If you ask me how I’m doing recently, I’d say I was hanging in there.

This is different from my usual state of contentment and mild discomfort. (False equilibrium.) I’ve somewhat successfully spent nearly 13 years of my life avoiding effective treatment for OCD, known as Exposure Response Prevention (ERP). Here are some key things about OCD: For people who have it, talk therapy can quickly become harmful. What that means is that, given the mechanism of OCD, it’s easy to fall into a mental trap in treatment where you seek reassurance, get that coveted reassurance, feel relief for a short time, and then feel infinitely worse in turn.

And if you’re not ready to face difficult and scary things in your life head-on, it’s unlikely that you’ll be eager to tackle your biggest fears. I have become a master of avoidance, something done in the hopes of avoiding my triggers. It’s easy for me to get stuck in what I’m doing, almost like I’m in a “reverse”, trance-like state of being. It’s a terrible and isolating feeling to remain in that place and only serves to positively reinforce that toxic avoidance in the first place.

So that was essentially the point I realized a few months back. I was struggling this year after moving back from France: The job hunt was laborious and unrelenting, I was stuck in my parent’s house, I wasn’t dating as much as I wanted to, and I was allowing my compulsions to carry on unfettered. Then I got in a bad car accident at the end of May. It scared the life out of me, and I walked away with a bad injury. Suddenly, my car was gone, my dominant arm was in severe pain, and I fell into a depression.

I was devastated. I walked away relatively unharmed in the grand scheme of car accidents, but I also understood how much worse that event could have been. It is a rattling experience to be reminded of how small and human you are, and how you can do everything right and bad things can still happen.

Though not my fault, the accident was a wake-up call for me. Whatever I was doing before the accident was not enough. I wasn’t demanding enough from myself and my life. I wasn’t conquering and overcoming my symptoms in the ways that I wanted to. I had grown comfortable in my plateau and made my life fit around my anxiety.

I needed more; I knew that I had been putting off addressing my OCD. I knew that it was going to suck and be uncomfortable to face my demons. But I had no idea what else to do, so I started to get scared. The option of staying in that same place had become much scarier than any new venture.

I began seeing an OCD specialist to address my symptoms and create a treatment plan. For the first time in my life, I learned about my condition. I learned about its structure, symptoms, and specific impacts on my life. We eased into doing exposures. In the context of ERP, you make a list of your biggest fears and anxieties to start and work from there. You create some exercise from there that allows you to hear your most anxious and uneasy thoughts, and to become desensitized to them.

ERP is not for the weak, and it’s a hyper-specific treatment for OCD. When I explain to people that I’m constantly exposed to my greatest fears and not allowed to do compulsions as a response, they’re horrified. It seems inhumane, but it’s the only path forward. Each day, I practice in my fear landscape through a series of behavioral changes (i.e. doing simple things that OCD has made immensely difficult for me) and listening to loop tapes. The loop tapes are recorded tracks of me reading aloud a massive fear. I start anxiously, then listen for ten minutes. All I do is listen repeatedly, and my anxiety naturally drops when I don’t do compulsions.

The goal of exposure is to realize that a thought is just a thought. It doesn’t hold any special value, and it certainly doesn’t predict anything. Thoughts are neutral, and I only get to that clarity when I am exposed to it enough and it loses its meaning. When you size it up, you learn what you're dealing with. I’m getting better each day at doing exposures and sticking with the process despite my discomfort. As my therapist noted, it always gets worse before it gets better.

I’m getting stronger each day and facing new challenges. My anxiety is still high, and I have a lot of rewiring to do; I cry a lot and feel overwhelmed by the task I’ve taken on. I'd take anxiety in the direction of recovery over anxiety over nothing any day.

And here’s the thing—I’m not going to live forever. And neither are you.

I want to make this experience of being alive the best it can be. I don’t want my diagnosis to limit me or diminish my quality of life. I refuse to be defined by the most outdated metrics that take power away from my story of resilience.

This work is difficult, but it is my work, and it is my destiny. And my destiny will not be defined by my condition.