day 1 đź’—
This is my story. Before you keep reading, This post contains topics such as suicide that may be triggering to some readers.
Suicide Prevention Hotline: Call 1–800–273–8255 or text 741–741
Available 24 hours everyday
Life is Worth Living
Hello. My name is Nina. Well not really. I obviously can’t tell you all my real name. Not yet at least. As far as you know I could be a Russian spy working in someone’s basement. But I’m not. I’m “Nina”. I’m 17. Not like that is really important. Though it might be for you. It might be weird for a 17 year old to have a blog. Who really has blogs anymore? I feel like Gossip Girl. Actually, I never watched that show but I am going to imagine it’s like this. A person behind a computer screen. But I don’t do criminal activities. Did Gossip Girl do criminal activities? I have no idea. The point it, I am Nina.
You might be wondering why I am doing this. And the answer to that is in a story. It’s really personal and something that I am still going through, and I’ve never said it or written about it in public. For others to see. But I guess that is why I can hide behind the name. No one will ever really know. This post will have it all. The good, the bad, the ugly. I guess we need to have the bad before we have the good so here it goes.
Last November, a kid in the grade above me committed suicide. I didn’t really know him, but I remember that I wanted to be friends with him. The day I found out, I kind of shut down. I was numb. I didn’t know what to do. I was 15 at the time and the only other death I had really gone through was my grandmother’s. But that one didn’t affect me as much. The Monday I came back from school, it felt different. People were different. There was this tension in the air. I could feel it. There was a memorial for him in the school hallway. His friends made it. Some of them didn’t even know he died until that morning. I was still numb. I wanted to cry or have some sort of emotion, but there was nothing. I couldn’t feel. I do this thing where I suppress all my feelings and I bury them deep inside of me. Day by day, things returned to normal. I thought I returned to normal too. Then it was Black Friday (about 2 weeks later).
I went to the mall with my family. I don’t really remember much from that, but I do remember that when we were coming home, I wanted to go to Shake Shack. I remember this because I replay this moment over and over. Even though I really wanted to go to Shake Shack, I said no when my parents asked me. I don’t really know why. It felt good, in a weird way. Saying no and making myself feel upset about the choice that I made. I think about it sometimes. What if I had gone? Would all of this have happened? Basically, I was sad/mad/a mixture of emotions all the way home. I wanted to just go home and lay down. My parents dropped me at home because they were going with my sister to Walmart to check out the sales. I made myself dinner and I watched YouTube, because that was all I really did. I even remember the video. Sometime after they came back I went to sleep. I was still in a sad mood, so I decided to sleep on it.
In the middle of the night, I woke up. I don’t know why, I just did. I was still in a bad mood. And this is the moment that changed everything for me. I had a thought. My brain had a thought. “What if I go downstairs and get a knife and slit my wrists and kill myself?”
Silence. That was how I felt. My heart stopped for a second. Wow. I have never shared that. This thought freaked me out and continues to do so. The rest of the night was a blur. I was trying to figure out why I had that thought and how I could stop having that thought. I decided that it was because of that student. He caused this. Yes, my brain said. He caused this. I did not understand, and it took my months (and still often does) to understand this thought. “Am I suicidal?” “Do I want to die?” I decided that in the morning, I would tell my mom how I am still hung up over his death.
In the morning, I rehearsed this whole speech over and over in my brain. But I didn’t tell her. That is another thing you all should know about me. Along with suppressing my emotions, I don’t share them. I am not very good at it. I blame it all on my zodiac sign. I am a Cancer. Yes, I know it is the WORST name for a zodiac sign. Cancers are known for being closed off, but I do know that it is something that I need to work on.
