Why Me? Yes You

I don’t feel like I deserve happiness.

And I know that sounds crazy. I mean, everyone deserves happiness. However, I really don’t think I do. I don’t think I do at all.

And it took me a while to piece together why. Why I can never let myself embrace any good that comes my. Why I constantly hide who I truly am inside a version of myself that it isn’t a real reflection of who I have become. Why, whenever I get the opportunity to reach for the stars I have been seeking since I was a little girl, I somehow am convinced I’m gonna get burned by them in the end.

And it’s because I live with the ultimate betrayal.

My own mind.

Picture standing in a room filled with flies and and pouring a bottle of syrup over yourself. The flies constantly swarm about you, buzzing around your head and in your face. You swat and swat, but they keep coming. The flies are like obsessional thoughts—you can’t stop them, you just have to fend them off. The swatting is like compulsions—you can’t resist the urge to do it, even though you know it won’t really keep the flies at bay more than for a brief moment.

-Cheryl Little Sutton

I had a really bad day last Wednesday. Like really, really bad. And no matter what I did, I couldn’t shake these awful thoughts that plagued my body. It felt as though I was watching a horror movie go off in my brain, only I wasn’t the victim but the villain.

Hell, I could barely stand to look at myself in the mirror because it was as if I was coming face to face with a monster. Who just so happened to look an awful lot like me.

I am constantly at war with my own thoughts. Every day. And I know how I come across. I seem fine because very rarely do I allow anyone to see differently. But the truth is, most of the time I wish I could run as far away from myself as humanly possible.

It is so easy to suffer in silence when your mind is thing causing your hurt. I’d know because I’m a frequent flier on that airline and it sucks. I put on this front so the world doesn’t realize just how much I feel like a stranger in my own body.

Having OCD is quite literally the scariest thing I deal with on a daily basis. I can twist and bend anything and adopt it as if it’s my own, even if my beliefs don’t match up.

And so that’s why I never feel fully comfortable when my life is going well because I am always waiting for that other shoe to drop. When it all seems too good to be true, I tell myself that it’s all about to come crashing down right in front of me, and there won’t be anything I can do to stop it. Sometimes, as a result of my own “actions” (I say that in quotation marks because most of the time my “actions” is my OCD screaming nonsense in my ear). And, sometimes, it’s a result of the trauma I have endured over these last five years.

If you continue to carry bricks from your past, you will end up building the same house.

-Unknown

But I’m trying to learn that I am more than the nightmares I face or the nightmares my body creates to try and fuck with me. And that my OCD thoughts do not define me or determine what I am worthy of.

Look, I wish I was in a spot in my life where I am able to celebrate the good instead of constantly waiting for the bad. But I’m not. And that’s okay. Life is about growing and evolving in whatever time frame works for us.

One day, I’ll get there.

Today just isn’t that day.