Being My Own Friend

Being My Own Friend

This past week, I experienced something I haven’t in a long time – I came very, very close to throwing up.

This might not sound out of the ordinary, but as someone for whom vomiting has been my biggest phobia since age three (and it even helped in my early diagnosis, as I performed compulsions to “avoid” throwing up even at such a young age), this was beyond terrifying.

Even after nearly five years of writing this blog, it’s hard for me to describe the sheer terror that spread through my body as I realized I had to shut down the computer game I was playing because I was getting clammy; my body tensed up; I dashed for the bottle of antiemetic pills I keep in the house just in case and struggled to swallow one as I felt something rising through my throat.

Finally, I managed to choke a pill down, but things were just starting. My anxiety was kicking in now, and my heart started to pound as if I was running—something my Fitbit quickly picked up on as it congratulated me on the solid workout. I was filled with nervous energy and prayed that this oncoming anxiety attack wouldn’t progress into a panic attack, which I thankfully haven’t had in years.

Since it was so late at night, I was limited in terms of who I could call, and my best option ended up being a relatively new friend. I berated myself for having to share myself in such a state with a new friend, but thankfully, he was kind and accepting, and stayed on the phone with me for about three hours until I was relaxed enough to try to get a little sleep.

When I woke up the next morning, still exhausted from a night of panicking about my oldest fear, I was ashamed that I still felt like this. I still had to do all of my adult responsibilities like go to work and do chores around the house, all while still thinking about my experience from the night before and how I felt like I did when I was a kid—out of control.

It helped me a lot when I figured out—thanks to a little help from Mom—that this was likely a response to eating something contaminated with almonds. Normally, nausea doesn’t escalate like that in three seconds and my stomach doesn’t take a few days to re-regulate, but I do recall that the last time I wasn’t careful enough, I experienced symptoms exactly like this.

Realizing that helped me avoid panicking about a potential future episode, but I was still distressed that this one happened. I’m thirty years old and have been in therapy for years, I told myself—and I still reacted the same way as I would have reacted to nausea when I was a kid. I was disappointed in myself for panicking so much and felt like I hadn’t learned or grown at all since I was a little girl.

When I told this to my parents and therapist, they were surprised to hear me talk like this—and they all immediately asked me how I would respond if one of my several friends with anxiety that spikes like mine came to me with such a problem.

I immediately responded that, to a friend, I would be kind and encouraging. I have trouble doing it for myself, but with a friend, I would try to talk them out of their negative self-talk and say that they did their best under incredibly difficult circumstances and that’s all you can do.

My parents and therapist told me that, even though the thought of “I have no idea what to do” kept cycling through my head, I did, in fact, know what to do. I called for help, followed my therapist’s advice in the moment, and distracted myself in healthy ways until I could attempt to sleep. If any of my friends told me this story, I would have told them that they absolutely knew what they were doing and I was proud of them for facing a big fear like this.

But for myself, I still struggle to be kind. I still can’t treat myself the way I treat my friends and judge myself harshly, demanding perfection when this is impossible under such circumstances. Even though I know this isn’t exactly reasonable, I still find myself treating myself like one of my old childhood bullies, nitpicking everything and demanding a standard of perfection that literally no one can meet.

In the wake of this incident, I’m putting more effort into noticing my self-talk and how I handle even small incidents that come up. Maybe, if I can practice being kind to myself with something more minor, I’ll be able to be kinder to myself when bigger things come up. I’m going to practice treating myself like a friend, and see if I can bring the same understanding and hope I bring to my friendships to my own experiences.

Michelle Cohen, a writer in 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.

An Exercise in Giving Up

An Exercise in Giving Up

I’m someone who always wants to overachieve.

Every year since turning 17, I’ve signed up for National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) and finished a 50,000-word-plus novel in 30 days--and most of the time, I’m done by the middle of the month because I’m worried I’ll miss the deadline so I go ahead. I’m also currently 41% of the way on my challenge to walk the length of New Zealand, in only 32% of the time.

So, when I signed up for the Tolkien Reverse Summer Bang (TRSB) writing challenge this year for the fifth time in a row, I assumed it would be like NaNoWriMo--I would take the three months I had to write 5,000 words and get it done easily, just as I had in previous years.

I was therefore very surprised when I kept trying over and over for the first two months to put something on the page, only to get stumped. I came up with an idea I liked eventually, but whenever I sat at the computer and tried to write, I felt a writer’s block like nothing before.

It took until I finally forced myself to sit down and write a scene that I realized what was going on: I was missing my beloved tradition of calling Nana to share everything I ever wrote with her, and she would kvell over me and say I deserved a Pulitzer for every line and tell me how smart and accomplished and amazing I was for every first draft.

