TRIGGER WARNING: Suicide, Self-Harm, OCD
Most people will have gone through this year experiencing all types of emotions - good and bad ones, it is normal, it is life.
2019 for me has been a dark, frightening and confusing time. This year I could not see a way out of my obsessive, repetitive and intrusive thoughts that consumed my daily life. This year I attempted to take my own life because I could not see a way out of my head anymore. This year I got diagnosed with OCD.
I have always been a worrier, I always joke that it is the only thing I am good at. I genuinely think it might be. I get obsessive thoughts that I going to hurt people, not in the malicious sense but in an accidental, carelessness sense. It will be my first thought in the morning and my last thought at night before I go to sleep. The same thought can last hours, weeks or even months with only compulsions, or as I like to call them ticks, to relieve the mental torture and pain I experience from having them consume my daily thought pattern.
For example, I am scared when I leave for work in the morning that if i do not check my plug sockets routinely back and forth four times to make sure they are off, that I will cause a fire. Why four? Four seems to be the number where I feel myself go calm. As I leave the house I will have to lock my front door and raise the handle three times, so hard to make sure its 100% locked that my knuckles will go white, worthwhile pain to make sure I do not hurt my family, but protect them. I could not leave my home if I did not “perform” these acts because my anxiety would consume every part of me and shut me down leaving me to become a dissociated zombie.
Sometimes I cannot tell the difference between my imagination and my reality they can become very intertwined and my brain can become a very confusing place of understanding what is true and what is false. Did something really happen that I really need to worry about our is my brain making it up? I find it very hard to differentiate these “situations” in my head. This is where my low self esteem and low confidence combines with my now diagnosed OCD to make my life even more confusing and frightening.
Help is something I did not think I needed or deserved. “I should just deal with this myself right?” I would always think to myself. Who is going to understand what the hell you are thinking in your head Abbey you are crazy! You are a horrible person! I would say this to myself every time I even considered getting some type of help. I dealt with it they only way I knew how to, to inflict enough pain on myself through self harm or completely numb myself with using alcohol or painkillers. It was almost like I was using them as a form of punishment and a security blanket at the same time. I got to a critical point where it was now or never for help I needed. I could not last much longer.
These last 4 months have been intense but worthy. I finally got the help I needed through medication, therapy and research after years of not understanding why I thought and felt the way I did. I genuinely would not have been here today if it were not for my family, friends and NHS and I will forever be grateful to them. This is a journey that will be hard and it will have a lot of unexpected turns but it's a journey that I will fight all the way.
Its okay not to be okay. You deserve help, happiness and kindness x