Labeled: One Year Later

     I'm coming up on the one-year anniversary of my Primarily Obsessional OCD diagnosis this weekend (on October 2nd). I still remember how I felt that day when the therapist I was working with at the time said the words Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. I felt mixed emotions. On the one hand, I was relieved because we had figured out the real problem, and that meant we could actually treat it. On the other hand, I felt scared of the OCD diagnosis, and I felt ashamed because I felt like having OCD meant I was crazy or that something was really wrong with me. A weight had been lifted that I had been carrying for years, but it was quickly replaced with a different weight that felt just as heavy.
     A year ago, I didn't want anyone to know that I had been diagnosed with Pure O. I was afraid people's opinions of me would suddenly change or that they wouldn't see me for who I really was and who I wanted to be anymore. I felt like someone had slapped a Post-It on my forehead, and that the Post-It was all everyone was going to be able to see. I knew about the stigma associated with mental illnesses like OCD, and I also knew that OCD was ranked pretty highly on the list of most debilitating mental health conditions. I was afraid, then, when I had to come face-to-face with all those things.
     I even had a little bit of a freak out. What if I didn't get better? What if this got in the way of my writing and getting published? What if no one wanted to date me because of the OCD? What if someone did want to date me and I let the OCD and anxiety ruin it? Did I still want to have children knowing that I could pass on the chemical imbalance in my brain that had made my life a silent Hell for so long? For some reason these concerns didn't hit me when I was diagnosed with Panic Disorder, but they hit me like speeding bullets when the OCD diagnosis came.
     Now, a year later, I'm in a different place. I'm always aware of my OCD, but it doesn't feel as heavy as it felt a year ago. I'm not terrified of the OCD anymore because I know how my OCD works. I don't feel like I still have the Post-It slapped on my forehead, and I've managed to make some new friends post-diagnosis that don't care that I have OCD. I'm getting back to myself now, after a long and hard battle to hang on to myself with the OCD at its worst. I don't feel crazy (most days), and I don't feel like something is really wrong with me anymore. I realized that I'm just an imperfect  human, and I'm no longer ashamed of that.
     Over the past year, I have also stopped hiding my OCD. I talk about mental health and therapy. I talk about OCD with people when they ask. I mention the Pure O and therapy, if someone asks or brings up mental health, just like I would tell them about a weather report. I treat it like any other topic of conversation, and I mostly don't feel embarrassed about it anymore. (I haven't been embarrassed to talk about my Cerebral Palsy in quite some time, so I don't see why I needed to treat my mental health any differently.) Although, I don't discuss my obsessions with people that aren't my therapist or my mother, but I can talk about obsessions in a general sense if someone asks about them.
     A lot of my questions have been answered over the past year. I'm getting better. The anxiety did get in the way of my writing over the last year, but I have recently been able to start writing the way I was able to write before the anxiety disorder. I still wanted to have children after I realized that I could manage my mental health condition with the right tools and the right help. (Maybe my freak out was a little blown out of proportion now that I look back on it.)
     A year ago, I felt like being diagnosed with OCD was a HUGE deal, and I was afraid that it was going to impact every area of my life in a negative way. My mom even says that dealing with OCD on a daily basis is "something major". Now, I realized that being diagnosed with OCD was a big deal in some ways, but that in other ways it wasn't a big deal. It's a big deal in the sense that it is a chronic illness, and I had to make lifestyle (and cognitive) changes in order to manage it. It isn't a big deal in the sense that I've realized that it doesn't define who I am or what I can do with my life, and it hasn't changed who I am as a person.
     I'll end with this: I wasn't sure I would ever reach this point in living with my OCD. I thought I might lose myself somewhere along the way, and sometimes I felt like I did lose myself in the battles with my mental health condition. Sometimes, all I could see was the label I felt I'd been given, but today, I can see more in myself than just what I struggle with. Coping with the diagnosis of a mental health condition, like any other chronic health condition, can be hard at first, but it gets easier over time. It's an adjustment, and it's okay to be scared. It might feel like your life is never going to be the same again, but that isn't exactly true. I'm surprised at how close to my normal that my life feels at this moment, a year after a diagnosis that I was afraid would change everything.