A Personal Story: Learning to Cope with OCD

My OCD symptoms started to become harder to manage around the same time that I noticed a cockroach in my apartment. Neither of them was truly welcome and yet unintentionally, I gave them both the space to thrive. It was during lockdown in China, when I couldn’t leave my apartment for two months.

Afraid of getting COVID, I began to perceive everything outside my apartment as contaminated. I was only able to go outside for COVID testing, to collect my packages and mail, and to take out the trash, but even those simple tasks that only required going down the stairs began to feel overwhelming and I often tried to avoid them. 

When I came back inside, even if I only stepped outside my apartment for two minutes to take out the trash (and didn’t even touch anything outside), I immediately got in the shower, sometimes showering multiple times per day. I would disinfect my phone, and disinfect my sink after touching it with “contaminated” hands. I couldn’t touch the clothes that I had worn outside. I had a specific, time-consuming process that I followed every time. Anything that had been outside was left right by my door and disinfected immediately, but even after disinfecting those items, I still saw them as contaminated. Cooking was extremely difficult because all food technically came from outside (at some point), so I washed my hands and used hand sanitizer to the point that washing them was painful. I specifically remember one time when I was removing food from its package but the food ever-so-slightly brushed against the edge of the package, so I threw the food out, then started sobbing for so many different reasons: I ruined a meal, I was wasting food, I had nothing to eat, and perhaps the most distressing thing was that so many processes that were previously simple, like making a quick meal, became tasks that consumed hours of my time. 

Performing the compulsions (according to the National Institute of Mental Health, “Compulsions are repetitive behaviors a person feels the urge to do, often in response to an obsession”) was time-consuming. OCD can lead to avoidance of things that trigger obsessions (“repeated thoughts, urges, or mental images that are intrusive, unwanted, and make most people anxious,” according to the National Institute of Mental Health), which is probably why I tried to avoid going outside, and when I did go out, I immediately fell back on the compulsions.  

I also “dealt with” the cockroach in my apartment by completely ignoring it. It scared me, so I adjusted my routine in every way to try to avoid it. I didn’t go into the room the cockroach was in at night. During the day, I could almost forget about that cockroach, but then it would suddenly appear again once it got dark. My obsessions were similar, for many years of my life: momentarily silenced or hidden, but lurking in the corner all the time and capable of seemingly appearing out of nowhere. Quick. Disgusting. Shameful. Unpredictable. 

OCD told me: Don’t look at the test result before your timer goes off, or you’ll get COVID. Don’t wear that outfit today or you’ll get COVID. Don’t listen to that song or, you guessed it, you’ll get COVID.

And I obliged every single time, falsely believing my OCD when it told me I had to perform these compulsions to prevent bad things from happening. I knew these thoughts weren’t logical, but OCD was always there to say but what if it could happen? Performing the compulsion temporarily made me feel a bit better. But the same false sense of control that OCD made me think could bring me comfort is the same thing that eventually made me feel like I was falling apart. 

Likewise, avoiding the room that the cockroach was in wasn’t going to make it go away or solve the problem. But each day when I made it through the day without seeing it, I felt momentarily relieved. Only to wake it up and do it all over again every day.

I couldn’t let anyone into my apartment after lockdown ended because I didn’t want to deal with the stress of them “contaminating” my apartment by not following my cleaning rituals. Even worse, they might have caught a glimpse of my inner world, which was far messier than my room and so much harder to explain. From a distance, my compulsions were invisible, and even made people believe I was coping well with the lockdown — something that was distressing for so many people. But I lost my time and myself in the process. 

One night I went into the cockroach’s room, thinking it would be hidden in the same corner as always and I could deal with it. But instead, it flew up the wall right in front of me, no longer avoidable or contained. It felt like a metaphor for the inner peace and control I had lost by desperately trying to control everything. The reality was that by avoiding the room the cockroach was in, I wasn’t making it go away. I was giving it space and power. It became the cockroach’s room, and I was just existing in it. 

I had to accept that my OCD would not go away either, and it had been given too much power too. It impacted how I prepared my food, what clothes I wore, what I looked at last before leaving a room, which words I looked at before turning the page of a book. A song I once loved became one that I couldn’t listen to because OCD told me listening to it might cause something bad to happen. Separately, those things feel small — but when you avoid a room every day, it doesn’t feel like yours anymore, and when your OCD controls what you do frequently, it no longer feels like you have much control over your own life. 

The intrusive thoughts still roam freely in my mind, living rent-free, as they say. As much as I would love for them to disappear, I’m learning to accept their presence. On some days, they’ll be quiet and calm, hardly taking up space. On others, they will be flying around haphazardly like someone suddenly turned the light on. I can’t control that. Avoiding the room will not make the cockroach go away. Fighting my intrusive thoughts will just give them space to grow.

Facing my intrusive thoughts, existing with them, and then moving on from them without performing a compulsion is extremely uncomfortable for me. But slowly, I am reclaiming my time. I am trying to listen to the songs I love, wear my favorite clothes in colors that OCD insisted were “bad,” and turn the page of a book randomly, whenever I want to. I can’t control what a cockroach does or where it goes. It might hide in the corner or fly up the wall. Some days are much harder than others, but I am trying to walk into the room at night, unaware of what will be there, even if it scares me.