It was Monday. I still had that thought. And even more now. More suicidal-like thoughts. And each and every one of them would give me blindsiding anxiety. After my mom came home from work she called me from upstairs. Both my dad and my sister were out at this time. She asked me what was wrong. And I broke down. I cried a lot. But I did not tell her about the thoughts. I couldn’t. How do you explain that to someone? And it was hard for me to even come to terms with. I remember that it was not a good talk between me and my mom. I kind of felt like she as blaming me for being “emotional”. Looking back now, that was not right. A traumatic thing happened to me. At a time where nothing really traumatic has ever happened to me. It was unexpected. She kind of got mad at me that I did not tell her sooner. Like I was somehow responsible. Regardless, that is what happened. And it kind of makes me doubt wanting to tell her deeply personal things about me again.
Essentially I believed that these thoughts would go away on their own. It felt like both my parents were forcing me to “move on” from the student’s death. I couldn’t. I’m not that kind of person. I couldn’t suppress things as I used to anymore. It was like all the trauma of my life thus far had “emptied” itself out of me and now I was empty. Which was how I felt a lot of the time. I was terrified that I had depression. Depression scares the hell out of me. I went to my counselor to talk to her. I needed a professional opinion. I didn’t want to feel like this anymore. I did talk to her about the student’s death, but it was so hard trying to tell her about my thoughts. Those “I’m going to kill myself” thoughts. I did not even know how to explain it to her. “I have suicidal thoughts but I don’t want to die, but maybe I do? Maybe my brain is lying to me?” How do you say that? Sometimes I got close. But I was afraid that she would tell my parents and they were putting so much pressure on me to move on so I wanted to appear strong. Wow. I just understood that. And part of me was scared of accepting that the thoughts were real, which was what I thought.
And so began the hardest journey of my entire life. If you are still reading, thank you so much. I did so many things trying to make the thoughts go away. I started to meditate, I worked out, I journaled, I prayed. A lot. I went to my counselor every week and essentially told her the same thing every time. I think about when I die or if I die. I also was scared of saying the word “suicide”. So that didn’t help. Some days I was so panicked that I had to use 7 Cups (a free therapy-esque resource) and talk to someone. I felt like no one could really understand my situation because it was so complex. I did all this without telling anyone how I really felt. I kept it all in. One day I literally thought that I was going to kill myself. I still remember how scared and anxious I was. I had to text this helpline. I even debated whether I should text the Suicide Prevention Hotline but that gave me chills. “If you text the hotline, it means that you are actually suicidal and that you should kill yourself” my brain said. This was the kind of thing that I was subjected to every day. From the moment I opened my eyes in the morning to the moment that I closed them when I went to sleep.
In April. Yes, April. Five months since this had happened. I was still having these thoughts. I went to see a movie with my sister and I had a full-on panic attack in the theater. I had a thought, “die now”. I suddenly felt very hot and I quickly went to the bathroom. I remember how powerless and helpless I felt. And how now I am so different. How so much has changed.
You may be thinking, did I ever tell my parents or anyone about these thoughts? No I didn’t. And I haven’t. But I’ll explain it later.
I think it was May. I had just come back from a trip to Pittsburgh for the weekend and I had these thoughts the whole time. There was even a moment when my mom asked me what happened, since I looked sad. I shut down. I said nothing. “Not here”, I thought. I went to see my counselor, and told her the whole spiel. Keep in mind that I had been seeing my counselor every 2 weeks or so. This time she said, “you should talk to an outside specialist”. I felt myself getting really hot. An outside specialist? There really is something wrong with me? The whole point of me seeing a school counselor was so that my parents wouldn’t find out about it! Too much time had passed for me to be able to tell them. How could I now? When even I didn’t know what was going on with my brain? She told me to tell her and gave me a week to do it.
That weekend, I went to a housewarming party. We were all dancing, but I couldn’t even enjoy myself because the thought of telling my mom what I was feeling was very nerve wracking. I didn’t tell her. I merely told her that I went to visit the counselor (she didn’t know that I was going about every week). I made it seem like a random thing, and I quickly switched the topic. I felt bad about lying to both my mom and my counselor, but I was not ready to tell them.
