Marquette University Intimations Project

Sawyer Regenbaum

I had OCD… wait, correction, I have OCD. It’s contamination based with various specific paranoias surrounding being poisoned or dying. I have no real memories that are completely detached from my mental illness. I didn’t eat a single french fry or donut until I was twenty years old because some busted circuit in my brain told me they were poison. I didn’t drink regular soda until I was twenty one because I had intense and persistent fears of a single drop of Pepsi being the first domino in the chain reaction that would lead to my premature death due to diabetes and the rising costs of insulin. Perhaps the strangest full circle moment for me was seeing the world wear masks after I had spent all of middle school and early high school prior to my first hospitalization being relentlessly bullied for donning a mask and gloves at school, or any public place for that matter.

The pandemic scares me because I’m afraid of dying. I’m afraid of my loved ones dying, and I mourn with a world broken by mass casualties. On top of it all – I’m scared of losing progress. I’m terrified of becoming the person who can’t leave their room because they might get sick. Or being the person who spends hours bathing, and washing, and sanitizing and agonizing over whether breathing through my mouth one time by accident would be the thing that sends me to the grave. 

When I put on a mask for the first time last year I had a panic attack. I was overwhelmed with dread and forced to confront the lingering trauma of my OCD after a decade of treatment and progress. I could hear the whispers of my classmates as I refused to take my school issued copy of The Outsiders in my hands without gloves, and I could feel the phantom touch of random dirty hands on my face from when people in the hallways thought it would be an appropriate way of fucking with me. I ripped the mask off and buried it in a drawer until I realized the inevitable; I was going to have to lean into my compulsions to avoid a relapse.

One of the things that sets OCD apart from regular anxiety or preoccupation is the significant distress and impairment it causes. Without suffering, there is no OCD. Parsing apart the trauma of acting on my compulsions and allowing masks to be commonplace in my life was an absolute shitshow at first. I called my therapist at the beginning of the pandemic and told her we should probably start penciling me in for two sessions a week and she agreed. We started on the arduous task of exposure response prevention therapy surrounding masks, but it was all backwards. I have had thousands of ERP sessions and I know the practices and processes of cognitive behavioral therapy like the back of my hand, but I had never intertwined ERP and trauma work, not to mention the work of doing compulsions while excluding obsessions.

I spent hours in therapy those first few weeks and I quickly realized that life in general was becoming exposure therapy because mask mandates began to sweep the nation and the death toll began it’s sharp climb to the moon. So we shifted to trauma work. I hashed out my past and confronted memories that had been buried alive years before. It’s strange because I have been in and out of 24/7 care for my various mental illnesses for a decade and somehow the extreme circumstances of a pandemic allowed me to really get my shit together with everything all at once.

I stabalized my depression medications and felt the executioner remove a few heavy stones from my chest for the first time in years. I decided I had suffered enough in my eating disorder and was not game for another hospitalization due to that. I think I realized that things will never be ideal and that I don’t need to be perfect to be functional. I started to see the world as shifting gradients of sweeping colors instead of harsh blacks and whites. I found purpose and beauty in my everyday existence because suddenly the present moment was all that made sense.

 The pandemic presented so many unknowns that I finally, with shaky steps forward on thin ice, moved forward from being afraid of everything. Every moment sits in the middle of an infinite web of possibilities that spins endlessly into oblivion. Why did I feel the need to follow every single thread? After the first month of lockdown, when I realized there was no telling where things were going, I decided to relinquish control and release my white knuckle fists into open arms. Bench pressing the weight of the world lost it’s sick and addictive appeal at last and I could finally just be. I always assumed I would never get better and that my baseline in the eighth circle of hell was as good as it gets, but now I’m sitting here in a world on fire with not a single drop of sweat on my brow.