Hurting To Help
This week, I finished my eleventh National Novel Writing Month - but this wasn’t like my usual NaNoWriMo experience.
This November, instead of writing a fantasy or science fiction novel like I usually prefer to read, I instead wrote the second draft of a memoir designed to educate people without OCD about what it’s really like - and help others who do have it to feel like they’re not alone.
To that point, the presence or lack of people who understand takes over a lot of the content. While writing, I had to remind myself that times are different now, I do have friends, and I am no longer the little girl who felt so lonely being the only person I knew with a mental health diagnosis.
I didn’t have the luxury of friends until I was much older, but when I was little, I wanted someone - anyone - to tell me that they also had something and their life was good, so mine was going to be good too. I designed the memoir to do that for others who might not know anyone else, who might find a friend in the book when they would otherwise not feel understood by anyone.
The tricky part was, I wanted to be as brutally honest as possible. I wanted to show the highs and lows in such vivid detail that people without mental illness would get a taste of what it feels like, and what some people go through every day.
Two problems quickly came up due to this approach: First, there is a lot of my own life that I don’t remember thanks to trauma, that I had to reach out to my family to ask about. It felt strange to be asking someone else about my own life, and yet I didn’t expect anything different. My psychiatrist told me a long time ago that the reason I was forgetting things like that was because of trauma, but it still bothers me that I feel like I’ve lost a part of my life to my head that I can’t get back, even by asking others. I can get their perspectives, but I can’t remember what I was thinking or feeling during these pivotal moments, which makes me feel like I’m missing something.
Additionally, I faced the problem of having to face that trauma head-on, especially in the case of my blood clot nearly ten years ago as well as the nervous breakdown two years after. I had written about both of these events before, but never in such explicit detail. In one of the essays in the memoir, I detail every single obsessive thought I had while I thought I was going to die in the hospital, from my fear of throwing up to my intense sadness of dying alone.
In order to make these essays as accurate as possible, I used the opposite of a therapeutic technique called “grounding.” Normally, people use grounding to remind themselves that they are in the real world and not in the middle of a traumatic incident, but I was using it in the reverse. I used the principles of grounding, including filling my head with sensory details, to make myself feel like I was there again. Although the writing turned out great, this greatly affected my mental health.
I’m so relieved to be done with this round of writing, and eager to hopefully share this book with the world sometime soon. In the meantime, I’m going to not think about the project for at least a month, to give myself time to heal. I was definitely hurting myself in the interest of helping others one day, and although I do agree with that principle, it was definitely too much all at once.
Even so, there was one positive side effect of writing about all these traumatic times: I was able to see how far I’ve come since I was first diagnosed, how I am able to live a successful life with a job and friends and financial independence, and that encourages me to keep fighting to improve life even more for myself and others living with mental illness.
Ellie, a writer in the Chicago area, was diagnosed with OCD at age 3. She hopes to educate others about her condition and end the stigma against mental illness.