''Compulsions feed obsessions,' my therapist told me. I had to starve one to starve the other.'
When I was eight or nine or ten years old, I found a daddy long legs layered in the sheets of my bed. I tossed it to the floor, crushed it with a book, and thought about it every night for the next 20 years.
That relief stayed with me. After the doctor and I broke up, I did not shake the sheets. After I moved to a new city, to a new apartment, to a new bed, I did not shake the sheets. I told them to keep looking. I felt itchy all the time. I spent hours in front of the mirror, inspecting every burst blood vessel and freckle on my body. I took pictures—of my skin, of my sheets—and actually sent these pictures to my landlord as proof, limp as it was, that I needed the exterminator to come back. The landlord complied. When I demanded he fire an exterminator I deemed incompetent, he sent another.Many months of this exhausted my landlord’s patience.
Throughout all of this there was labored breathing. There were regular night terrors, when I’d shoot up from sleep, choking on air. There was a panic attack that started in the backseat of my parents’ car and ended in the emergency room. There was the diagnosis from my therapist: obsessive, compulsive, and, looking back, probably OCD for my entire life. And there were more hours than I had ever spent before at the countertop in my kitchen.
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