Warning: this article contains descriptions of violence and sexual assault

I watched one of my friends crinkle her nose and shake her head. “That’s driving my OCD crazy!” she exclaimed, and she reached forward to adjust the object out of line.

A few days later, another person: “I’m so OCD,” she says. “I have to keep all my books in alphabetical order at all times or it doesn’t feel right.”

I never said anything. I have before, and it never ended well. After all, there’s nothing easy about bringing up the terrible effects that one disorder has on your whole life, especially when accused of constantly faking it, and even more so when your symptoms are horrific in nature.

However, the truth of the matter is this: OCD is a mental disorder, not an adjective. Everyone has something that makes them tick, something that drives them up the wall if it’s not perfectly right, but that’s not what OCD is about. OCD is a deliberating illness that has ruined the lives of countless people, and makes life itself extraordinarily difficult.

The first time my OCD appeared, I was five years old. It started with simple touching -- my left hand touched this, my right hand touched that. 13 years later, and it’s become a complex pattern, one that can get up to be 64 different touches on particularly bad days. And it’s not just limited to touching. I have to breathe and blink just right too, and if I don’t, it results in me holding my breath and clenching my eyes shut for a certain amount of seconds, maybe even minutes, and if I mess up, I have to start all over again.

But that’s not the worst of it. The worst is what happens inside my mind.

Middle school is a rough time for everyone, but for me, OCD made it exceptionally harder. It was at its worse when I was 12 years old. I was unable to look any of my male teachers in the eye, because every time I did, I had terrible thoughts of initiating sexual contact, right there in front of the class. I’d stare at the ground and obsess for hours over thoughts of asking a teacher for help and kissing him halfway through his answer, and then undressing him against his will. And as improbable as it seems for a small 12 year old like me to overpower a man in his 40s, I couldn’t stop myself from thinking about it.

At home, the situation was much worse. I had graphic thoughts of viciously attacking and sexually assaulting my sister with a pair of scissors, so much so I would get anxious at the sight of her. By the time I was 13, I had convinced myself I was destined to be a violent criminal, after many thoughts of throwing infants out windows, pushing children in front of moving vehicles, and even more thoughts about my sister, this time about strangling her to death.

I never told anyone about these thoughts for years. How was I supposed to disclose such gruesome and appalling obsessions to others?

It’s taken me years to reach this level of openness, and even then, I hate talking about it. It’s hard when I’ve been open before and have had people tell me I don’t really have OCD despite the fact I’ve been diagnosed with it twice by two different psychologists. Public education on OCD, along with mental illness in general, is painfully low. Our ideas on what constitutes as mental illness is skewed by inaccurate portrayals of it through the media, or very limited examples that do not explain most cases.

My personal struggle with OCD is not the same as everyone else’s. In fact, I have a much less common manifestation of it, but the struggle with it is understood by all others diagnosed with it. All of us grimace when you start talking about how OCD you are, because the matter of fact is that while you wear it loudly, you are irritated by some of our symptoms -- like the kids who got angry at me for my perfectionist behaviors, like the friends who get irritated whenever my OCD turns into panicked paranoia that everyone is out to get me and causes me to act erratically.

OCD becomes something that you have to constantly hide. It’s an embarrassing secret. Most can sympathize with the need to keep organized, but most will also balk at hearing about graphically violent and sexual scenarios that are impossible to stop thinking about.

So please, before you get irritated at someone’s excessive worry or peculiar behavior, or before you use OCD to describe yourself once more, think before you say a word. OCD is hard enough as it is, and it’s even worse when you’re made to feel completely alone.