I thought I’d write my first post about the reason I wanted to get into writing in the first place. I was given the advice that if you want to be a writer, start calling yourself one, and write. I spend a lot of time thinking of things to write about, jotting them down, and saying “one day I’ll write this right.” This blog is my opportunity to write what I think about in a more fluid way. Some posts may be personal, some may be more general, but in all, this blog is for thinking and writing and thinking some more. The point is to write (and hopefully get some readers!) but write nonetheless. Even if it’s not perfect. Even if no one is reading. Especially if its not perfect. I have spent the past 16 years of my life going to school and writing for a grade. To be perfect. Agonizing over every word, comma, and period. This blog isn’t about that. It’s not about perfect. It’s about writing.
Speaking of perfect. One of my biggest weaknesses and strengths was identified from a young age when symptoms of my obsessive compulsive disorder starting showing in fourth grade. Most of the people in my life identified it as perfectionism. Maybe it was, in part, but I knew that hearing the term “perfectionist” never settled in my stomach as the correct identification. I was tapping my pencil over and over with some notion that my answer was wrong if I didn’t—or that if I didn’t maybe something bad would happen. These are the intrusive thoughts that are a more familiar term in present day, but as a terrified fourth grader, I had lacked the vocabulary to identify. I spent the next eight or so years of my life managing my impulses in my own ways—developing nighttime routines, clenching fists, and screaming into my pillow.
Looking back, I think the one of the most detrimental impacts OCD had was on my reading. My grandmother used to tell me during games of Bananagrams that our vocabulary is our strongest weapon. She probably meant in terms of the endless word games we played, as more words in your arsenal makes you a stronger competitor, but I think she had another point. She would tell me to read and talk and learn. She said that once I didn’t know a word, I should look it up and learn. However, an unfortunate effect of OCD for me was its impact on my reading. Going back and rereading sentences, paragraphs, and pages had prevented me from finishing a book throughout middle school. I was not reading, so I was not learning. I didn’t have the words to describe OCD because I had never learned about it. I didn’t have the resources.
This effect is what ultimately guided my impulse to write when I reached college. My freshman year of high school I read the first book in many years with minimal to no re reading. A year later, I read the first book since I was in third grade that was simply for pleasure. (I give a special thanks to All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr and Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens for reviving my interest in literature). I started to realize that reading could be an escape from my mind instead of the very thing that stirred up my (un)controllable urges.
Fast forward to sophomore year of college in my first creative writing class. At this point, I had started therapy and gave a label to my OCD. In class, we were given the chance to write a creative non-fiction short story and a longer fiction piece. I used the fifteen pages of fiction to tell a story about a main character driven my OCD, but I gave her the plot of finding a home for an abandoned infant. I didn’t want the whole story to be about OCD, but I discovered that a character can have OCD without the story being about just that. I wondered how I would have reacted to a story about someone with OCD in fifth or sixth grade. Would I have recognized the same traits within myself?
Up until late high school, my understanding of OCD was someone who needed everything to be clean. The Monica from Friends or Sheldon from The Big Bang Theory. My understanding of OCD had become a punchline about an arbitrary focus on cleanliness. I didn’t think that I could be considered someone with OCD because my room and desk tend to paint a different disorderly picture. I didn’t know there were other facets to this disorder—other ways of presentation.
What if I had been given a more accurate version of OCD? I don’t want to play the “what if” game because I am pretty happy with how my life is going, but I still wonder. I know I would have wanted some connection to something or someone who was feeling the same way I was. I knew I wanted to know that I wasn’t crazy because that’s the only explanation I could come up with. It would have been nice to know there were other people out there like me.
This want is what ultimately drove my writing. In the workshop on my fiction story, multiple of my classmates mentioned how they found it refreshing to see this representation of OCD. They said that they appreciated it because they themselves had OCD and were tired of seeing it written about in the same way. I felt a release. I had put words to my feelings and others were understanding them. It was the first time in a while that I felt I had a voice that other people could hear—I didn’t always need to scream into the audience-less abyss of my pillow.
(I remember one of my best friends sending me an anonymous Instagram story from her college’s page. The person had written something along the lines of “I have felt guilty since the age of eight for no reason at all” when describing their experience with OCD. I found it cathartic. The ability to read something that verbalizes something I have felt).
This blog, all the writing I have done, addresses this impulse I have to write. Some of it has to do with OCD. Some of it doesn’t. All of it is working through my thoughts and sharing them with others to see what they have to say. It is finding commonality through words so that we are not alone.
Thank you for reading, and I hope you come back for my next post!
Julia DeLuca 