Coming Clean

I am Ashley Renee Titus. I am a daughter of God, fully redeemed by the blood of Jesus from my sins past, present and future and all the sin that has been done against me. 

This alone is what defines me. 

I am also the wife of Andrew and the Mama of Owen. I have blue eyes, am 5’9” and have Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.

There, I said it. No more hiding. No more covering up. 

Research says that people with OCD generally take between 6-9 years to seek help for their disorder due to a variety of reasons including fear, shame, and not knowing that there is help for the way they think and live. 

It took me over 20 years.

Growing up, I can remember fear. Terrible, horrible fear. All consuming fear. 

Fear of death. Fear of earthquakes. Fear of volcanic eruptions. Fear of sickness. Fear of someone breaking into our house. Fear of someone or something looking into my bedroom window. Fear of being awake when my parents were asleep.

I remember specifically in the first part of elementary school sobbing on the playground even before school started because I was thinking about that night and feared being awake when my parents shut off SportsCenter and went to bed. 

The panic gripped me and I tried to stop the anxiety by pleading for reassurance. From my parents, from teachers, from other kids, from myself. “Are you sure Mt. Rainier won’t blow up and kill us today?” “Are you sure there are no such things as UFO’s?” “Are you sure no one is going to break in and you not hear and kill me as I run into your room to tell you?” “Are you sure North Korea won’t kill everyone in Seattle with a bomb today?” “Are you sure the world won’t end and we won’t all die when the clock strikes midnight on January 1st, 2000?”

The fears were terrible. I never knew that they weren’t how my brain should have been processing things. I assumed I was a freak, and that this was just how it was for me. My lot in life. It sucked, but oh well. 

Then there was the organization. I was known for the immaculate desk and pencil box in school. I would beg to clean the kids’ desks around mine, and not stop hounding them until I was allowed to. I didn’t know why, but it felt like my mind was going to spin out of control if those desks weren’t clean and organized. So I just cleaned. The shouting and spinning of my head would stop, for a while, and I could calm down, so I just kept doing it.

Through the years, times were better and times were worse. Small things would bug me like the chairs in rooms not being aligned, or posters being hung crooked. As I got older I realized how I thought was odd and tried to keep things to myself. I would stare at things that were ‘off’ instead of listening to teachers or paying attention to friends and plan ways to find time to fix them when no one else was around. Always constant was the anxiety, the not being able to get the ‘off’ things out of my train of thought. The feeling like my mind was on broken record, one thought being replayed over and over again.

My parents always said that I would never let anyone else make my bed. It would have to be a certain way or I would start over and fix it until it ‘felt right’. This moved into my nannying and babysitting as I got older. I would play a game with the kids I babysat to see who could make their rooms cleaner and they would frolic off to cleaning while I cleaned alongside them, staying the course as they, at some point, would get distracted and start playing with toys they forgot about but found during the cleaning. Time and time again, parents would come home shocked that their kids cleaned their rooms, all the while my mind obsessed over the corner of the closet I couldn’t get to, or the pile under the bed we ran out of time for. It was long and terrible. But hey, the kids had a great time and the parents seemed thrilled. Too bad for me. 

All this being said, I never sought help. Actually, I never knew that I had OCD. Sure people would tell me “oh Ashley, that’s just you being OCD” or “you’re so OCD” but I never thought they were serious. OCD is for crazy people, right? I don’t wash my hands 100 times a day and horde things, so clearly I am an oddball freak and this is a personality quirk. Right? I mean, sure I cleaned every day and my husband noticed but thought it was a personality quirk but nothing more. True, I checked and rechecked and triple (or more in all honesty) websites through my pregnancy to ensure I wasn’t having a miscarriage, or wasn’t going to die. Doesn’t everybody?

After Owen was born, the chronic depression that I had dealt with throughout my life came back deeper and darker than ever before. I was diagnosed with Post-Partum Depression and began to seek help through a psychiatrist, psychologist and anti-depressants (after spending 4 months refusing help until it got so bad that I finally consented to those around me pleading for my safety and health and admitted I needed serious help). I expected help for the depression, I never expected it for OCD. 

When I had my first psychiatric evaluation, I brought up my fears, my cleaning, my organizing and my broken record thoughts. After a few more questions, my psychiatrist said: “sounds like you have OCD”. What? No. Really? No one in my life seemed surprised when I told them though. The more I started opening up about what was going through my head, the more I seemed to check of boxes of OCD right and left.  The need for a clean and organized house went from a difficult personality quirk to what it truly was: intense anxiety mitigated the only way I knew how - through cleaning. No matter the time, no matter the level of exhaustion, no matter if it was supposed to be Date Night or family time. I cleaned. It had to be “just right”.

So now what? I don’t know. As the depression starts to lift (oh, praise you Jesus), it feels as though the OCD has once again become more oppressive. Or maybe I’m just starting to realize what feels horrific but normal to me isn’t how I have to live. Isn’t how others live. Things are on the road to me being able to manage this disorder, but nowhere near finished yet. In all honesty, I’ve taken nearly a dozen online surveys as to whether or not I have OCD in the past few days alone. All of which said I most likely do. All of which have been confirmed by both my doctors weeks ago. All of which I’ve taken before with the same answers. Several times each. 

I write and share this for three reasons. The first of which is I just feel strongly compelled to write it, and I enjoy writing so why not. The second is that I desperately want people to know what OCD is and what it is not. I want them to realize that you can’t just say “get over it” or “where’s your sin in this?” and someone with OCD will stop. If we could stop that easily, we would. Oh my, we would. 

The last of my reasons, and not in the order of importance, is that if me sharing can encourage even one person to seek help and treatment for their OCD, it would be awesome. I’ve struggled with this for nearly all of my life, as have other people close to me, and waiting 20+ years for help is far too long. My psychologist put it this way: you wouldn’t feel ashamed or stupid if you had asthma, but would want treatment and help to manage it. Having Obsessive Compulsive Disorder is the same. You don’t ask for it, you didn’t do something to get it, and you’ll have it your entire life (aside from God’s hand moving in a miraculous way), why shy away from treatment and help to get better?  

Please don’t let your feelings of shame or fear or playing down of what you go through stop you from getting help. I don’t say this from someone who is perfect now, but from someone who could barely drive home tonight because the thoughts of all that “needed” to be cleaned caused such anxiety that counting “1,2,3,1,2,3,4” and tapping it on my steering wheel was the most logical way my OCD mind found to manage the screaming in my brain. 

Please dear one. God has so much more for you, for us. This isn’t how he intended our brains to work, and although it feels hopeless now (for you and for me), I trust that the God who spoke the world into being can help us manage OCD. Maybe not tomorrow, maybe not for years, but he can and I do believe he will. You are so, so not alone.