sixteen-year-old me would love the inside of our fridge

and other pleasant thoughts I've had since treating my OCD

Abraham Brueghel, Allegory of Autumn, late 17th century

On Sundays, I clean out my fridge and restock it.

This is not revolutionary. It’s not even remotely interesting. And yet, it was during this mundane ritual on a random snowy Sunday that I realized I was getting better.

I was staring at the fully cleaned, fully stocked interior of my fridge, when I had an unfamiliar experience. It was the following pleasant thought:

sixteen-year-old me would fucking love the inside of our fridge.

On the top shelf, a bottle of fancy champagne chilling for no particular occasion. Around it was a variety of condiments ranging from North America’s most guilty pleasures to specialty sauces and jams I’ve collected along the way. Castelvetrano olives, grapes, burrata, arugula, ginger, greek yogurt. A dozen eggs from the St-Lawrence Market. Fresh herbs in little jars of water. A lot of Diet Pepsi.

That thought pleasantly led to more pleasant thoughts. All of them answering the questions I used to ask myself when I watched rom-coms growing up:

Will I have a cool apartment in the city? An interesting job? What will my boyfriend be like? What kind of friends will I meet for after-work cocktails and Sunday morning coffee runs? What will my style be like? What would I keep stocked in my fridge?

This was about eight weeks after my diagnosis. A full two weeks after the medication was due to take its full effect. I had been waiting for a big moment, one of those light-switch ones, but instead, it was a gradual return of all the things I couldn’t see or feel before.

I used to watch how others moved through the world with what looked like ease, trying to reverse-engineer how they did it. My conclusion was always the same: I think I’m a shitty human being.

Passionless, high-strung, self-absorbed, and hypersensitive.

I framed my physical compulsions as quirks and assumed everyone lived with a running list of worst-case scenarios playing on a perpetual loop in their head. I thought I just wasn’t resilient enough to manage mine.

So, to feel better, I checked. And rechecked.

I opened my banking app more than 20 to 30 times a day convinced that if I didn’t, all of my money would be gone. I touched faucets, stovetops, outlets and dryers to prevent whatever fire, flood, or disaster felt inevitable if I didn’t. I locked my door three times and touched the numbers on the sign beside my unit. If it didn’t feel right, I did it again.

When driving, I would watch someone cross the street and, minutes later, convince myself that I had run them over and was now fleeing the scene. In a state of panic, I’d turn the car around to check. Sometimes more than once.

I’ve lost hours of my life googling the symptoms of AIDS, stomach cancer, parasites, Ebola, multiple sclerosis, and Naegleria fowleri, which is a brain-eating infection you can get from jumping into still water. Sometimes I would throw out everything I had just cooked because I was convinced I accidentally poisoned it without realizing. Once, after three days of insufferable rumination, I paid to have my university transcript mailed to me just to prove I had graduated.

One of my favourite authors has OCD and he describes it as a snowstorm — absolutely blinding, making it impossible to see anything other than fear.

There has always been so much good around me, but it never stood a chance against that kind of noise. And eventually, the systems I kept building to deal with the snowstorms started to take everything else with them. I became numb. My life became flat.

The first diagnosis was acute stress disorder and a major depressive episode. It took a psychiatrist to see what was actually happening underneath. I started medication with ERP therapy, and waited to see what would happen.

It’s funny, nobody tells you how strange the quiet is. The noise had been so constant for so long that its absence felt almost suspicious. I kept waiting for it to jump out from a shadowy corner or to fall back into it through a trap door.

It never did. And while I waited, the small things that make life so wonderful started to become noticeable.

A night surrounded by friends that I love. The warmth of my partner’s hand when he reaches over to grab mine. Fresh flowers. Laughing until I cry with my mom. Finishing a puzzle or a really good book. The delightful surprise of having an empty fridge but enough ingredients to make Pasta Al Limone. The first sip of a very cold, very dirty Belvedere martini at 5:30pm on a Wednesday.

All of it was there this whole time. It was just too loud for any of it to get in.

There is a particular kind of mourning that comes from learning your suffering had a name, a treatment, a path through. It also borders on torture when you understand, with perfect clarity, how much earlier you could have found it. I spent a few months grieving the years I couldn’t access what was rightfully mine.

But there is a silver lining. I can’t get back the time I’ve lost but I now get to experience a life the way I had always intended it to be.

One that sixteen-year-old me would recognize immediately.

One that’s worth popping the fancy champagne for.