She didn’t care about the craft or whether the story was perfect; she just cared about praising me--and I didn’t realize how much I would miss that when the opportunity came to write my first story after she passed away.

I reached out to my therapist for advice about how to make myself push through and write the rest of the story. I had reached about ⅕ of the way, which I considered highly disappointing--I wrote less in two months than I always wrote in a day during NaNoWriMo.

I was surprised when she told me, instead, to reconsider whether this challenge was something I needed to do at the moment with so much else going on, and advised me to think about how I consider easing away from a project, let alone quitting.

I told her I felt like a failure for even thinking about it. I was always capable of so much more, after all, and I didn’t want to lose my ambition to do projects like these.

My therapist told me this is yet another example of the all-or-nothing, black-and-white thinking that my brain tends to favor. She told me that there’s no reason for me to feel like a failure if now isn’t a good time for me to do something even if I’ve succeeded before, and there’s no shame in needing extra help or time especially after a life-changing event like losing Nana.

I decided that I should give TRSB one more try, with a new organization system designed to break a big project into tiny steps. If this helped me and I was able to write the story, I would do it; otherwise, I would withdraw from the challenge and hope the artist whose work I was basing the story on wouldn’t be too angry.

After a week of trying, and even writing a little more, I realized that the more I pushed myself, the more I was hating the process--and that was the worst way to get back into writing after taking a hiatus.

And so, I reached out to the artist and let her know that I would be withdrawing and finding someone else to write the story. She actually found someone else before I did, and there was no harm done. She didn’t get angry with me, and none of the negative things I imagined actually happened. Since I withdrew before the deadline, I’m allowed to take part next year if I choose--so there are literally no negative ramifications.

My therapist told me that I was also allowed to take things easier with my walking challenge, which requires 5 miles a day, but I often end up averaging 7--and I even hit 10 some days. She told me that if I was going so far ahead to leave myself a buffer, I was allowed to use that buffer and not hit my goal every single day, especially since I’m still recovering from what turned out to be a bacterial infection of sorts and the walking makes me cough harder.

I’m still working on allowing myself to step back from something if it’s making my mental health feel worse, especially if it’s not something important to the course of my life as a whole. It can be very hard considering I’ve spent nearly all my life trying to push myself as hard as I can, but it’s also liberating to take a step back and realize that these extra projects are supposed to be fun and make me feel good. If they don’t, I’m absolutely allowed to take control over them, rather than letting them control my life--and find a way to feel good about my side projects again.

Michelle Cohen, a writer in 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.

Getting Sick With OCD

Getting Sick With OCD

My OCD first manifested as an intense fear of throwing up (emetophobia) after I vomited as a child--and ever since then, I became acutely aware of everything my body was doing. I was a pint-sized hypochondriac, thinking every cough or sneeze meant something terrible was going to happen to me.

I tried to control my health with compulsions, which I knew on some level wouldn’t work--it’s not like counting things a certain number of times would prevent me from catching a cold or stomach bug--but other things seemed so rational to me that I couldn’t stop doing them.

I refused to share food from other people’s plates or drink from their cups (which did, in fact, save me from a particularly nasty bout of norovirus nearly everyone in my dorm caught during a high school summer program). I would drink out of water fountains only if I was extremely thirsty, and I had a particular ritualistic way of doing it that didn’t exactly help me make friends. I tried to remember who around me was sick and how long the illness typically tended to last, so I could stay away from them until I was sure they were okay.

Thanks to this history, it’s always somewhat weird for me when I do wind up catching something. COVID was a bit of a special case since there was genuinely good reason to be scared of catching it, especially considering my history of a blood clot, but everyday things still bother me probably more than they should.

As I’m writing this, I’m (hopefully) on the tail end of having a bad cold with a near-constant cough, an ear infection that has almost completely eliminated my ability to hear out of my left ear, and pinkeye in both eyes.

As an adult, I know how to take care of myself--I set phone alarms for the twice-daily ear drops and four-times-daily eye drops, learned how to administer both kinds of drops to myself, and have been checking in regularly with my doctor to make sure I’m doing everything I can to facilitate recovery.

But on the other hand, it’s hard at times like these to not regress into the kinds of thought patterns I used to have as a kid. For example, I used to panic that whenever I coughed too hard or too many times, I would throw up. (Sometimes, if I thought I was going to throw up, I would try to get it over with and force myself to cough repeatedly even if I didn’t need to.) I still find myself hypervigilant of symptoms and feel the need to do something about them, even if there’s nothing I can do.

