My Return to Earth

Well, I guess I'm back. The past two years have been extremely difficult. First, we had a cleft baby. He's so beautiful, but it was a very traumatic experience for me. It's so hard to watch your baby go through surgery after only a few months of life.

In the process, I think that must have triggered something else. Anyway, I was struggling so much with postpartum depression and anxiety. It got to the point where I had so much anxiety that I couldn't even think and I had a really hard time eating. The strange thing was that I was so anxious about specific things that didn't make sense to worry about. Well, I was diagnosed by three different professionals with OCD. I always thought of OCD as some sort of perfectionistic ritual type thing, I never realized it was an anxiety disorder until I experienced it. I felt so much anxiety that it was physically painful - panic attacks - the whole thing. Yuck!

Now the stories of my great-grandmother being committed for pushing a bed down the street make sense. She was terrified that it was contaminated. I was always afraid I would become insane like her ... I guess I did inherit the gene. But, who would have thought that it was really OCD and not insanity ... which is worse anyway? Just kidding.

Anyway, with a year of medicine and therapy, I'm feeling better than I have since junior high school. Wow. By the way, therapy has been way different than I thought. Exposure and response prevention therapy is what has been found to help the most with OCD. In other words, I get to do things like touch public toilet seats and asbestos and other yucky stuff without washing my hands or praying that I don't get sick. It's been an interesting journey.