ERP

I’ve been anxious since before I can remember, but I vividly remember my first obsession.  I was 8 or 9, and on the first day of school, our teacher excitedly told us we would be taking a class trip to an amusement park in May that year for some sort of science day.

Almost immediately, all I could think about was dreading and avoiding the trip.  My thoughts started to fall into an obsessive pattern that’s now so familiar to me:  What if I fall off a roller coaster and die?  What if I don’t go on any roller coasters, and I become some sort of social pariah?  What if I vomit on myself or someone else?  What if someone else vomits in me?  What if I pee my pants?

I became obsessed with roller coasters and roller coaster accidents.  There was no internet back then, but I remember checking out books from my school library about roller coasters to research the probability of their failure even though I’d never been on one.  I asked my science teacher all sorts of crazy physics questions.  It’s funny to me now, but at the time, I was terrified.

My obsessions continued through middle and high school.  I was mostly Pure O at that time, but I was on the debate team and knew how to research, so I used my skills to feed my worst fears.  One year, our debate topic was Russian foreign policy—I became obsessed with the kind of treatment resistant tuberculosis that was prevalent in Russian prisons at the time.  I live in Texas.

If I got a sore throat, I was suddenly dying of TB—I vividly remember asking my family doctor for a TB test.  She looked at me like I was insane, but she never said the word “anxiety.”

Simultaneously, my debate partner and I started dating, and my STD and pregnancy fears began there.  We never had sex, but making out was enough for me to feel like I had been infected.  A girl in our class was diagnosed with herpes around this time, and I couldn’t shake the idea that I was going to get it.  I still struggle with these fears despite over a decade of marriage.

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