We all worry. It’s a fundamental part of the human condition. World events (especially these days) give us no shortage of things to be concerned about in addition to our mountain of typical life concerns–our jobs, our families, our finances. There’s always something.
What a lot of people don’t understand is that living with obsessive-compulsive disorder is not just having a lot of worries. It’s also not just being a stickler for details and order, or being a perfectionist. For me, OCD is a ravenous dragon who sieges the castle walls of my mind—and, for a long time, it was winning.
In this article, I’d like to share my experience with OCD and how I trained my worry dragon. I want to be clear: This article is not meant as any sort of definitive or monolithic statement about OCD and the experience of having it. It’s just my perspective that, perhaps, others may see themselves in and maybe take away a few helpful nuggets.
Here’s a short description of OCD from the Mayo Clinic:
Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) features a pattern of unwanted thoughts and fears known as obsessions. These obsessions lead you to do repetitive behaviours, also called compulsions. These obsessions and compulsions get in the way of daily activities and cause a lot of distress.
Ultimately, you feel driven to do compulsive acts to ease your stress. Even if you try to ignore or get rid of bothersome thoughts or urges, they keep coming back. This leads you to act based on ritual. This is the vicious cycle of OCD.
The language of “worry dragon” is used in literature to assist anxious children, and has continued to be of assistance to me as an adult.
My OCD first emerged in early high school and, at that time, centred around my academic performance. I was constantly flooded with thoughts about what could go “wrong”—which, for me, was bringing home a grade below 90%, flubbing my lines in the school play, or—heaven forbid—getting “in trouble.”
Now, I’m a rule-follower with an unhealthy amount of respect for authority, so the probability of getting “in trouble” was pretty low, but it still lived rent-free in my head. I felt surrounded by uncertainty, constantly in circumstances that felt beyond my control, and thus the rituals started to soothe that uncertainty.
I would lay out my clothes for school the next day, perfectly folded, on the same chair and would check and check and check that the corners of the jeans and t-shirt were perfectly aligned. In my morning routine, tasks had to happen in a certain order, and if that was changed, or I did something “wrong”, it had to start again. I remember showering, doing my make-up, and deciding halfway through drying my hair that something was “off” and getting back into the shower to start again.
That’s the thing about the rituals—it gives you the illusion that you have control over uncontrollable things. I am a classic “try-hard” who always thinks about what more I could have done when something goes wrong; if I skipped or messed up one of my rituals and something went wrong, how would I cope with the fact that I did not do everything I could do?
For me, this was a siren song. I thought the rituals were the only way I could hold on, to be sure. But when things inevitably did go wrong, the fact that I had done all the rituals perfectly did not help. I figured I’d messed one up and missed it, or a new one was needed. I could always find a way that it was my fault—that there was more I should have done.
By some grace of teenage ego, my worry dragon went dormant in late high school. I still took comfort in patterns then and throughout undergrad, but it wasn’t running my life. What I didn’t know was that the dragon was saving its energy for the big show: law school.
I’ve wanted to be a lawyer since I was a little kid. It felt like a distant and lofty dream, and when I got into law school, I could not believe it—literally. My exhilaration at being a big step closer to my lifelong goal quickly turned the corner to imposter syndrome. I remember sitting in class and thinking that someone from the administration was going to come to the door, call my name, and take me into the hallway to explain that I was there by mistake.
In the midst of this crisis of confidence, my worry dragon saw an opening: even if I was not there by mistake (which the dragon did not admit and expressly denied), I would find a way to screw it up.
My dragon left no stone unturned when coming up with the ways that I might screw up my dream. The concerns about my academic performance were still there, but my worries deepened and grew in all directions—for example, I worried that:
This was also the crucial juncture in which my dragon decided to become less self-indulgent and introduce the idea that my rituals were not just about keeping me safe, but keeping the people I cared about safe from me. What if I don’t turn off the faucet properly and flood the apartment complex? What if I don’t lock the door properly and someone breaks in and hurts my roommates? What if I don’t lock my friend’s car door properly and it gets stolen? I became consumed with all the ways I might let people down, and with how ill-equipped I felt to process that failure.