I was also afraid of coughing up mucus, as I believed that anything coming out of my mouth was similar to throwing up. That was always the worst part of having a cold for me, since it meant that I swung from attempting to relax to being on high alert in just a few seconds, and it would take me a long time to calm down again.

Even though these thoughts don’t take the form of compulsions like they did when I was a kid, it’s still strange to feel like I did back then, trying to control something I couldn’t. I can live a healthy lifestyle, but germs will still exist, and I am now old enough to know that trying to breathe through the gap between my front teeth won’t actually “filter them out.”

My therapist has told me that, at times like these, it’s important to have a balance between what my adult and child sides need. As an adult, I need to know I’m taking care of myself, doing work and chores, and working on other life goals as much as I can. But I also need to take a break if I need something calming or relaxing due to a spike in anxiety from more child-like thoughts.

The difference is that, now, I can reassure myself that things are going to be okay--but it’s still strange to re-experience the familiar thoughts of wondering if that’s actually true, panicking over things I really shouldn’t be panicking over, and overanalyzing everything about my body as it tries to recover from even a simple illness.

I don’t think I’m ever going to be especially “good” at being sick, considering my history, but I believe it’s important to note things like this as a way to demonstrate that mental illness is not something that can be outgrown or fixed in its entirety. There are always some parts that stick around, just like there are parts of everyone’s adulthood that reflect how they grew up. When I was a teenager, I thought I would be able to put OCD behind me for good, but it took me until I was in college and really struggling to realize that although people change over time, some things from the past will linger--and the way to move forward is acceptance.

 Michelle Cohen, a writer in 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.

Slowly But Surely

Slowly But Surely

Everyone I know who lives with a mental health condition has barometers they can use to judge how “okay” they are -- almost like a list of symptoms that you can use to demonstrate if things are going all right or if you need extra help.

Over the years, I’ve figured out a lot of these for myself. For example, if I’m feeling the impulse to overeat--especially sweet or salty foods--I know something’s not right. Warning signs of a hard time can also be something more easily spotted, like crying more, having less patience for everyday things, or not wanting to interact with friends or family.

It’s important to keep in mind that these warning signs aren’t the same for everyone, but for most people I know, it’s a good sign to check in when someone’s not “acting like themselves.”

Even though I have many more easily observable signs to tell that I’m not feeling quite right, the most obvious sign for me is that my creativity completely disappears. This doesn’t just mean that I’m not interested in writing--it means that I can’t and don’t have any interest in trying.

Normally, when I go for a walk, I wear headphones and listen to music that inspires me to write stories in my head. It makes the walks feel faster and also gives me great enjoyment--as does my usual nightly tradition of making up stories in my head before I go to sleep. But this is something that requires head space, which means I can’t be worrying about too many things at once or I literally won’t be able to come up with even the simplest ideas.

Ever since I got back from New Zealand, and especially since Nana got sick and died, I have had nearly no interest in writing at all--and not just my own. I’m usually an avid reader and I love everything from thousand-page books full of worldbuilding to silly short stories that people post online, but I have struggled to be interested in reading anything at all.

I knew something like this would happen as soon as Nana got sick. It’s a hallmark of every hard time in my life, and yet, it’s still frightening to live without something that I consider one of the main parts of my personality and one of my favorite things that my brain does. And, unlike some other signs of a bad time that I can work on, creativity can’t be forced. I just have to wait for it to come back, and hope it’s sooner rather than later.

In the hopes of encouraging my creativity to return, I signed up for the Tolkien Reverse Summer Bang writing challenge once again this year. I’ve done it every year since it started, but this year would be the first I wouldn’t be able to call Nana and share excerpts over the phone--something that made it harder for me to choose an art prompt to write a story about.

I wound up with my third choice prompt, and initially, I doubted that I could muster any creativity. I didn’t have any ideas, and the artist who created the piece I received was eager to talk about all of her many ideas. I started to wonder if this was a good idea at all, but since the story wouldn’t have to be completed for two months, I decided to stick with it and see if my head would cooperate.

For the first month, I wasn’t really able to do much at all aside from name the two characters in the picture--and that was with help from the artist. I still doubted myself but knew that a story of this length is usually not a challenge for me, and since it’s fanfiction, I have the added bonus of getting to geek out over Lord of the Rings while brainstorming and (eventually) writing.

I couldn’t force inspiration to come, but eventually, a little spark showed up. After five weeks of giving myself patience and time (something I’m not great at, but I certainly work hard to do), I finally decided that I needed to either start writing or back out of the challenge, and I wanted to at least give it a try.

