Take it Back
It’s like theres an invasive weed that just spreads out of control.
John Green, Author of The Fault in Our Stars, on Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD)
I don't accept this cup of pain, legacy I have regifted against my will: a constant parade of dark thoughts like supplicants begging for relief. I never realized how heavy the yoke of reassurance, how stifling the confessor's cassock, the call to expiate a hiccuping uncertainty— what if, what if, what if. I never realized how hard it was to love me when I was like this. She comes to me now, my little daughter with full moon eyes, sweaty palms, and a stomach full of bees. She carries the dark seed sown in her tiny wrinkled brain before she was born. Take it back, this vestige of evolutionary advantage, this hypervigilance impossible to appease, this malady I wish I didn't recognize.