And thus, the ritual checking and routines returned and expanded. When I left the house, I needed to check the door was locked 9 times—3 rounds of 3. If I messed up the count or the sound of the lock did not feel right, I’d start again. I’d do this even when my roommates were home and usually be able to let go of it after a few rounds, but if I were the last one to leave, this process could go on for some time.
My friend had a car without power locks, and I nearly took the door handle off while checking I’d locked it properly. Before I went to bed, I’d stand in the bathroom, eyes darting over and over between the faucet and the toilet to make sure the water was off and where it should be.
Feel uneasy, do the check, still feel uneasy/off, rinse and repeat. And repeat. And repeat.
For me, one of the most insidious parts of OCD is the repetition. I can see that everything is fine—the door is locked, the oven is off, the faucet isn’t running…but I don’t believe that I’ve seen it. I have so little trust in myself and my abilities that I find myself literally not believing my own eyes. It makes me feel stupid, incompetent, and alone, and that the only way to stop those feelings is to keep repeating my rituals until they subside. It never fully resolved the worry, but it gave me enough that I could keep moving with my day—even if it was after I’d lost 30 minutes to checking the door was locked.
There was a part of me that always hoped that my worries would go away when I completed law school, when I finished articling, after I got called to the bar…at some point, I would “arrive,” and then there would be nothing to worry about.
In a surprise to absolutely no one, that magic day never came.
Like most junior associates, I found being a new lawyer incredibly stressful. Everything was new, senior lawyers could be mercurial and demanding, the reward for good work was more work, and the reward for unsatisfactory work was silence. You never knew where you stood, if you were doing a good job, what that day’s crisis might be.
There you were, doing the thing you wanted your whole life, and it still felt like any minor misstep could take it away. I remember asking a mid-level associate at what point I’d stop feeling like I was going to throw up all the time.
Note: She said around the 3-year mark, and I’d call that ballpark accurate.
And thus, ideal conditions continued for my worry dragon. The morning and evening rituals ballooned—use the skin and hair products in the right order, make sure the squeeze bottle of face or hair cream makes the right clunk when you put it down, check the bathroom, check the kitchen, check the alarm clock, check the door is locked, check the door is locked, check the door is locked. If I was lucky, I could get it done in 30 minutes, but it was often longer.
Every day was also “bring your dragon to work” day, where an elaborate series of checks was required for me to leave at the end of the day. No cords could touch, and everything needed to be a perfect right angle. On the tough days, the stress compounded to the point that I would be frozen in my office for some time before I could break the cycle, and on the toughest days, I went back up the elevator to check more.
While my OCD up until that point had been largely focused on physical rituals, in early practice, it expanded to compulsive thought patterns. Anything I became worried about, I would compulsively think about it over and over again, raking over the coals for anything I had missed. This would happen with work stuff, health stuff, interpersonal stuff (the worry dragon had many a field day with “I wonder if [person] is mad at me?”).
It was almost like I thought if I “showed my work” to myself over and over again, I could stop worrying about it. “Showing my work” to another person and getting them to tell me it was okay sometimes helped, but I often worried afterwards that I’d left something out that would change their answer—and then that became the compulsive thought pattern.
On the surface, I was a very well-thought-of junior associate. Smart, conscientious, reliable—somewhat high-strung and talking a mile a minute, but dedicated and easy to work with. I showed up at work, got ‘er done, left work late, and went home alone, where no one else could see I was struggling.
I feel this is the right juncture for me to address one of my real peeves about how OCD is perceived. Sure, it bugs me when people use it to describe something they are passionate about (everyone’s seen those “Obsessive Christmas Disorder” shirts *forehead slap*), but the thing that really gets me is how often it gets dismissed as “just being really careful.”
