Trigger warning: this piece discusses themes of OCD.
At the end of 2024, during the Christmas holidays, my anxiety started to get really bad. I started to spiral and ended up in a really irrational state of mind. What I later found out was that compulsions had started to take control, and I ended up not leaving my room. I removed all technology from my room (including a colour-changing light bulb my parents had gotten me) because I was terrified of A.I. and technology. My parents went to our local mental health team, and I ended up in CAFMHS for the entire 2025 year.
For the rest of that year, every day was a fight. A fight to get out of bed and face the day, knowing that around every corner there would be a new fear, a new compulsion. Something else that would try to pull me down into a spiral. But I kept fighting, determined not to let my OCD get the better of me.
One of my (two) therapists at the time told me that giving a name to my OCD would help to separate it from me, and so Eddie was born. I named my OCD Eddie after Chandler's annoyingly persistent roommate on the TV show, Friends. Naming it really helped. I started to view Eddie as something like a parasite in my brain, kind of like an outside influence. The more I viewed my OCD as something separate from myself, the easier it became to dismiss the lies it would tell me.
When life would get stressful, the thoughts would come back; they'd get bad again. A tool that helped was telling myself that I was in control; I didn't have to listen if I didn't want to - that Eddie was just talking nonsense again. Something I realised was that, at the start of my journey with OCD, those thoughts would take up so much space in my life, and I would think about them for hours and sometimes days. But over time, if you use your tools enough, then the thoughts don't take up as much space, and they begin to just become passing remarks in a bigger conversation.
I remember the thoughts that lasted hours and days; I remember that time in my life very clearly, and I remember how overwhelmed I felt. But I don't remember all the thoughts I had last week. I know I had lots on a quiet car ride to Dunedin, but I don't remember what they were because they don't matter. That's my message to everyone else who struggles with the loud intrusive thoughts of OCD: thoughts don't always matter.
Once you take the power away from those thoughts, they don't hold as much weight or space in your mind. Those thoughts that overwhelm you, the things they make you do, YOU CAN OVERCOME THEM! You don't have to live the rest of your life like this! There is hope!
-Sarah K
Voices of Hope wants you to know that you do not have to do this alone. Click here to 'find help' - it's not weak to speak!