A young adult from Kansas wrote the following article about his experience with OCD and how baseball can serve as a helpful analogy. We are delighted to share his article, which was originally published in the Spring 2018 edition of the IOCDF’s OCD Newsletter.
Learn How to Play to Win by Ethan
To have OCD is to have a struggle. Everyone who has it knows this to be true. Whether it’s the struggle over germs, religion, or the perfection of a space around us, OCD can be so overbearing at times that it makes us as individuals feel powerless against it. Often times when battling OCD we feel hopeless, as though there is nothing we can do to avoid the pain and anguish that we experience daily from the illness.
For those of us who live with OCD, we know that it’s not a game. However, when thinking what it’s like to fight against it, I have found it useful to use the analogy of one particular game – baseball. I am not really a sports person, but I have come to enjoy baseball, and I think that of all the games that exist it is the one that relates most to our struggle with OCD. Although Jumanji would elicit stress levels closer to those of OCD, the game of baseball has similarities that can help us to understand how to conquer our struggles, while also being a game that many of us associate with fun.
The analogy starts like this: Baseball is life, the pitcher is OCD, and the ball is an obsession. Every time we come up to the plate, the ball is thrown at us, whether we want it to come or not. When the pitcher throws the ball it is like an obsession coming toward us, something we have to shake off and hit away from us. Batting is done by performing exercises that help us to fight the disease, and just like batting, this takes practice. If we grow lazy, or we decide we are no longer going to try to hit the ball to the best of our ability, the pitcher gains the upper hand.
Now understand that batting is not a compulsion. In fact I would compare the urge to perform a compulsion to the urge to hit a ball that is not in the strike zone. We want to hit the ball away, just like we want OCD to leave us alone, but by doing compulsions, or swinging at a bad pitch, we are taking the easy way out and misguiding our efforts. Swinging at bad pitches just leads to strikes and gives the pitcher more power. As with resisting the urge to swing, there are times when we have to resist the urge to do a compulsion in order to successfully hit the ball.
Unfortunately, once we get good at hitting the ball, once we get stronger in our mindfulness and our OCD exercises, the pitcher may notice and start throwing us curve balls. These curve balls are obsessions or worries that are new and scary to us, or they are old worries that have been presented to us in a new way. It is at these times that we must learn new strategies – new ways to hit new pitches – in order to stay one step ahead of the pitcher, or one step ahead of OCD. It’s when we become afraid of these new pitches that we are unable to hit the ball effectively. This is why we must keep practicing in order to help ourselves and our teammates.
The fact of the matter is that baseball games end, but OCD does not. To many, this may seem an unfortunate truth. However, both in learning to play baseball and learning to manage OCD, we develop skills that we can utilize in other areas of our lives. We can learn to practice, to become more resilient, and to challenge our fears. I believe that if we learn to conquer OCD and to overcome our struggles, it equips us to do anything in life. Although it may not always seem so, our struggles can be our blessings. OCD has made me stronger than I ever thought I could be and, in time, I believe that everyone can learn to fight it – to play this game until it is nothing more than a small nuisance in our head, a tool to help us grow stronger, and a means to an end in the greater scheme of things. So, keep playing the game, keep your eye on the ball, and try to have fun while you’re at it. Because just like baseball, OCD isn’t our whole life or our whole identity, it’s just a small part of it.