I never actually thought much about how my current life living with mental illness is different from the life I had before the onset of my Pure OCD. Then, this past week, I hit a rough patch, perhaps the worst one since I began treatment. I realized that I took some things for granted before the onset of Pure O. Easy things had become not so easy, even though I pretended that my life hadn't changed so much.
One of the big things I realized I had taken for granted before was good days. Before onset, most of my days were good days. I didn't have to work for them. My good days just happened. Then, mental illness set in, and the anxiety and OCD sort of took that from me. A lot of my days from that point on were days that I just tried to survive, hour by hour, and tried not to get so lost in the deepest, darkest corners of my mind that I'd never be able to find my way out again. I had lots of days like that, and like this rough patch, bad days can turn into bad weeks.
With mental illness, I do have good days just like everyone else in life has good and bad days. The difference between now and before, is that my good days take effort. For lack of a better way to put it, I fight like Hell against my own mind. On the good days, I literally say to myself, "I win at life," because that's how it feels. I appreciate my good days more now, I guess, because I feel like I'm winning a battle when I have them.
I also feel like mental illness took my sense of peace and trust in myself. I've always been a pretty logical person, but I also took my intuition into account when I made decisions. I made life decisions, like where to go to college, my career choice, and even the future I tried to plan in my head based on what my heart told me. (You know the old saying, "Follow your heart because it will never lead you down the wrong path." At least that's what my mother always told me). Don't get me wrong, I also evaluated what my heart wanted with the logical steps to get there. I had peace knowing that my life was guided in such a way, and I trusted myself. I knew, deep down, in my very soul that my decisions were the right ones for me. Then mental illness set in, and I started to second guess every single thing about myself.
I made decisions about my life, and back then, they seemed like the easiest decisions in the world to make. They all felt right. I took a trip through Carson-Newman campus when I was in elementary school, and I knew I would go there because I felt peace while I was there. All through high school, I wanted to write as a career. Sure, I thought about going to graduate school while I was in college, but I always came back to writing because that was where my heart was. I knew a writing career was a risk, but it was a risk I was willing to take. That was the path for me. I forgot about graduate school, and I felt like a huge weight was gone off my shoulders. I felt at peace. Then my OCD picked everything apart, and I accidentally let it. I had taken for granted the ability to trust myself and my intuition.
I struggle more with decisions since the onset of my OCD, and when I make decisions, I agonize over whether or not it was the right decision. I started listening to my head more, and I lost my sense of peace because an anxious brain likes to think of everything that can go wrong. Then those possibilities turn into real dangers inside my mind. Wrong decisions, in my head, lead to catastrophe.
I'll end with this: Mental illness changes things. Mental illness has certainly changed things about my life that I hadn't even thought about. Life with mental illness can feel like an uphill battle some days, and you have to make an effort everyday to fight. Everybody always says it gets better, and the good days feel like that. On my bad days, I try as hard as I can to hang on to the thought that a good day will come around again.
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