Frequently, when I share I have OCD with a person, within a few sentences, they will try to put some sort of positive spin on it—for example, “that must make you a really good lawyer” or “you must have great attention to detail”. You know why it bugs me so much? They’re not wrong.
Yes, if I let the worry dragon drive, the document will be PERFECT. Because I’ve read it backwards and forwards and checked the citations and hyperlinks a bajillion times—but the cost was my mental health.
I know the folks who say something like this don’t mean any harm. I think it’s a product of lots of people not understanding the often-unseen struggles people with OCD experience, and not knowing what to say—but it still devalues my experience. I say something like “thanks, yes, could be” but my inner monologue is “Yes, thank you, I am a good lawyer, but my mind is a PRISON *maniacal Joker laugh”.
Note: OCD can also make me less careful, trying to do something quickly before the dragon has a chance to dig in its talons. The dragon contains multitudes.
As I mentioned earlier, I’m a try-hard, and all throughout this, I was trying to get better. I sought help at the University and in the community in early practice, but nothing seemed to help.
I don’t think it was the fault of the folks who were trying to help me—I think it was my approach. I viewed my OCD as something needing to be contained, not something I needed to understand. I would focus on trying to get help to cut down on the rituals, to move through them more efficiently—not on why I thought I needed them in the first place.
Flash forward to me as a mid-level associate: I no longer felt like I was going to throw up all the time at work (my colleague’s prediction was correct), but the worries, rituals, and compulsive thought patterns persisted. One day, I went to the medical clinic after work feeling faint, and it turned out I was having a panic attack. While I was super embarrassed in the moment, it led to me getting a referral to a psychiatrist, who referred me to the psychologist who changed my life forever.
The first time I walked into my psychologist’s office, it was with the same mindset I had before: needing to contain. I remember saying, “I just need to get my hands around this”. I had accepted that the worry dragon had me pinned in my mind castle, and the best I could do was to fight it back to the moat outside the outer wall. I was trapped and needed to find a way to white-knuckle it through the rest of my life. To me, at that point, that was the best-case scenario.
And that’s when my psychologist uttered the words that echo in my mind to this day: “We can do so much better than that.” “WHAT?” I said, “THAT’S AN OPTION?!?!?” I was the living embodiment of the mind-blown emoji.
And thus the work began in earnest to understand my OCD—to learn how it connected to my feeling that I should be able to control the uncontrollable, how afraid I was of something being my fault, how desperately I needed others to think well of me, etc.
When I look back on that time, the major feeling I remember—other than profound gratitude for my psychologist—was shame. Not ashamed that I have OCD, but ashamed at how quickly and uniformly I had accepted limitations. The constraints on what I thought my life could be, that I had assumed for years were concrete, were actually cardboard. And, if I’d just had the courage to push, I could have figured that out sooner. I know that’s not fair to myself, but it’s what I felt.
Now, I’m proud to say that in large part, my worry dragon has been banished from my mind castle. I can see him over the horizon beyond the castle walls from time to time, and can feel when he’s plotting an approach, but I know what that feeling is now and how to deal with it. When things are going well, and my mind jumps from thing to thing that could go wrong, or when I have a moment when I’m having trouble peeling myself away from the oven or the front door, I understand now that it’s just the dragon looking for an opening.
Continuing to thrive also requires ongoing investment in my mental health. I see a counsellor with whom I continue to learn more about why I am the way I am, and I find that path of exploration wildly empowering—the better I understand, the more tools I have to regulate and feel through emotions rather than pushing them down.
I appreciate everyone taking the time to read this article and learn about my story. If there is one takeaway I hope folks have, it’s this: You do not have to be in a visible, profound crisis to benefit from engaging with your mental health. You may be surviving, but never forget you deserve to thrive.
Feeling “okay” doesn’t have to be “okay” with you. Be curious about yourself and reflective about your feelings, and never be afraid to wonder if you deserve more. I only wish I’d done it sooner.
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