OCD and the Role of Nature in My Life by Olivia Przydzial

OCD and the Role of Nature in My Life

by Olivia Przydzial

When I was 6 years old, I was diagnosed with OCD, obsessive-compulsive disorder. As a kid, it was just another part of my daily life, and I honestly didn't think much of it. My OCD was embedded in every single part of my life. Over the years, it's morphed into so many different behaviors and fears. Sometimes, it required minimal effort to just push it off to the side and ignore it. In others, I would experience panic attacks so bad that I would shake and vomit. But it was always just another part of my life. I never hated it. I never really associated the 'OCD' everyone's heard of with my own experiences. Why? I never knew anything different. It was just another part of life, no big deal. I expertly concealed my behaviors in public, and I continued to live on.

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I spent my childhood in a large urban city in southern Jersey. Our backyard was about 30 feet by 100 feet and consisted of yellowing grass, a single large oak tree, a wire fence on its perimeter, and baby pine trees growing our neighbor's side of the fence. Almost two years after my sister was born, my beloved oak tree was cut down. I've counted the rings of that stump so many times. I've sung in my own concerts with the stump as my stage. I've performed surgeries on leaves and frogs with that stump as my surgical table. I've watched the stars from that stump, despite the heavy light pollution. I've sat on that stump and really cried for the first few times in my life. I told my sister stories about what once was the oak tree that I so adored.

I moved to Sparta for fourth grade. With the woods in my backyard, I was beyond overwhelmed with the nature before me. I was inexplicably drawn to the natural world, despite the lack of it in my early childhood. From the years I spent in my tiny backyard, to the years I spent exploring the woods, and to the summers I spent every waking minute of in the ocean, nature of all kinds had a special place in my life.

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Over the years, I've discovered that my OCD compulsions were eased to more manageable behaviors when I spent time with nature. If I didn't spend time in the woods or if I didn't go on a walk, my OCD was so much harder to ignore, the fears bubbling in my brain and nearly impossible to push away. The harmony of the imperfections that characterize nature is therapeutic to me because they prove that something so imperfect can remain so balanced and beautiful.

OCD has been and still is such a significant part of my life, even in times where it was just an underlying theme to everything I do, but nature has played a key role in infusing peace and balance into my life.