Episode 2: What’s Your Black Dot?
Listen to this episode on spotify: https://creators.spotify.com/pod/show/simone-aliya/episodes/2--Whats-Your-Black-Dot-e305p33
“What’s Your Story?'“ It’s a question Bumble dates used to ask me, long ago. “You seem like an interesting girl,” they’d say. “Interesting” is how dates often described me. Once, somebody called me “well-adjusted,” which made me laugh. With OCD, I’d certainly spent plenty of time adjusting things, but was I myself well-adjusted? No, I didn’t really think so. Well today’s episode has nothing to do with my online dates of the past, but maybe someday I’ll do a separate one on Bumble, OCD, and anxiety, because I have no shortage of material in that department. For example, it would be totally worth sharing about my preoccupation with the blind, “depth psychologist” who didn’t actually have a degree and said that driving was more about sensing than seeing things. We’d agreed to meet in a Whole Foods parking lot, and I remember him being very nervous about the parking ahead of time. I’d wondered why, not yet knowing he could only see vibrations. Believe it or not, this was not the guy who told me I seemed well-adjusted. Okay, yes, more on my dates another time.
For me, other people’s OCD stories have really helped transform painful emotions associated with the disorder, like guilt and shame. Stories can soften, open and connect us—to our true natures and to the world around us. In that spirit, I’ll offer a little bit more of my personal OCD story, which I never shared with those Bumble dates or almost anybody else. When people have asked what my story is, I’ve usually just said something like, “Hey look, I can make my collarbones hollow enough to eat cheerios out of them,” and then that totally derails the conversation. Because what’s more interesting than that, right? Well, I can think of many things, actually . . .
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