I suppose we can blame YM magazine, really. When I was 11, I stole my older sister’s magazine to do a few quizzes. And while marring her precious magazine, I stumbled upon a story where a teenager claimed to get pregnant from sitting on a toilet seat. Instead of being a little shocked and laughing it off like any other kid, I suddenly became gripped by the utter fear of toilet seats. Because yes - I was convinced that this would be my fate. And it wasn’t just toilet seats. Toilet seats became fears of chairs, of sofas, of any surface where a man could sit and then I could somehow sit on that seat and then get me pregnant.
Let’s ignore the fact that I also didn’t have a period at this point (and wouldn’t until I was almost 15). Or the fact that I didn’t understand that men just didn’t go around leaving sperm on every surface they sat on (you can imagine the fun conversations my parents had to have with me about this). For 11 year-old Amelia, this fear was 100% real, to the point where I couldn’t sit down in public place for MONTHS without carrying a towel with me to place down under me or a can of Lysol to wipe down the surface first. I wouldn’t even let my dad use the same toilet as me in our house.
Just super normal things going on. And if you thought that was stressful for me, imagine what it was like for my family.
But the YM toilet seat debacle wasn’t my first rodeo.
My parents first noticed there was something different about me when, around the age of 6, I became super regimented about my bedtime. I *had* to be in bed by 7, and if I didn’t fall asleep within 30 minutes, I would start screaming bloody murder.
I was certain that if I didn’t get to sleep quickly, I was going to die.
Preventing death at age 6 required a lot of rituals and regimented behaviors and resulted in a lot of tears and crying fits.
As I got older, this anxiety and these behaviors found new things on which to fixate: whether it was our house burning down (I had to practice using the escape ladder daily), the feeling of fabric between my legs, or, my family’s personal favorite, the toilet seat phase.
Shocking to absolutely no one, I was diagnosed1 with obsessive-compulsive disorder and generalized anxiety at a young age on the basis of all of this. Cognitive-behavioral therapy, exposure therapy, and meds became my friends.
It felt like my brain was constantly scanning for some type of threat, for a place to put a low-grade level of anxiety. Once my brain latched onto one thing, it let go of another one. You know how you can’t really feel bad pain in two places at one? The same thing applied to my anxiety - it would fill a bucket until it found another more enticing bucket to fill.
And as we all know, my brain found a very welcoming bucket in anorexia for the next twenty years. I never consciously realized this at the time, but having an outlet to place ALL my anxiety, in the form of being terrified of food, gave my anxiety a purpose. If I channeled all my anxiety there, I didn’t really have the space to worry about anything else.
Instead of constantly scanning, it stuck in one place. Focusing all my fear, all my obsessions, towards food allowed me to function in other aspects of my life because I just didn’t…care about anything else. For all intents and purposes, I was otherwise pretty even keel. But I was also slowly killing myself and breaking bones every few months.
I’ve been out of eating disorder treatment for almost 4 years now, and within this past year, I finally feel like the habit-reversal and real recovery is taking hold. Food rarely causes anxiety anymore. So THIS is recovery, I say. After years of white knuckling…phew. Big sigh, I think we are going to make it.
Rejoice, right?
Right!
But the flip side - the thing that I didn’t expect - is that my anxiety and OCD would suddenly be without a home. It would return to its old habit of scanning - of being ever vigilant to find SOMETHING to fixate on. Something to get caught in the thought loops and the ruminations and the obsessive researching and checking and rechecking.
With some greater uncertainty in my life lately, I’ve found the anxiety cropping up in unexpected yet familiar places. It’s been a litany of obsessions and ruminations on a variety of topics, which is incredibly frustrating to someone who thought she had “conquered” her OCD 20+ years ago (note: my OCD has always manifested more in obsessive thought loops, not as much ritualistic compulsive behavior. It’s a common misconception that people with OCD are all about flipping light switches and extreme clean freaks, but that’s a story for another day).
I don’t want to be back in this place, but I also know that pretending that I’m not here won’t make it go away. I have the tools, I have the therapist, I know what I need to do. Fortunately, unlike pre-teen Amelia, I actually know that these ruminations and anxieties are irrational (and luckily, none of them involve toilet seats or pregnancy). That’s the hardest part of all of this - *knowing* that your fears are disproportionate to the actual threat, but being utterly paralyzed anyway. Lately, that paralyzation has ben to the point where it interrupts sleep, makes it impossible to concentrate on work, and even enjoy and be present in the moment.
And in times like these, I remember that my anxiety is going to find a bucket to fill, and eventually will move on to another one. I don’t want to deal with this forever - the ever vigilant scanning, the brain on high alert. But right now, getting rid of it seems so impossible.
Then I remind myself that eating disorder recovery also once seemed impossible as well, and I’m living that right now. So maybe I can have faith and know that - brain, we got this.
And I still blame YM magazine. RIP.
I’m using anxiety and OCD interchangeable here, with the caveat and knowledge that GAD and OCD are two different diagnoses and I may be blurring the lines when I talk about this. Not a therapist, just spent too much time with the DSM over my life, so please forgive any inaccuracies.
Thank you for being so transparent! It's not the same at all and I won't pretend to understand your story but I'm a recovering alcoholic of 15 years and is was alcohol that I turned to and focused on to relieve all of my other issues. I initially thought alcohol was the root of all of my problems and if I could just kick that everything else would fall into line. Turned out alcohol was just an outlet and when the alcohol was out of my life all of the other issues were still there... in all the chaos I found God and even God never promised to take care of all my issues but I did finally find sanity again in my faith and learned how to better handle the other stuff without being destructive to myself.
Thank you for your story cause it gives me some knowledge in knowing how to pray for you. I wish you well on your recovery journey as that's just what it is, a journey, the long walk, a lifestyle, never ending adventure. Someone said to me... no matter how far down the road we are on recovery, we are still only three feet from the ditch. So we must remain vigilant and focused on our path.
You ROCK!!
I like the idea of something internal needing a place to be; in this case your use of buckets. Understanding who and what we are is an incredibly complex and monumental task. I've been visiting my therapist weekly for about 6 years now. She uses analogies like your buckets to help me understand some concepts, I guess I'm a very visual person. When dealing with grief upon my parents both passing in 2020, she gave me Grief is a train we ride, sometimes it stops and other times it moves us at 200mph, not letting us go. For some reason that made sense to me.
Anyway, I really like your buckets and see how much of a challenge you face daily. It's a very human problem, and makes us other humans feel like we are not alone. Thanks for sharing!