Now, if you are going through something similar or have something that you need to tell someone, I am not telling you to not do it. Sharing things is hard. And I feel like this is the first step for me. Whenever you are ready, you can share. Also, I am not bashing therapy in any way. It was just that I was not comfortable doing that. It goes along with the “talking to people about my feelings” thing. I will probably go to therapy when I am older, but it is something that I cannot do right now.
After I basically lied to my counselor, I did not go back to her office for the rest of the school year. I felt sad, because I felt alone. I couldn’t even talk to her now. Even though I could, I felt like I couldn’t. Honestly the rest of the year was pretty repetitive. Thoughts I did not want, panic, anxiety, the usual.
In July I had an internship at a doctor’s office. I shadowed the doctor as they went to see patients. Since it was summer, I had a lot of free time. Obviously, I was still having these thoughts. I honestly didn’t know what to do. Sometimes I would have bursts of happiness where I would 100% know that these thoughts weren’t real, but then 10–20 minutes later, it would all come rushing back. That particular day, I searched up on Google: “I have suicidal thoughts but I do not want to die”. One of the things that came up was an article for intrusive thoughts. I kept reading and I found one for something called “Suicidal OCD”. This changed so many things for me. As I read the article in the break room of this doctor’s office, I realized something. I matched almost all of the symptoms. And the ones that didn’t pertain to me were because they involved telling other people. I couldn’t believe it. There was a specific diagnosis for me. I wasn’t crazy. Suicidal OCD is one of the more common types of OCD, but OCD is such a taboo topic that it doesn’t talked about a lot. I began to look for treatment options. All of them did require going to a medical professional, but I wasn’t going to do that. One of the treatments is ERP therapy. It is Exposure and Response Prevention therapy. You essentially exposure yourself to the things that give you anxiety so your brain gets used to it. It is extremely hard to do, but it is one of the most effective treatments.
So a week before my 16th birthday, I started doing my own at-home exposure therapy. Now, I do not have a formal diagnosis for OCD by a medical professional, but I choose to believe this. I choose to believe that yes, I do have OCD and I have intrusive thoughts (unwanted thoughts or images that you find distressing and/or disturbing) pertaining to OCD. If I don’t have this, then what is it? I have thought that maybe I have an anxiety disorder instead, I don’t know. I am ok with this. And exposure therapy has helped me greatly. Knowing that there is a solution for my problem is the greatest feeling. As November approaches, I have begun to do a lot of reflecting on the past. I wasn’t happy before. I can see that now. I had this underlying sadness. Maybe it was from the events that I had in 9th grade (which is another story in itself). As I am continuing my exposure therapy, and taking care of/motivating myself, I feel different. The things that I did, meditation, yoga, journaling, all of it, I realized that those did have a positive effect on my life. They have changed me, and are continuing to change me. I am more aware now than I was ever before. I realize how I was living in the shadows my whole life, how I never really felt human. Maybe that was because I was constantly in my own head, and never really in the present moment. I think that I have an amazing imagination. I can transport myself to other worlds. But that same imagination showed me the most disturbing and dark things which in turn, gave me OCD. Funny how that works, isn’t it?
I feel wiser. Wiser than most people in my own grade. I don’t know that many teenagers who’ve kind of had their own “enlightenment”. But I am not done. No, I barely scratched the surface. I think. I haven’t even told anyone in person that I have OCD. Some days it is really hard. Some days I wonder why I am trying. I will not give up. I will not give up and I don’t know why. What is on the top of the mountain? I want to feel what Shonda Rhimes felt like after her Year of Yes. I haven’t completely become 100%. I don’t really want to. If I am 100%, then what do I do after that? Won’t life be boring? I want change. Good change preferably. I want to feel alive. I hope you all will stick around and see my journey. I am excited. Yes, I am.
Thank you for reading. It means so much to me. If you have OCD, I know how it feels. I have attached some free resources that have helped me, and I hope that they will help you too!
NOCD App on the App Store
