This OCD Relapse Brought to You by Hantavirus

Not me falling face first into another OCD rabbit hole--I mean, rat hole

Sometimes, I write about my OCD—all the early signs of it, how I suspect everyone on Reddit has it, how it manifests as health anxiety, and most of all, how nobody around me can stand it. And today—how it was doing really well until, thanks to the notorious hantavirus cruise, my Twitter algorithm turned into what I am calling the HantaZone Situation Room.

Generally, if I’m not writing about my OCD at any given point, things are going pretty well for me. For the past couple months, this has been the case. I have a good therapist who specializes in the most proven technique for OCD—ERP, otherwise known as exposure-response prevention, where you deliberately expose yourself to things that make you anxious and then avoid doing maladaptive things to reduce the anxiety.

But the biggest challenge of ERP is actually doing the exposures—including when things are going well for you. This is doubly true if your OCD subtype is something unrelated to a tangible phobia, where you could theoretically go months or longer without actually encountering a trigger, and when your trigger cannot be self-imposed. (Since my OCD revolves around rare fatal diseases, I have a hard time triggering myself on purpose by thinking about diseases—it has the same effect as trying to tickle myself.)

Therefore, after a period of peace with my OCD, I usually become complacent. I no longer worry as much about whether or not I’m engaging in reassurance-seeking or other maladaptive behaviors, because on some level, I believe I don’t have OCD anymore. But of course, at some point, a trigger will show up and pull me back into the insidiously sticky vat of molasses that is my OCD, and having forgotten the importance of the whole “response prevention” part of ERP, the obsession will consume me effortlessly.

That’s what happened this past week, courtesy of hantavirus and (of course) Twitter.