Does Everyone on Reddit Have OCD?

The worst thing for people with OCD is other people who don’t know they have OCD

Before I begin, my book, WILL THERE BE FREE FOOD?, a collection of comedic true stories about being a young, married (and socially inept, OCD-afflicted) woman in the San Francisco tech scene, is launching as a paid Substack series with one chapter every Tuesday. Tomorrow’s chapter will be about the worst therapist I’ve ever seen for my OCD, so I thought today I’d stay on topic with this article! If you’re curious about this book but don’t feel totally comfortable paying for a subscription yet, check out Chapter 1, which is free!

I wrote about my earlier OCD journey and diagnosis with OCD here, but you don’t need to read that article to understand this one. However, it could provide good context. Anyway…

Let’s talk about an absolutely batshit obsession/fear that I had last year, courtesy of my OCD. I gave birth to my second child, and because both of my kids were from IVF, I developed a horrendous fear that she was not biologically related to me, because I was given the wrong embryo by our clinic.

I would have loved her anyway, but my concern was that somehow her “real family” would materialize and want her back, or that our clinic would discover their mistake and try to remedy it by taking her away. No amount of lawsuit money in the world would have been worth losing her, and I couldn’t sleep my first night in the hospital because of this fear. I might have had the same concern about my first child, except he looked exactly like my husband immediately. Our second child looked like her own person—not like either one of us, and not at all like her brother. It was one of the first things I noticed when she was born and the nurses raved about how light her hair was. We did not have light hair in our family!

I spent days—weeks, even—scrolling through old baby photos of my first child and checking to see if there was any resemblance. I started examining her hair under different types of light to see if it was actually blonde, or really just brown with golden highlights. I found our old transfer consent documentation and checked to see if anything was out of place. I could have asked for a DNA test, but that wasn’t what I wanted—I wanted assurance that she was ours, not the truth, which might have been that she wasn’t ours. I did not want to send her back! My anxiety only heightened when the clinic texted me and asked how the birth went, including a request for baby photos. I panicked and considered blocking them. Stay away from my baby!! I don’t care who her real parents are!!

Of course, this was crazy, and even though I had OCD, there was probably some element of postpartum hormones at play. She was ours. She just needed to grow into her tiny little face and body, and by the time she was a few months old she looked nearly identical to me as a baby. Somehow, in my OCD spiral, I forgot that I had been strawberry blonde as a child:

Omg, CHH face reveal!

You might be saying this doesn’t really sound like OCD, because there was no compulsion. But there was. Even in cases of what folks call “pure O,” where sufferers don’t believe that they have a compulsion, they usually still do. The difference is that instead of hand washing or some obvious physical manifestation of a compulsion, their compulsion tends to be a mix of the Three Rs: rumination, research and reassurance-seeking, all of which feel good in the short-term but ultimately “feed” the OCD and make it much worse. The main strategy for “recovering” from OCD involves quitting these rituals, even if they seem like normal parts of life (who doesn’t ruminate from time to time?) But some people find it incredibly difficult to stop, especially when reassurance is so easy to find.

My fear of being Maury’s first “You are NOT the mother,” wasn’t my first foray into the Three Rs. In fact, with the exception of a brief spell of germaphobia most of my OCD had always been about the Three Rs. I’ve asked my parents, brother, friends and husband for reassurance far more times than I’d be able to count. I’ve probably lost friends because I shoehorned reassurance-seeking into all our conversations (When I lived in San Francisco, my biggest fear was my husband dying in an earthquake. It probably wasn’t “socially appropriate” for me to go to house parties and start chatting up the host about the retrofit status of their apartment.)

Over time, I realized that the Internet was a much better place for reassurance-seeking. I could ask more people, I could be anonymous, and I could maybe even reach real doctors with my hypochondria for free (or at least people on Reddit who said they were doctors.)

Sometimes this went wrong in horribly embarrassing ways. At one point, I posted a photo of my nipple anonymously on Reddit when I was breastfeeding, convinced I had some kind of breast cancer that was manifesting as a nipple rash. I posted the same question (without the photo) on my Facebook mom group, non-anonymously. The first comment on my mom group post was another mom saying, “Wow, someone JUST posted almost this exact question on Reddit!” complete with a link to my post, nipple and all.

Sometimes asking for reassurance online helped me, at least for a while. I would ask about a disease I was worried about, and either the overwhelming majority of responses would be to tell me that I’m crazy (this is good) or someone who sounded legit would have some explanation for why my fear wasn’t warranted. Sometimes the question would be something casual: has this happened to anyone else? I’m not asking for medical advice, I don’t “need help,” just tell me if this also happened to you and how it turned out. As Tucker Carlson would say, I’m just asking questions!

When I started seeing my current therapist (one of the only therapists I’ve had who actually specializes in OCD) she told me that a particular obesssion I had—that I was a bad mother if I “allowed” my children to get sick by taking them to the children’s museum—was an OCD thing. I told her she was wrong. My reasoning was that I had seen a Reddit post about this (granted, I was banned from posting at this point, but I could still read posts) and all the moms had concurred that it was irresponsible to take your children to places where they might catch a virus. Many of them also said that they would never take a baby under 6 months old to a family Thanksgiving, which helped to solidify that rule in my mind as well. My therapist shook her head and said, “I would bet money that most of these women also have OCD.”

It’s kind of like being on the comments section in PornHub—not that I’ve ever seen that or anything. If you’re there and posting comments on “Big Boobs Teacher Hot Sexy Vid” it’s safe to say you’re horny. So why would you not assume that everyone else posting there is just as horny as you are?