Revolution

Two years now without medication and so far so good.  Without the crutch of medication to lean on I've undergone a revolution in privacy in the sense that I took a torch to a lot of my fears about interacting with people.

I spent a good thirty years learning to hide every aspect of OCD, often with good reason.  Particularly as a child it was hard to find peers with the social sophistication to accept aberrant behavior.  Harder still being that not much was commonly known about OCD in the early 1980's.  Maybe it's easier for kids today, I'm not sure.

My phobia about revealing my OCD wasn't all that bad, though, even it felt so at the time.  While the bullying was unpleasant there was also a positive peer pressure to keep me from (usually) coming completely off of the rails and giving free reign to my obsessions.  Societal norms may not always be fair but they are usually the best a society can do at the time and an absolute necessity for us to function together.  There's a reason society rejects, fair or not, certain types of behavior and that keeps a balance.  Sure it isn't fair to ostracize a kid for a genetic abnormality, but on the other hand it helped me to eventually realize that the problem did lie within myself and not in everyone else.

The problem that developed was that in response to this social pressure I maladapted and created my own superstitions about what people could know about me and what they couldn't.  I remembered a psychologist telling me once that I shouldn't take my emotional walls down (as I had developed them for very good reasons) but learn to make them a little more porous, a little more discretionary.  I'm still learning to do this.

My sense of privacy had organically grown around a false perception of reality and I found myself unsure of what was genuine privacy and what was my own irrational fears.  The only way for me to cure myself of this was to set fire to my own rules and rediscover the world as an adult.  I am happy to say that, while encountering some rejection, as a whole I was able to discard 90% of my own inhibitions armed only with a self-deprecating sense of humor.  What a relief to learn that most of what was causing me anxiety was a complete non-issue to most everyone I knew.  That was quite a weight to cast off.

Even when facing rejection I found myself stronger.  We always want understanding, even when others disagree with us, but do we likewise give it to those who disagree with us?  And if we do give that understanding and at least a respect that we can disagree, how painful can that rejection really be?  Therefore, is it not beneficial that we have our detractors, our challengers, and are we not made stronger when we burn in the fire of their criticism?  Only the strongest of elements within us will endure, the weaker burned away, and we have grown, our false assumptions and conclusions now cindered we can move on in life more sure of what remains of us.

My personal revolution was this.  I have learned to confront the dark within myself and confront my fears and accept them.  Now I have learned to face the fire from from without.