Inside my compulsive mind.

It wasn’t until I was in my 20s that I began to wonder WTF is wrong with my mind.

I didn’t share those things for awhile. We were in Vegas and my grandmother was standing next to our hotel window that was well over 15 floors in the air. In my mind was a scene on loop. In my mind I saw myself push my grandmother out of the window. This is the first violent intrusive visual I ever had. Prior to that I had this intense fear. This fear that knowing me was to die. By the time I had left high school I had been to 32 funerals. Early upon losing people I loved I developed a fear that then manifested into this idea that I was the end for people.

Before that I was scared of being touched. Hugging people scared me. Smiling at people scared me. Being alone with people scared me. Talking to people physically hurt. I was scared of people. I obsessed as a young child about the idea of these things happening.

When I was not yet 8 years old a man tried to abduct my brother and me. I was a magnet for bad things to happen to people who loved me. My brother wouldn’t have been targeted if I hadn’t been there.

I was obsessed with finding a balance in the world. I try to center myself by applying intense pressure to what feels like the absolute center of my skull. I have to apply intense pressure to the center point on both of my thumbs, so much so that I have calluses built up in the dead pin center of both thumbs. I walk my glasses up my nose but it has to be done symmetrically. I apply intense pressure into my belly button. After having lost over 150 lbs I have contemplated skin removal surgery and I have intense fear that they wouldn’t be able to maintain a belly button and that I would lose my point of symmetry. I apply intense pressure in the center of the back of my knees. When I walk across a line, a line that I learned tonight my husband, and both daughters never feel, I feel intensely on the bottom of my feet even when I have shoes on. When I think about walking on a line I feel that intense pressure in the exact same point on the bottom of my feet.

The last one, until tonight I seriously thought everyone did because I have always “felt” this. Turns out not everyone feels this. To my husband and oldest daughter that doesn’t seem strange but I’m reacting in a way that feels like questioning my entire reality.

No doctor pursued the idea that I have OCD until recently. After I decided to stop worrying about the image I was projecting and sharing the fact that I have visualized pushing my grandmother out a window, that I can’t handle knives near my daughters because when I do I have terrible intrusive thoughts, I have visuals of an argument my husband and I had 20 years ago but instead I pushed him out our window, I have visuals of taking a knife and stabbing it into my arm and removed a layer of body fat in order to feel balanced, or that I have visuals of sticking a knife into my stomach while pregnant and pulling the knife from one side to another.

How could any person share those ideas with other people? Those all made me feel like a terrible monster. I couldn’t be trusted with the people that I loved.

I spend so much of my time trying to be perfectly balanced so that I won’t be that monster. So that my daughters won’t be killed if they’re away from me. So that they won’t be kidnapped. So that I won’t come home after having allowed my daughter to stay home while I go grocery shopping only to come home and find her body mutilated. So that my husband won’t end up in a fatal car accident on his way home. So that my mother-in-law’s plane won’t fall from the sky as she’s coming to visit us. So that my dad won’t leave me again. So that people won’t hate me.

I have no balance. I have no symmetry.

I don’t know if that actually qualifies as irony but it sort of feels like it possibly could.