Oh Chaotic Dust,
Remember before; before your mind was a menagerie and your impulses erratic? Summer 2015 and you didn’t know what it was; wouldn’t know until 2018. Three years is a long time, and now it’s been four since you’ve known.
In childhood, you now realise, it lurked in corners and crevices. A thought here or a reaction there: a feeling that you just have to do x or y or z, or any of the other illogical actions you felt so inexplicably compelled to do. But happiness reigned in your childhood nonetheless. In adolescence, more sporadic, though those stories are for other times. And so, when it hit – like a truck screeching into your mind, tires tearing smoke into your eyes; a deafening, suffocating isolation – it hit as though from nowhere.
That’s when this chapter of your life began: at 20. In time you’ll see that the years before and after can only be understood by the key you were given through those three years: a cipher to help you untangle the webs and the lies, the past and the future. You’ll learn that others are like you too, though their particulars may differ. And that’s okay, for while in some twisted way the mental hell made you feel special, you’ll learn that you don’t need to be unique like that to have worth.
Oh Chaotic Dust, it gets better, I promise you – and I know how painful it got. The deterioration of mental health is a horrible, horrible thing. The OCD monster is a cunning, clever creature. The stigma, the shame, the self-imposed silence. Its defeat is not inevitable, as many sadly attest, and even after the endless therapists and therapy sessions, you’ll still find yourself alone, a nagging compulsion in your mind, and you’ll wonder, now you’ve gone through all the healing motions: what happens next?
That’s when you’ll discover your voice.