Kelle’s Story
Kelle’s pronouns: she/her
One of the cruelest aspects of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder is the terrifying fact that it has no rock bottom. OCD is an insatiable thief that strips away everything that makes life worth living. No matter how low you sink into the vortex of OCD, it will find a way to pull you in even deeper. At my lowest, OCD confined me to a dark bedroom that I could not leave and memories of abuse that I could not shake. The last thing that the disease will try to take is your life. OCD nearly succeeded in taking mine, yet, through some stroke of good fortune, my story did not end there. In 2017, at the age of eighteen, I was admitted to the residential OCD Institute at McLean Hospital for 3 months of intensive OCD treatment. I returned for two more stays in the following years before I was able to function at a level necessary to be a part of society. The treatment I underwent at the OCDI was truly the hardest work of my life. And yet, it not only gave me a second chance at a life I thought I didn’t deserve, but a second family in my fellow patients—the most courageous people I’ve ever had the honor of knowing.
“The last thing that the disease will try to take is your life. OCD nearly succeeded in taking mine, yet, through some stroke of good fortune, my story did not end there.”
My life today is unrecognizable from the dark days I try so hard to forget. This month marks 5 years since my first admission to the OCDI. Reflecting on these years is a profound experience that can be difficult to describe. They are, simultaneously, a painful reminder of all that I’ve lost and a joyous reminder of all that I’ve gained. The memories of the years I lost myself to the clutches of a cruel and unrelenting disease that robbed me of my childhood, my potential, and my dignity flash before my eyes. The hell that I endured during the years that my illness raged untreated haunts me to this day. In all likeliness, it always will. I’ve learned to make my peace with this. Even now, on the other side, I wake up from nightmares in which I am forced to relive the trauma of those days. Their beat is eternal in my mind.
And yet, there is an undertone of hope in the narrative of my life that I cannot deny. Five years ago my life was redeemed, and I was brought back from the depths of a hell that I dare not deliberately reimagine. Five years ago I was an empty, rotting shell of a human being. Mine was a mind that revolted against its body, intent on killing it by any means necessary. To say that it nearly succeeded in doing so is neither hyperbolic nor dramatic. I know that I’d have been dead within months, had I not received treatment when and where I did. Things were coming to an end, the means by which I kept myself alive were no longer sustainable. The five years I’ve lived since are a gift more profound and indescribable than I can ever say.
It strikes me suddenly in the times that I least expect it. I will experience a jolt of that familiar despondency and feel myself slipping ever backwards into the abyss of my memory. The effort it takes to pull myself from this vortex and reinsert myself into the ‘here and now’ is considerable, but mesmerizing. When I am once again centered in the present moment, I am overcome with a sense of amazement and gratitude that I am experiencing the beautiful monotony of everyday life.
In this way, I wonder how I can ever take so pessimistic a look at this miraculous life that has been gifted to me. Other times, when entrenched in bitterness of all that was stolen from me, I feel that these last five years have been a farce. Could the efforts it took to save my life really have been worthwhile? Was my life worth saving? Why me, when so many others were extinguished by the unbearable agony that this disease extolls? I am still prone to the occasional, yet debilitating, bout of utter hopelessness—the old core belief that I still harbor positing that I simply cannot fight this war indefinitely. The resurgence and disappearance of this hope is exhausting. I long for the consistency of a strength that will sustain me on the worst of my days—the days when I can scarcely perceive the reality in front of me, the days in which I have too deeply forsaken my mind to rightly see this world.
I have resolved—or am attempting to resolve—that neither of these outlooks is final. Hopefulness and hopelessness; gratitude and grief—why should they be mutually exclusive, after all? To deny myself the right to grieve, to feel anger at the abuse and mistreatment that I endured would be a striking betrayal of myself and my history. My young self, deluded in the lies fed to her by those who hurt and exploited her, was too steeped in guilt and fear to see the wrong that was being done to her. I keep the anger alight in my heart for her. She deserves an advocate, even retroactively.
“I love this life. I always have. All people who fight to reclaim their lives from this disease do. It takes a radical, almost illogical, faith in life and love to put oneself through the torture that we do.”
On the contrary, though, I can never ignore the reality that I was saved from the darkness of an impenetrable mind and given a second, even a third, chance at this life that I am finally living. My story matters, if only to show others who have lost themselves to this demon that they, too, can live a life worth living. It is difficult to look too intensely at the contrast of then and now. I can hardly look at the whole picture—the narrative of my life thus far. It is too large, too vast, too damning to see all at once. It is akin to swallowing a boulder—impossible in one piece, doable when broken into small stones. I love this life. I always have. All people who fight to reclaim their lives from this disease do. It takes a radical, almost illogical, faith in life and love to put oneself through the torture that we do. It can only be done when one has reason to believe that the future is worthwhile, that life, in itself, is inimitable and precious. We keep moving only because we refuse to stand still and let this disease pull us under. We keep moving because we need to know if there is a life waiting for us on the other side of the seemingly impenetrable wall behind which we have been trapped for far too long.
And so, remembering is bittersweet. No, I will never forget the lost years, nor will I stop imagining what the scope of my life may have looked like had it not been stolen from me. That does not mean, however, that I will ever stop acknowledging the wonder and impossibility of the life that I have regained. In a way, I feel that I am luckier than most. Not in the obvious way, of course, but I don’t know many other people outside of my chosen family who can say that they have fought for the integrity of life as purely and intensely as we have. My life has a singular, immutable purpose that cannot be taken away by anyone. And the sole flame of hope that illuminates the road before me, though it may flicker at times, never truly goes out.
