things going on in the world that we don’t have control over, and everyone has different ways of coping. Our normal coping mechanisms might not work as well at this time, and that’s fine too. At a time like this, it’s a good idea to shift goals from being “perfectly normal” to feeling as good as possible during stressful situations.

With everything going on, emotions - especially stress - will run high. That’s fine. It’s also fine to feel overwhelmed, scared, and unsure about both personal and global futures. With a little self-kindness and acceptance, we can get through times like these and make positive change in ourselves and the world.

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.