Being Mentally Ill in a Pandemic

I have been officially diagnosed with both Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and Agoraphobia. These are two diseases that are pretty commonly misunderstood by the general public, but they’re also two diseases that make my relationship with this pandemic unique.

When I heard about the Coronavirus my OCD kicked into overdrive. The stereotypes of people with OCD being terrified of germs- while not always true- happened to be very real for me. It wasn’t just that I was washing my hands or hyper fixating on wiggling my nose (compulsions don’t make sense, I don’t know)… no, it was the obsessions that were uncontrollable. In my mind, I wasn’t just at risk for contracting COVID-19, I already had it. And I was spreading it to everyone I knew and loved. Hell, I was pretty sure that my dog was going to be the first dog to catch the Coronavirus from a human. Because when you have OCD, your brain isn’t rational, and you’re consumed by fear.

The fear progressed until I had convinced myself that if I didn’t die, I would be one of the few survivors of this pandemic and be forced to live in a Walking Dead world. I played it all out. My only real skills are writing (albeit questionably) and painting (albeit very questionably), therefore I would have little value to a post-apocalyptic society. I would probably have to have children I never wanted to have to repopulate the earth and end up teaching humanities to a bunch of kindergarteners… or something.

This was where my OCD brain went.

When you have OCD, you have zero chill. And those no-chill thoughts replay themselves in your head over and over again until the only way you can get them to go away is by perfectly wiggling your nose twenty times, or washing your hands twice while you sing Welcome to the Black Parade.

There was a solution, though. A very easy, very natural solution. If I didn’t want to catch the virus, I just wouldn’t go outside. Thankfully, this was something I had a great deal of practice with, and society was adopting as well.

Agoraphobia is typically known as the “fear of open spaces,” but really it’s more like the fear of…

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