I used to go up to my room so that I could stand in front of my big bay windows with the pink mini-blinds, stare at the street below me, and lift my window seat lid up and down, up and down, up and down, up and down. I think I did this in order to alleviate some sort of pressure that had built up in my 10-year old mind, pressure that just wasn't being released anywhere else.
I remember one time specifically in front of my windows. My parents had gone to a holiday party, leaving us with a babysitter, and thereby leaving me in a state of subdued panic. I always wondered if they would make it back alive, picturing the streets they were driving on as some kind of war zone, with drunks pulling out from the side streets crazily, and criminals waving guns on every corner. In my mind, it was a complete miracle that my parents car EVER made it back to the turnoff to our street, and when I would see the suburban's headlights, I would let the window seat lid slam shut as I jumped into bed, my heart racing, my eyes squinched closed, attempting to appear "naturally" asleep.
On this particular evening, the holiday party was keeping my parents out exceptionally late (by my timetables, anyway) and I was in distress. The window seat had been opened and shut so many times that the hinges were starting to creak, and I was sweating so profusely in all my imagined scenarios of parental death that I was actually starting to feel weak. About 10pm I started to cry, and could not stop the violent, silent shaking of my sobs until, after an ETERNITY, I saw those yellow-tinted headlights cast their familiar glint onto our mailbox. As usual, I let the window seat lid drop as I hurriedly clambered into bed, but all my attempts to look asleep and angelic were severely challenged by the aftershock sobs and shudders of my cry-fest. I knew my parents were home, I knew that somehow they had survived the odds and made it back alive, but nothing could console me enough to appear peaceful.
This situation was NOT acceptable to me, as I had always taken great pains to make sure that neither my parents, nor my brothers, nor any of my babysitters ever knew of my window seat vigils. If my parents came upstairs to check on me, as they always did, and saw that I had been CRYING, of all things, then they would know! What they would know, whatever intrinsic thing they would immediately surmise after seeing my tear-stained face I have no idea of, but what I did know at the time, and what I still know today is that it was VERY IMPORTANT to keep it all hidden. Because if they knew, if anyone really knew, then they would Not Understand, and what is worse than that?
Luckily enough, I had legitimately made myself sick with all my window seat opening and closing and made-up death traps and ceaseless panicked sobbing, so my parents just took my temperature and determined that I was upset because I had a fever. And that was that.
Of course now I know that situations like those are caused by OCD, and I can therefore handle them a little better, or at least FEEL better because I know what is happening. But the thing that never goes away is that feeling that No One Will Understand, and that is largely because no one ever does. I am, for the first time, allowing someone else to see it all, or at least most of it, and so far he has done the most amazing job of trying to Understand. Sometimes I drive him completely crazy and then push him even further away out of fear that I might be driving him crazy, what if he thinks I'm crazy, what if he knows? But he's really patient with me, and I could never explain what it means to be totally HONEST with someone like that, to be completely REAL, and to know that they will never love you any less, no matter how many sheets you tear off the bed, no matter how many times you check to MAKE SURE the alarm clock is really on, no matter how many chicken breasts you pull apart and then discard because "I think it's kinda pink- right there, see?".
Thank you, O Patient One. You are helping me more than you will ever know.
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