Grassroot Heroics Scholarship

The absolute most significant challenge I've faced during my entire high school experience has been my own mind. To put that more specifically, obsessive-compulsive disorder, or OCD. If you don't really know what that is, it's a mental disorder causes a sort of turbo-anxiety about the tiniest (or literally nonexistent) things, and you have to do things in very specific patterns or rituals, known as compulsions, to calm it down and prevent a - made up - disaster from occurring. (Of course, doing them just feeds the anxiety so it becomes stronger every time you encounter it so the way to fight it is to ignore the urge to do compulsions, but I digress). Compulsions also don't actually work most of the time, because your brain has to make sure that they happen absolutely perfectly on an arbitrary scale. That means you might have to repeat the same thing dozens of times before you're finally let go. Because compulsions usually demand that you stop whatever you're doing to perform them, OCD can become EXTREMELY debilitating. OCD is with you from birth, but it normally only starts showing itself in your early teens. Mine first developed about a year before my freshman year of high school. It started up at the beginning of December, and the main topic for it was worrying that something bad would happen before Christmas. Basically every single day until the 25th was absolutely constant stress. I would develop stomach aches and headaches almost daily, and could barely function because I was on such high alert for the smallest things. I had a ritual I had to complete before I went to bed, and it could take me an entire hour some days. When Christmas finally came, I was exhausted, but relieved. I thought that since Christmas was here, the crazy stress I had been feeling would finally go away. Guess what happened? No, it didn't go away. It became less strong though, and I was finally able to consciously process what on earth had just happened to me. A few months later I was formally diagnosed with OCD. Stress can agitate OCD, making you more sensitive to being triggered by small things and less able to resist compulsions. With that in mind, let's go through my first year or so of high school. I was dealing with compulsions during school every day (before that, school was all online so it wasn't a big deal). Most of them were just me having to take weird roundabout routes to my classes and things like that, so not too bad, but there was one that was destroying me. If I thought the "wrong" thing while writing or typing, I would have to erase what I wrote and rewrite it, even having to rephrase it to 'avoid' the thought in the worst cases. It was stopping me from doing tons of things and, although it was less debilitating than the December event, it was getting dangerously close to being as stressful. Something had to change. I started practicing a special type of treatment I learned in therapy where you intentionally trigger the OCD and then resist doing the compulsions. Let me tell you, that's the strangest feeling ever. It's like a weird combo of unbearable agony and joy. I just kept going, destroying all those walls my brain had built, and over months and years, slowly, I started to gain ground in this crazy internal war I had going on. My most recent year of high school was the best I've ever had. I was happy, making tons of friends, and actually being able to focus in school. Although compulsions can still pop up when I'm under a lot of stress, some days go by without a single one worth noting. It's something I honestly never thought I would experience again, but it's just as nice as I remembered. My experience with OCD has permanently changed me, though. I learned so much about mental health and psychology, and I've really become a more empathetic and caring person. It's helped me understand what other people are going through, and most importantly, how to help them. It's even made me consider studying something psychology-related in college to keep helping others more effectively. To this day, I'm still fighting that never-ending war, and learning new things about myself and my wonderful mind. It's become a big part of my life that I find a lot of satisfaction in sharing, in the off-chance that someone else out there suffering in the same way might hear it. OCD isn't something I would wish on my worst enemy, but if I had the option to go back and erase it from myself, it would be a tough choice.