Allowing yourself to breathe ...

I have been accused of relating a few too many things to The Catcher in the Rye. Guilty as charged. I get a real bang out of Catcher.

When I read Victoria Ralston’s blog post about coming to terms with her own mental health, I immediately thought of our friend Holden Caulfield.

The two most enduring messages of that novel -- in my opinion -- are very straightforward: 1) Be honest with yourself about your own mental health; and 2) Don’t be afraid to ask for help. Holden walks around New York City doing everything he can to deny, repress, or otherwise not deal with the central fact of his life: he’s hurting. For Holden, the healing process doesn’t begin until he hits rock bottom and subsequently gives himself permission to get help.

Victoria tells a similar story here. Like Holden, she takes a purposeful step toward mental health by acknowledging and naming a longtime condition (OCD) and then allowing herself to get the help she needed.

Victoria graduated from high school in 2016 and went to NYU, where she continues to major in Dance and Child and Adolescent Mental Health Studies. On the days when she doesn’t have classes, she works at a small cafe on the Lower East Side, mostly to earn the money necessary for physical therapy and other medical bills. She has danced in Italy and Berlin during the past few summers and is generally the kind of person who keeps herself as busy as possible. She plans to graduate from NYU early in 2019.

In her piece, Victoria tells her story, and in doing so offers up some important advice about coming to terms with your own mental health. “This post is an admittance of who I've always been but was too scared to see or expose,” she said. “It's about my mental health and how long it took me to find the space to allow myself to fall so that I could heal from a lifetime of avoidance of myself.”

C.H.

Until very recently, I’ve kept a secret buried as far from the surface of myself as I possibly could. Far from friends and farther from family, farthest from those who could’ve helped me. While it affected me each and every day, what I failed to realize, was that it affected those that I loved even more.

It was an enemy I couldn’t identify, and one I couldn’t explain or reason with in my most desperate of times: that which had coined me the title of being too “extreme,” allow me to introduce my untreated OCD. This wasn’t shocking to me, not even phasing. Sitting in the ER on October 1st, listening to a doctor tell me this diagnosis he’d concluded in under five minutes, watching him watching me and waiting.  OK, what's next?

I’ve spent my entire life living with and listening to this corrupting and callous roommate, but hearing that diagnosis was nothing but a huge relief. Finally, I was something with a name and an explanation. Finally, someone knew, someone had a fraction of an idea of what goes on inside my head. I could breathe. A four-year-old brushing her teeth until they bleed, lining up her stuffed animals in size order so that she wouldn’t be taken in her sleep -- my earliest memories are distorted and twisted by that acronym I’ve always known but never admitted. Invasive and intrusive, a single day inside my head might as well be an entire lifetime. But now? I feel free, free to act in any way I choose, to say whatever I feel needs to be said, and accept the reasons as to why I am so damn extreme.

Mental health advice is something we always give but never take. We ask others to care for themselves, tell them the importance of who they are, but when we must shift that lense to focus on ourselves, somehow the task becomes impossible, weak, wrong. It becomes everything we say it is not when we are faced with caring for ourselves. At least, I am this way. I knew for so long that something was wrong but I was terrified that I would seek the help I needed and it would come up with nothing. That there would be nothing wrong with me, and all of these things I see and hear and say to myself, all of these things that I do, are actually for nothing. There needs to be a better word than “blame,” but without a diagnosis of OCD, there was just something wrong with me and who I was and who I was trying to be. I lived in fear of knowing something was off and being told that I was fine -- so I said and did nothing. I focused my attention on various ways to distract myself with whatever and whoever I could. I lived for two decades in complete fear of myself and everyone around me seeing me the way I knew myself to be. I pushed myself academically, physically, and emotionally. I shut so many doors because I didn’t want a fault to get the best of me. I wanted to be stronger than any obsession or compulsion I might have. In fact, I knew I was stronger than all of them combined and nothing was going to take me away from me. Until I did.

But for once in my life, I’ve started to breathe. I’ve always seen what obstacles I faced, what I should be doing and catering what I did based on the actions of whoever was “normal” around me. But being taken to the hospital was the best thing I let happen to myself. For the first time, someone could see that there is something I struggle with every single day, that there’s a flooding sink of who I am that’s been left on since I can remember. And now people can see that I’ve been drowning in myself, that I’ve been trying to open every window and door to let this water out, but everything was jammed. I see my life in a comforting clarity at the moment, my extensive self-control has kept my OCD a secret for the entirety of my life but the love of one person has allowed me to finally know what it means to breathe. My sister let me speak. She listened and encouraged me to share some things that I had never said. She knew me, she saw me, and she didn’t brush me off with another label of extreme. It’s terrifying to hurt and have no physical proof of that hurting.

Mental health affects a person physically but all the devastating damage is internal. A body is a structure and a shield; it carries and protects us from anything it can.  But I was not equipped to fight for and treat myself. The thought of being put on medication was enough to keep my intended actions at bay, but before I was diagnosed a friend asked me this: “Do you think you are weak because you tape your knee?” To which I replied, no, it’s just a precaution because I know my knee is weaker and it needs extra support. “Then why would needing medication for your mental health make you weak if you’re just supporting something that needs help?” To this, I had no answer because she was right. No matter what you have to do to care for your mental health, you are not weak because of that care or that help you receive. My weakness lived inside of my fear of needing help and not being able to “fix” myself. But my stubbornness and self-control made me weak, not my OCD.

And now? Now, I’m finally allowing myself to breathe.