Our theme for the month of October is “haunt.”

Content warning: This piece contains suicidal ideations, descriptions of intrusive thoughts related to violence, and descriptions of mental illness. 

Last year, a week before my college house’s Halloween party, I opened up a fresh Google Doc and titled it, “Maybe I’ll Profit Off My Trauma One Day.”

It only took six sentences for tears to blur my vision.

I just can’t stop thinking that I’m faking everything. That the funny and sweet person that everyone sees is just a fraud; just an act. And that if they knew what was really going inside my mind, and not just me telling them, but them getting direct feed into my mind, then they would understand and hate me. They wouldn’t want to be around me anymore.

And I know that when I stop typing this all of my self-aware shit will fly away before I can grab onto it, and then I’ll be wrestling with reality again.

Writing brings me a sense of control I don’t often find when speaking. More often than not, I either stumble over my words in excitement or take long pauses as I struggle to remember what I was saying.

After paragraphs of emotional outpouring that didn’t erase the heavy numbness, I turned to assurance.

• People love you. People enjoy being around you. 

• Bad people don’t overthink everything they do.

• You don’t want to hurt people, or else you wouldn’t be so fucking terrified of it. 

I repeated the words I’ve heard from my friends, family, and therapists, hoping that they’d pull me out of the dark corners of intrusive thoughts.

I wrote entries for the next three days, and then I came out of the obsessive spiral. I was relieved, happy to talk to my housemates without wondering if they’d still talk to me if they knew what thoughts dominated my mind.

On the Saturday before Halloween, I spent over an hour covering my face and bald capped head with white makeup. With the help of a cloak, wand, and my housemate’s eyeshadow skills, I stole the show as Voldemort.

I spent the night laughing and gossiping with people I care about. I couldn’t help but feel like the main character when I overheard people talking about my costume and when two of my friends took videos of me doing my flawless impression of the antagonist.

After midnight, when our friends left and the only noise was the cackles coming from my housemates and me as we struggled to clean the basement, I was still filled with happiness. Despite all the times my unwanted guests have told me that I don’t deserve to experience joy, that I don’t deserve to live out my dreams, I still smiled and laughed along with the people who I’ve often seen as leagues better than me.

I wrote another entry a week later. I wasn’t surprised that the relief was temporary, but the realness of the obsessions always takes me aback, always sends me reeling, always fills me with fear and disgust.

For me, haunting isn’t a constant but an unpredictable force that’s always bound to come back. You just don’t know how, when, or what form it will take.

It’s taken me years to understand and accept that Obsessive-compulsive disorder is something that may haunt me for a long time. Though I have started seeing a therapist who gives me hope for a future where uncertainty and fear don’t rule my life, I also know that recovery is never an easy upward trajectory.

Like I have for the past eleven years, I will go through periods of peace, and I will endure times when the unwanted guests return. They may take on fears that I’ve never considered, screaming at me until I follow them down an obsessive spiral that tightens with every compulsion I do.

The uncertainty of if or when my recovery will take a wrong turn is a form of haunting itself.

All I can do is face the lingering uncertainty that’s either breathing down my neck, reminding me of all the ways I can fail, or acting as a shadowy reminder of what’s to come. Either way, I have to face this haunting, or else I’ll have two ghosts to deal with: the unwanted guests and the fear of when they’ll return, what shape they’ll take.

It’s only when I face the uncertainty, when I force myself to admit that I cannot force the world into the clean boxes of black and white that OCD longs for, that I can smile and laugh with friends with powdery white makeup covering my face and a wand dangling from my fingers.

Liana Hirner

Liana Hirner graduated from Calvin in 2024 with a bachelor’s in writing. She currently lives in her hometown of Aurora, Illinois and works full-time in a warehouse filled with books waiting to be sorted. Writing is her first love, followed swiftly by lattes and dark chocolate.