You never realize how valuable time is until you don’t have it. When I was eight years old, I used to lie on the hardwood floor and stare at the clock on top of our fireplace.
Tick.
Tock.
Tick.
Tock.
Tick.
Tock.
I’d count the seconds for an entire minute, from the first tick until the long needle hit the twelve. And if I didn’t look away quickly enough and I saw the hand pass to the next beat, I’d have to count the seconds all over again.
And again.
And again.
I’d be stuck there for minutes, maybe even an hour, before someone—usually Mama—rescued me.
But I’m not a kid anymore. I don’t get to lie there and stare at the clock. Every moment I waste could be a moment I spend with Mama.
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11.
These are the numbers that run through my head every day, every hour, every minute. The set of digits might change—my magic number used to be four. And then seven. And now eleven. The compulsions ebb and flow. But they’re forever present, a part of me, like a beast whose talons have wrapped around and buried themselves in my soul.
My life is far from easy. Every day, I go to school, or sit in my room, or simply exist, and a war wages within my mind.
Voices whisper inside me, forcing everything I touch, everything I do, to be symmetrical.
I check my tests over and over again, certain that I missed something.
A powerful urge makes me complete every sentence I read—and then reread it again, just in case. A paragraph could take me an hour to get through, a school assignment half the night.
Every moment of my life is a battle. I thought that my perpetual struggle with obsessive-compulsive disorder would prepare me to face any fight that loomed in the future.
Holy moly was I wrong.