“When I remember anxiety is just energy that wants to move, something shifts.”

I have obsessive compulsive disorder. It runs in the family, first my father with his compulsion to check door locks, finally loosening the front door from the frame, and then me, with my repetitive handwashing as an adolescent, hands raw and cracked. Later my OCD morphed into other classic manifestations like fear of running over animals with my car, a thought so scary I would check the paper for reports of animal hit and runs. For a long time, I didn’t discuss it or made a joke of it. I’m just OCD, don’t mind me. But inside I worried. Will the medical licensure people come for me now? Will they say, “You have a mental illness, you can no longer practice.” Now I see a therapist specializing in OCD, and I have learned that a spectrum of symptoms exists with anxiety on one end and OCD on the other.

Psychologist and writer Faith Galliano Desai’s essay titled "The Humming Wire" (Fall-Winter 2025-26 Intima) describes anxiety as a wire tightly strung. As thoughts race around the brain, we yearn to stop them, control them. But in our efforts, anxieties return with more energy, as if the attempt to quell them amplified them instead. An OCD ritual, like hand washing, serves to manage the obsession or fear of contamination. It seems simple to tell yourself not to wash your hands, ignore the thought. But it doesn’t work that way. OCD nags you to complete the ritual, its voice getting louder and louder, your anxiety ramping up, until you do.

Desai provides a solution, but it isn’t an easy one. She instructs us to remember that anxiety is energy that must move. If we let it pass through us, it will lose its power. But by sitting with that fear again till it dissipates, you must experience the anxiety again, your heart racing, brow sweaty. It is unpleasant but necessary.

I believe her. It’s the remembering I have trouble with. In the middle of a storm, it can be hard to sit still in the pouring rain and not run. But maybe if I read Desai’s piece during the downpour, maybe if I keep it posted on a mirror, linked on my phone, I will remember, as she says, to ride the wave or stand in the storm till it passes.