I wanted to make things as easy as possible, so since the story is about orcs, I took inspiration from the line many people get silly with from The Two Towers of “looks like meat’s back on the menu, boys!” It’s common to see jokes about orc restaurants and the fact that they clearly require reservations, as “one does not simply walk into Mordor.”

Starting with something more widely discussed like this is a way for me to proverbially dip my toe into the waters of creativity without stressing myself out too much. I usually find the idea of a story that could be about literally anything exciting, but when it’s hard to come up with anything at all, the openness feels more intimidating than inspiring.

I came up with four restaurant-based ideas and sent them to the artist, who quickly liked two of the ideas and figured out a way to put them together. We had a fun conversation bouncing ideas back and forth, and during that conversation, I felt myself finally getting excited at the prospect of writing a new story.

I’m still at the beginning of the writing process, so I can’t promise a happy ending right now--but it seems like things are heading in that direction. I’ve been more inspired to imagine stories on my walks and when I’m falling asleep, and every time a bit of inspiration comes back, I am so happy to know that I’m recovering even just a little bit. And Nana, who always supported my creativity, would be thrilled to know that it’s making a slow but steady return.

Michelle Cohen, a writer in 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.

Harnessing the Happiness

Harnessing the Happiness

It’s been five months now since I set off on my life-changing journey to New Zealand, and thanks to all the complications life has thrown at me ever since, it’s been hard to bring back the kind of euphoria I felt to finally be taking my dream trip and having the time of my life.

In a Hallmark movie, now would be the time when I would discover long-lost tickets to New Zealand and fly out to remember everything in the place where it all happened. But in the real world, this isn’t feasible--although I do have a pretty nice option in the meantime. 

A couple of weeks after Nana first got sick, The Conqueror Challenges released a new walking challenge in their global collection, giving an option to walk the length of New Zealand in a timeframe you get to pick. Along the way, you get virtual postcards, photos, and videos as if you are at each of these places, and thanks to Google Maps Street View, you can see exactly where you would be if you were really there.

As someone who struggles to connect with my usually overactive imagination when things go wrong in life, I jumped at the opportunity to have a semi-immersive way of pretending I was back in my happy place. I set myself an ambitious goal of walking the 1,974 miles in a year--which averages to a little over 5 miles a day--and hit the road.

My therapist understood right away that this was a way for me to control things in my life at a time when I felt like so many things--from little things to the bigger concepts of life and death--were out of my control.

She supported me starting this journey, and I’m proud to say that I’ve officially hit 25% of the way--and in only 20% of the time! If I keep this up, I’ll finish in 9 months instead of a year; if I’m more lenient and allow myself some days off, I should still be able to finish in the timeframe of my original goal.

Even though it’s not the same thing walking in Chicago as in New Zealand, there are many ways this has helped me.

When Nana was sick, and home seemed like a place where all I did was get bad news, I could leave and be outside and remember that there was still sunshine. There could still be nice days in the world even when it felt like everything was falling apart.

After she died, it helped me avoid the impulse to wallow in my apartment and read endless books about grief. It helped me to immerse myself in learning about the grieving process, Jewish customs, and how to journal through feelings, but my therapist emphasized how important it was to set a limit on how long I did these things so I wouldn’t get too upset. Slotting time for a walk after this helped me clear my head and return to my current life.

Walking is also recommended in some of these books as a way to stay physically active and create healthy habits. As someone who hit 10,000 steps maybe a third of the time before I started this challenge, walking the 11,000+ steps required to hit 5 miles every single day has been an engaging challenge that’s absolutely boosting my muscles and stamina.

Lately, as I’ve walked, I’ve been able to get absorbed in some of my favorite memories from New Zealand. As my steps pound on the sidewalk, I remember the pitter-patter of seal paws as I watched the babies in the New Zealand fur seal colony flop to their mothers for feeding. Anytime I see a shorter building, I remember Hobbiton and how amazing it felt to be on all the sets for the Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit movies. I even don’t mind the gnats that sometimes follow as I walk, since they’re a far cry from the New Zealand sand flies that gave me a horrible allergic reaction.

Just imagining myself walking in New Zealand makes my days feel better and helps me get closer to that ridiculously high level of happiness I felt there that I wonder if I’ll be able to feel again… on this continent, at least.

It may not be my usual coping mechanism of choice, but so far, this first quarter of the virtual Te Araroa trail has helped me realize that, even though grief and anxiety may sometimes make me feel like there isn’t any happiness to go around, it’s still there. It may be buried deep somewhere inside, but it didn’t go away--all it takes is some seeking, even if that means walking a lot every day to find it.

Michelle Cohen, a writer in 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.