when The past meets the present

Something I’ve noticed about my OCD is how many different ways it shows up in my life. It isn’t just about everyday stress, like school or small worries; Although for some it can be. But for me, it feels deeper than that. It usually appears when I’m triggered, or when a sudden wave of anxiety hits me out of nowhere. That’s when I really start to see my OCD come to the surface.

What I’ve realized, though, is that it shows up more when I’m feeling depressed or emotionally low. During those times, my mind feels heavier, more vulnerable, and more likely to spiral. My brain can travel in so many different directions when I’m in that state, and I often feel stuck inside my own thoughts.

I often fear that I will fall back into old thinking habits, a period in my life when I was really struggling, when my brain was chemically wired in a way that wasn’t healthy or safe. Back then, I was deeply sad, and my OCD didn’t just appear; it took over. It created fears and doubts that felt overwhelming and impossible to escape.

I often feel that when I get anxious, I slip into my own head, and once I’m there, the thoughts start to form. Then it becomes a cycle: anxiety, depression, OCD, and the exhausting work of trying to convince myself that those thoughts aren’t real, no matter how real they feel. OCD is tricky. It’s complex. And it shows up in so many different ways, intrusive thoughts, rumination, checking, reassurance-seeking, avoidance, and fear disguised as logic.

My mind is linking my present emotions to my past pain. My brain remembers how it felt to be afraid and overwhelmed, and it tries to replay those patterns. With OCD, that connection is especially hard to untangle, because it feeds on triggers, and sometimes those triggers aren’t things happening around me, but emotions I’ve felt before.

I get lost in my head, drifting back to past versions of myself, versions I didn’t love, versions I tried to love but couldn’t. And sometimes the only thing left to do is to reinvent myself: to take my fears, thoughts, and doubts and turn them into their opposites, to take my mistakes and grow from them. Even though I work through this with my own kind of exposure therapy and by learning more about myself and my triggers, I’ve learned something important: healing isn’t linear. Living with a mental illness is a process. It’s something we carry with us and continue to navigate, but it does not define who we are.

We are not our thoughts.
We are not our past.
We are not our diagnosis.

We are people who are learning, growing, and finding our way forward, one moment at a time.

And to anyone who feels the same or struggles with OCD, try to anchor yourself in the facts of the present moment through mindfulness, or by letting your thoughts spill freely onto the page in a journal. Sometimes writing it all or talking out loud is the first step to quieting the noise.