“I have come to believe that by and large the human family all has the same secrets, which are both very telling and very important to tell. They are telling in the sense that they tell what is perhaps the central paradox of our condition—that what we hunger for perhaps more than anything else is to be known in our full humanness, and yet that is often just what we also fear more than anything else.” Frederick Buechner
While I think this quote is universally true, right now I’m thinking specifically in the context of obsessive-compulsives.
Alone, we imagine that no one else could think the horrible things we do.
But when we are in community, we realize that our secrets are pretty much all the same. I know that’s it’s not necessarily an abracadabra moment, but when you start realizing that other people share your secrets, you feel less like a monster and more like the victim of an ugly disorder. In other words, you start seeing the TRUTH.
The TRUTH is…
You are not the only one who imagines harming a child.
You are not the only one with excessive concerns about contamination.
You are not the only one who fears you’ve done or thought something blasphemous.
You are not the only one who fears you might be homosexual.
You are not the only one who needs symmetry.
You are not the only one with counting compulsions, who makes lists excessively, who feels a NEED to confess, who is driven to accumulate useless things, who counts, who has unwanted sexual thoughts, who needs to check “one last time” a hundred times.
You’re not a freak– you’re just a textbook case of OCD. One amongst an entire community of people whose lives have been affected by this thief. I love the online OCD blogging community– I love that people are sharing their secrets and learning that all our secrets are pretty much the same.