My name is Jackie and I am here to tell you that you are not alone. Today I was moved powerfully and urgently to start this blog. There is someone out there who is meant to read this now. I don’t know who you are or anything about you. The only thing I do know is that God is looking out for you and wants you to be healed and comforted. I am honored and grateful to be able to speak to you today. I know you are feeling lost and need help now, so I will not delay getting right into what is on my heart to say to you.
In my life, I have had and continue to have struggles with my mental health. More specifically, I am a sufferer with OCD. In 2013, I experienced the toughest, most grueling and sickening time of my life. I felt unsafe in my own skin and my brain felt like it was infected. My brain was on hyper drive, attacking me with despicable thoughts that debilitated me. How could I possibly be thinking the things I was thinking and not actually be what those thoughts were? The confusion, the circular thinking, the back-and-forth drove me nearly to suicide. I felt like a monster who had no reason to continue to live for fear of being like those thoughts. I had to go. But thank God I stayed.
With the help and wisdom of the Lord, I was able to find the right help. Surrounded by my family and dear friends, I gained enough courage to start accepting the fact that something was wrong with my brain, and that it was OK to start looking to take care of this major, major issue. Maybe you don’t have the support around you that you think you need, but know that I am here, thinking of you, encouraging you, wanting you to read this blog to know without a single doubt that you are not alone. What is happening to you, you could not have helped or stopped. You are not your thoughts. They will trick you into thinking that you are, but you are not. They will feel like they are you, but they are not. This is the fight of your life, and God has inspired me to share all that I know with you on how to tame that OCD beast in your brain. I will be honest and as a frank as possible on this journey. But I will not take any credit for the victory in my story or yours. That belongs solely to God. I won’t shove the Bible down your throat, but I will talk to you about Jesus Christ because He is my Savior and He is the one who brought me to and through the greatest challenge of my life: the challenge of physical survival when every ounce of me was exploding with anxiety and inner chaos.
I will not tell you that my life is totally free from my OCD struggle. It is not. But it has gotten better, much better. Somedays I can’t function well enough to live a normal life (i.e. go to work, wake up and get stuff done), but more often, I can and I do. To the reader without a mental health issue like OCD, that may not seem like such a big deal, but for the person in the midst of this heinous suffering, all you want is to be normal. I understand.
A final note: This blog will not heal you; it does not have that power. But God does, and I believe that if you are here reading this, you were led here for a reason. Know that you are welcome here, and you are not judged by your thoughts. You were fearfully and wonderfully made by the LORD. He knows your struggle and every thought. So, if you are up for it, I’ll tell you about my story with OCD and God’s hand in and through it all. Check back at least weekly for new entries. Though you are a stranger, I am praying for you. Keep fighting.