One of my friends wrote a story with an element of the story that didn’t match up with another historical book that I have been reading. I looked up the information on the Internet and the element still didn’t match. I wrote to my friend and asked him about it. He didn’t give me an answer that made any sense. I have continued to do research trying to make sense out of the element and have come up empty.
Today at breakfast, I told my husband about my progress. He asked me why I cared. He said that it was obvious to him that I would not get a good answer from my friend and that I should just let it go. After all, it wasn’t my story anyway. He was right about everything.
I looked up at him without skipping a beat and said, “Don’t you know your wife? I’m OCD girl.”
I couldn’t help myself. It was like a like worm had burrowed into my brain and now I couldn’t stop thinking about that story element. Even as I write my post, I am still thinking about it and wanting to know the answer. Yet I already know that I’m not going to get an answer that satisfies me. That fact doesn’t change anything. I still will obsess about it. I will probably think about it for days; it’s just who I am.
When I told my husband, “I’m OCD girl.” I didn’t tell him with shame or pride. I told him as a matter of fact.
If he were to ask me, “Why are you eating with you left-hand?”
I would say, “I’m left-handed.” Just a fact. No judgement. No pride or shame. Just who I am. That’s what OCD has become for us. He knows me and accepts me for who I am. OCD isn’t a disorder or a disability, it’s just the way I experience the world.
I get so upset every time there’s a mass shooting because the politicians say that it isn’t a gun issue; it’s a mental health issue. The problem is a gun problem because if we didn’t have so many guns, we won’t have so many mass shootings. Yet, when they say it is a mental health issue, they don’t seem to understand that we haven’t come to terms with what exactly mental health is.
If anyone dares to think or act outside of the way the people in power deem as abnormal, then they consider that person to have a mental health problem. In the late 1800s when a woman dared to act outside of her place, she was deemed to be hysteria. Today, when people are just trying to deal with the stress of a modern life, they are told they have a mental disorder and they are given therapy and drugs. Instead of learning to accept who we are and love ourselves, we are taught that we have a disorder of the mind. In the meantime, there are people who have severe mental disorders, and those people are slipping through the cracks because they don’t have the finically and community support they need.
Instead of making laws and prescribing medications, I believe we could all benefit from remembering that God commands us to love each other the same way we love ourselves. By loving ourselves, we could learn to love the way we are instead of believing we have disorders and then we could learn to love those around us and give them the help they need instead of just throwing them to the streets because they are different.
My faith saved me. May God’s peace reside in all of our hearts.
