For as long as I can remember, I felt different. On the outside, I looked okay—composed, capable, even happy at times. People saw me as smart, outgoing, and someone who could get along with almost anyone. I knew how to make conversations flow, how to make other people feel comfortable, how to appear grounded even when I wasn’t. But on the inside, there was a constant disconnect. While others could see the good in me, I couldn’t.
I always knew I had OCD, and I always felt like I was searching for myself but never finding anything solid to hold onto. I’d obsess over things intensely, while also clinging to different hobbies, interests, and versions of myself, trying to figure out who I really was. It felt like I was constantly trying on different versions of a person I could never fully become.
But there was another layer to it that I couldn’t explain at the time. Beyond the obsessions and compulsions was this overwhelming instability in how I saw myself. My identity never felt solid. I didn’t know who I was when I wasn’t attached to something—or someone—else.
I didn’t want to accept that I had BPD. A personality disorder? Was that what I was going to become known for? The girl with BPD. I kept asking myself if I was more than a label, or if I had lost my sense of self so completely that the diagnoses had become the only identity I knew how to hold onto. BPD, OCD, anxiety, depression—those words became the only things I felt certain describing myself as when people asked who I was, because everything else about me felt unstable, shifting, impossible to fully grasp.
When people asked me about my hobbies, I never really knew how to answer. There was no clear sense of identity to pull from. I knew I loved spending time with my friends and family, but even in those moments, I often felt alone.
Questions like that made me feel worse, not because I wasn’t interesting or lacked depth, but because I never knew which version of myself would stay. My obsessions would consume me completely, teaching me everything there was to know about a topic, only to disappear just as quickly as they arrived. I carried endless fragments of knowledge, stories, and interests, yet none of them ever felt rooted deeply enough to become part of me.
I was often told I spoke too much about my illnesses. But to me, they felt like the only things about myself I truly knew how to explain. Other people could talk about their hobbies, the things that made them feel alive—sports, music, passions, dreams. I envied how naturally identity seemed to come to them.
For me, it always felt like it was me and my illnesses against the world. The lines between where I ended and they began became so blurred that eventually, they felt inseparable from me. They were me, and I was them.
No one knew the extent of the silent battles I was facing. This is the first time most people are hearing it—my family, my friends, the people closest to me never truly knew how much I was struggling internally.
My mind never felt like a safe place to be. I was scared of the one person I couldn’t escape: myself. I felt like I couldn’t trust myself, and I held tightly to anything that made me feel even a little bit grounded. At the same time, my mind would turn against me—intrusive thoughts that didn’t feel like me, but felt impossible to escape.
I didn’t know how to love myself, but I knew how to hate myself. I was my biggest enemy, my biggest bully. I’d spend up to five hours a day writing down everything I hated about myself, obsessively picking apart every flaw until it felt like there was nothing left worth keeping. I believed I deserved to be punished, and at times, I acted on that belief—convincing myself it was what I deserved.
I poured all the love I had into everyone else, leaving none for me. Somewhere along the way, I lost who I was, making choices I wasn’t proud of.
There are choices I have made that I am not proud of, but I wouldn’t change them. They have molded me into who I am—a person I once struggled to like, who I am now learning to be kind to.
I turned 24 in December. I was celebrating it in Utah, surrounded by mountains and people I loved. It was supposed to be a moment I enjoyed, right? A moment that felt exciting. A fresh year of life.
But when the clock hit midnight, I felt sick.
I didn’t feel deserving of seeing 24 years.
I had never experienced a feeling like that before—complete emptiness, while somehow feeling overwhelmed at the exact same time. Even in the hours leading up to my birthday, I felt disconnected from myself, almost like I wasn’t fully there, and I couldn’t understand why. Looking back now, I realize it was my mind responding to the weeks that came before it.
The weeks leading up to that birthday held thoughts I had never spoken out loud. They existed only in writing. Only my therapists know the full extent of those words and the places my mind had gone. These are thoughts no one else in my life has ever known about.
I’m not sure I will ever share them with anyone else. They feel too heavy to carry out loud, too painful to revisit. Part of me would rather not even think about them at all.
No one knew the depth of the sadness I was carrying, or the amount of hatred I held toward myself. From the outside, I looked okay. Internally, I was collapsing.
Deep down, I knew something had to change.
But I wasn’t ready to accept that yet.
And somehow, despite all of it, I still made it to 24.
There were moments where the weight of everything felt unbearable. Staying felt harder than leaving. Thoughts I never said out loud became part of my everyday life.
For so long, I lived for everyone else—trying to be enough, trying to keep the peace, trying to be who I thought I needed to be.
Until I finally chose me.
I decided I needed help—and for once, I accepted it.
Right now, I am in my seventh week of treatment. I stepped away from everything I knew to focus on healing. I am facing things I spent years avoiding. I am learning how to sit with discomfort instead of running from it, and slowly rebuilding a relationship with myself.
And somewhere along the way, something shifted.
For the first time, I fear losing life.
That’s when I knew I was getting better. The fear came back—but differently. I am afraid of something happening to me, because for the first time, I don’t want to miss out on life. I am finally finding reasons to hold on.
OCD, BPD, anxiety, depression—they are part of my story, but I’ve learned they don’t define me the way I once believed they did. I am not them.
I am deeply grateful for the higher level of treatment I am receiving here at OCDI. For the first time in my life, I feel understood. It’s the feeling I’ve been searching for my whole life—and suddenly, it’s here.
When I say I finally feel understood, I don’t just mean clinically understood. I mean humanly understood.
I mean sitting across from people who have seen the ugliest corners of their own minds, and because of that, somehow knowing how to hold yours gently too.
Some of the people I’ve met here will remain part of my life forever. I have told them things I once believed would die with me. Secrets wrapped in shame, fear, grief, and silence. And somehow, people I have known for only weeks have understood parts of me more deeply than people I have loved for decades. Not because anyone failed me, but because there is a certain language pain creates that only those who have lived it can fully hear.
And then there are people here whose names may one day fade softly with time. People I may never see again once these walls are behind us. Yet they will still remain part of my story. Because even without realizing it, we carried one another through something sacred and impossibly difficult.
We witnessed each other stripped down to the most fragile versions of ourselves. No masks. No pretending. Just raw humanity.
We sat beside each other in moments where living felt heavy. We learned each other’s fears, rituals, wounds, and survival patterns. We watched people unravel, and we watched them slowly begin stitching themselves back together again. And through all of it, there was never judgment—only quiet understanding.
There is something almost indescribable about a room full of hurting people choosing softness anyway.
A group of strangers arriving with shattered pieces of themselves, only to unknowingly place those pieces down beside one another and realize none of us were ever as alone as we thought we were.
For so long, my mind felt like a place I was trapped inside of. Somewhere unsafe. Somewhere lonely.
But here, for the first time in my life, even in the middle of the pain, I have felt seen.
And sometimes, being seen is the beginning of healing.
For so long, I was scared to share my story. But silence keeps people stuck.
If this helps even one person feel less alone, I’ve done my job.
It’s okay to not be okay. Life can be cruel and unfair—but it is also beautiful, meaningful, and worth staying to see.
I’m excited to continue sharing my story, week by week—documenting everything.
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