(And inspire others)
I have OCD
Having this mental illness is like playing hide and seek with Satan inside my head.
I deal with the compulsions well. I no longer touch things eight times, and by melting light bulbs, I have stopped turning them on and off 12 times.
Although I still obsess with the doors, I check them four times to see if I have thrown the key when I leave the house.
Otherwise, I am functional.
It’s not like when, as a child, I crossed the street by jumping from the white line to the white line of the crosswalk because if I touched the road, I thought I would die.
Nor when, as an adult, the compulsion led me to smoke one cigarette after another, using the previous one and or rummaging in the ashtrays when I ran out of money for tobacco and having to smoke the butts.
But I’m still scared of the black voices that have lived inside me since my classmates beat me up at school.
And there are days when those voices make me feel like I’m not worth enough.
There are days when I feel like a cockroach crawling to feed on pizza scraps left by rats in a cul-de-sac where it always smells like pee.
It’s not fun. But it is what it is.
My life is like a continuous dark night of the soul.
I’m not a hero.
I’m just a guy trying to survive another day.
But sometimes, that’s enough to inspire others to do something positive with so much pain and darkness.
For example,
I have a Mexican reader who, inspired by many of these texts I write where I pull out my guts and show them to everyone, wrote a brilliant book about her mental illness.
She is bipolar, like my mother’s friend’s daughter.
Speaking of my mother’s friend…
Not having enough with her husband committing suicide by throwing himself down the stairwell during the pandemic, her bipolar daughter escaped from the mental hospital, and after 48 hours missing, the police fortunately just found her.
Why am I telling you this?
So you can see that you are not alone. If you are going through the dark night of the soul, know that we all have been there, are there, or will be there.
Neither my Mexican reader, my mother’s friend’s daughter, nor myself are very different from you.
We are all, in one way or another, screwed.
Life is not easy.
Neither for me, who has OCD, nor for you, who maybe doesn’t have any mental illness but has just lost your job, or your partner has left you, or you think something is wrong in your life, but you don’t know what.
This is from a forty-two-year-old guy who turns to look at any statue on the street several times.
I can’t help it. I try to. But it doesn’t come out. The impulse gets the better of me. It’s an exhausting and constant struggle.
Writing makes it better.
Writing is my revenge.
When I write and tell the world that for most of my adult life, I have been a manic depressive victim of childhood bullying, that I have OCD, and that I have come out of the f*cking hell of drugs and alcohol by the skin of my teeth and my hair still smells like sulfur, I feel so much better.
And this should make you think that if my Mexican reader, the mother of the bipolar girl, the bipolar girl, and I can move on, you can too.
Because I’m sure you, too, have camped 6 feet from hell at one time or another and survived.
And not because you’re Harry Potter. It wasn’t magic. It was you, getting up after every damn fall and moving on.
We’re not heroes; we’re fragile people who get hurt whenever we fall.
But we are also people who get up.
And that turns all our pain into a miracle.
We may not be millionaires, nor can we offer a testimonial on getting rich before 30, having the perfect family, or becoming a digital nomad. Still, we can inspire others like us to keep fighting another day.
And that’s the only best way to turn your dark night of the soul into a miracle: transform all your thorns into beautiful roses so that others can enjoy their scent.
Hopefully, these words will encourage you to continue.
And your example (your thorns turned into roses) will inspire someone else to keep going.
A virtual hug
AG