I haven’t been doing very well.
On a scale from too-vague-to-be-even-slightly-interesting to too-detailed-to-be-shared-publicly, it’s really hard to strike a balance when talking about mental health. So, I’ll just say that OCD is rearing its head again.
I’ve been thinking about repeating patterns. It’s hard not to make something of the fact that on December 5th, 2023, I got a prescription for an anxiety medication for the first time in my life, and on December 5th, 2024, I went back to the doctor for a new medication. What a funny coincidence, I thought, and then, lest anything be taken too optimistically, Oh no, does this mean that last year’s experience actually got me nowhere? If I’m back at square one?
It’s hard not to think of repeated patterns as some kind of failure. We’re taught to see progress as a perpetual upward slope, a bit like this royalty-free stonks meme.
You struggle with some horrible thought pattern or dysfunction and then you move beyond it and find ways to grow and heal, so finding yourself back in those patterns feels like all the growth was just fraudulent. It’s not just with mental health, either; every time I experience periods of, say, loneliness or creative droughts, it can feel like a narrative device has been broken. Like, hey, I already felt this once before, and the rules clearly state that after I’ve experienced something bad, the lessons I’ve learned will update my software and I’ll never have to feel that way again.
I don’t know if this all sounds relatable or baffling. But I think that it’s common for a resurfacing struggle to feel like it invalidates what came before. I wrote my essay last December about some of the progress I’d made managing OCD, and I have to remember that feeling worse doesn’t cancel out everything that came before. Things get better, and then they get worse. And then they get better, and then…
In February of 2020 (incidentally, during another bad OCD episode), we read Vodolazkin’s Laurus in my Russian literature class. I remember being struck by the way one character talked about time as a spiral. You repeat moments and patterns in your life, he explained, but each time at a new level. I doodled a spiral in the margins as I listened to the professor discuss this passage.
Maybe I’m not regressing, I thought. Maybe I’m just moving up the spiral.
Right now, I feel transported back in time, faced with the same old lies. Like, you’re supposed to simply self-reflect yourself out of a mental health problem. Or, a personal favorite, this is actually just Bad Person Syndrome and you’re shirking accountability by treating it medically.
But no point on this spiral is ever the same. Some obsessions feel painful as ever, but I’m approaching it by reaching out to family and being honest about my experiences instead of trying to pretend the problem isn’t happening. Even just labeling the previous thoughts as “lies” when they feel so intrinsically real is a new point on the spiral. Seeking out a new medication is a new point, when the experience of taking anxiety medication at all is still so recent.
Usually, I try to save personal reflections until I’ve had enough time to Deduce What The Big Lesson Was. It’s vulnerable to write about something when you’re still in the middle of it. But I also hope that next time I’m back at this pattern, I’ll be able to see what I felt before and know it doesn’t last. I can only hope that by then I’ll have even more tools.
Or maybe that’s still too progressive of a way to see life. Maybe I’ll have fewer tools next time, but I’ll have adopted a cat. Maybe I’ll have unlocked new, never before seen emotions. Maybe I’ll stop referencing the stonks meme so much. Time can only tell.
Stonks image by Wikimedia Commons user Di (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Hannah McNulty graduated from Calvin in 2021 and stuck around Grand Rapids, against all odds. She has spent her last few years singing in choir, teaching herself to love reading again, and trying to learn every fiber art simultaneously. She currently works at Eerdmans Publishing, where you can find her burying her nose in old paperwork and forcing anyone within earshot to listen to her bad puns.
I really enjoyed your rendition of the “spiral,” as I tend to think about the spiral as an ominous, bad thing in relation to my OCD. Like when the spiral tightens, that represents my intrusive thoughts tightening (got this from John Green). It’s refreshing to think about the spiral as something with points, a marker of progress when it feels like any progress has been erased. I really appreciate how you blend optimism with the realistic mindset that OCD isn’t going anywhere, but progress will be made in small or big ways. I also completely relate to the Bad Person Syndrome. There’s nothing OCD loves more than to tell you that you don’t have OCD.
I hope next year brings you some respite from OCD, and that you celebrate all moments of progress, both big small!
Thanks so much for commenting! I almost talked about John Green’s spiral analogy in this post as well. One thing I like about Turtles All The Way Down is how it captures the lifelong struggle with mental health—if he’d written a book where the protagonist was cured by the end, it would have rung false for everyone who deals with OCD, but ending on a sour note would have been really depressing too. Instead, he kinda shoots forward to the future and shows that the main character will continue to struggle throughout her life, getting alternatively better and worse, which is strangely comforting. That was also a bit of an inspiration for life as a spiral.
(I am assuming you read the book but sorry if this makes no sense).
And yeah, the Bad Person Syndrome is real.