Ever just have one of those days where ya’ feel like this?

“The thing about mental illnesses is people just expect you to deal with it and shut up.” -Unknown

PART I

And so it begins like this ….

Once upon a time, I sat at my 4th grade desk scribbling and scratching with my #2 pencil at the bubble-it-in question on my FCAT test (a Florida standardized test) (Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test) (more commonly accepted among students as: Florida Children At Toucher). No matter how many times I repeated blackening all those little dots I still had to go back and etch away at them just a little bit more, just a little bit harder, just a little darker and they would be perfect. The a, b, c, d and e bubbles lined up in their neat and tidy little rows and columns and seemed to jump off the page and into my ears whispering more, more, more.

  Finally my bubbles were nearly illegible and indistinguishable between which answer I had chosen when my teacher frantically swooped over me taking the eraser side of my pencil and feverishly began to erase the blackness outside of the lines. If my anxiety wasn’t already at it’s peak my blood truly began to boil. How close to it “feeling just right” and she messed it all up! I wanted to rip the whole test to shreds, to cry and stamp my feet and make a scene and hit the white board until my knuckles hurt. But instead I sat there wide eyed and watching her.

I heard her ask what I thought I was doing but how do you describe the “right” feeling to someone? No one could possibly understand! How dare her even ask!

Later that evening I rested against an alcove in the wall just out side of my kitchen while I silently listened to my mothers side of the conversation she was having with Mrs. K. My teacher called that evening with her concerns. Why had I done this, she wanted to know!

How dare her call any way. It was her who interfered with MY test! I should have told on her! Why did she care anyway?

I was the type of little girl who never ever got phone calls from her teachers unless I had done something exceptionally wonderful. And that wasn’t unlikely for me to be praised by adults. For my maturity, my manners, how much of a little lady I was, both my academic and creative abilities. At the time I was even student council Vice President showing up to meetings adorned in my baby doll dresses and immaculate white sandals with the little lace ruffled socks rolled over the top long after I had outgrown them.

Why all of a sudden did I feel my checks flushing red and feeling nervous that I was going to get in trouble for my little test mishap?

Also around that time I had started collecting some unusual habits. I remember feeling like I didn’t have anything that was “mine.” No little nuances that were signature to me. So gradually I began doing things like touching all the corners in my house. The corners of the walls, the corners on the ground where the carpet met the tile or where rugs met the rest of the floor. I tapped and touched corners of tables and beds and other sorts of furniture.

And as you may ask next, did any of this strike me as unusual? The answer is simply no, not at all. It just became a part of “me.” It just became a part of my routine. It became apart of my everyday life. It became something that I HAD to do. It became exhausting and annoying and I didn’t want to have to do it anymore but I had to for some reason and I couldn’t stop. It started to phase me and it started getting me in trouble with my mom because it made me late for school everyday and made me take longer to do things around the house and I felt bad for making my mom late and making her mad and I felt angry that she was angry at me and angry that I couldn’t stop and angry that she didn’t realize that I couldn’t stop and just leave me alone to my compulsions. (which at the time didn’t have the name compulsions to me)

I realized that my parents though my new “habits” to be very strange and their worrying made me worry. I felt alien all of a sudden. Something is wrong with me. I’m different and no one likes it.

How old are you in the 4th grade? Nine? Maybe? So I’m nine and feeling all of this madness and I’m faced with the inability to communicate all of this because every other means of communication I had developed thus far hadn’t prepared me to deal with this yet.

A program on television aired and my parents asked me to come watch it with them. They used that tone of voice that gave me every indication that I in fact wouldn’t want to watch this show but would rather be anywhere else in the world because this was going to be a program about me and my new “problems.” I gathered all of that just by the inflection of their tone when they invited me to come watch with them. I’m very intuitive and parents will always underestimate that about their children.

In this TV program they talked the majority of the time about tourettes syndrome and what I remember most was it showing all of these children spouting out cuss words out of the blue. And that worried me. Did my parents think I was going to start saying these filthy words? Was that why they were so worried?! I wanted to stand up and shout “No, no, no! I wouldn’t do that! I don’t even know most of those words or what they mean. I’d never ever do that! I’ve never even THOUGHT of that!” They didn’t need to worry about something like that. I wouldn’t do that!

I guess what they were really listening for was the parts sprinkled in about correlating disorders including a snig-bit about OCD…

 

TO BE CONTINUED…