Headaches and Physical Discomfort: School Teacher

Hi, all! I apologize in advance for how long this is. 😅 I’m just reaching out to ask if anyone else has ever subconsciously made themselves sick when combatting obsessive thoughts and if there is a cure to it? So for some background: I am a law school drop-out turned teacher who loves English literature and learning in general. However, ever since college, I have been dealing with some pretty intense ocd surrounding writing (ever the irony with ocd, right?😭). Throughout my schooling, I have always been told by my teachers that I am a good writer. However, these comments, which I know were meant to be supportive and encouraging, turned into this unreachable, subjective standard that I became fixated on meeting. The pressure started out as a hum in the background of my mind, but in college, it became much worse. I remember not being able to write a complete sentence down without rereading and rereading and rereading and rereading it. I could only move on to writing the next when I felt that it was “right.” From there, the pattern continued. This writing compulsion gradually seeped into my reading comprehension. I would be assigned books and reading material in college that I could never bring myself to read because I did not trust myself to do so. I would read a sentence and then ask myself, ‘Did I actually understand that? What if I didn’t? Then I won’t understand the rest of this book, and I’ll have wasted my time and effort. What if I’m not smart enough to be in this school? How will I be able to get into law school if I can’t adequately complete this simple assignment?’ Of course, these spiraled thoughts would lead me to rereading and rereading the same sentences over and over again until I felt comfortable enough with my comprehension to move onto the next one, which never happened. Eventually, this became so exhausting that I avoided looking at or thinking about any of my assignments until the very last minute. Unfortunately, when I did this, I realized that something magical happened: with too little time to complete my assignments, my brain didn’t have the time to ruminate, so it wouldn’t. I wouldn’t. As a result, I took to starting my assignments mere hours before class every day. I would function off the bare minimum of my effort and understanding, and somehow it was enough. Enough to get me out of college and enough to get me into law school. Of course, all the while, I wanted to be a good student, and I knew a good student put in good, long hours for studying, so I would sit in the library for hours on end, just being scared and doing nothing. With these issues still lingering, you can imagine how much of a shit show law school turned out to be. My symptoms continued to get worse, and I developed a new symptom: physical pain. I could not sit down to do work without my body bracing for the horrendous impact of my stress. This is the only way I’ve been able to understand what my body did at that time, even all these years later. Any time I would sit down to study, I would develop a horrible migraine, backache, neck ache, and nausea that I could not work through. This was useful for multiple reasons: 1) my procrastination was rooted in something real and 2) it would give me an excuse to stop trying to work through my ocd compulsions. Eventually, my mental health became so bad that I dropped out of law school, which sounds bad, but really is one of the best decisions I’ve made in my life. Since then, and it’s been about two years since law school, I have been prescribed medication, and I see my therapist once a week. I am now a high school English teacher, which is a job I absolutely ADORE, and I always think I’m doing a lot better,,, until days like today occur. I can read better than before, and I can grade tests and quizzes without any major problems, but every time I am set to grade any written assessment, my law school symptoms come roaring back: the physical pain and the procrastination. I sit to grade a few essays a day for a couple of minutes each, and I am hit with neck and back pain and a killer headache. I stop to lay down to make the pain go away, but it doesn’t subside until I go to sleep. I try again the next day and the next and the next, and the same pattern keeps happening. Suddenly, it’s the day before I have to give the papers back to the class, and I have 60 to grade in 4 hours. It makes me feel so discouraged about all the progress I’ve made. At this point, I’m starting to wonder if it is even progress or just new circumstances? Anyway, if anyone has any experience with physical pain with ocd or deadlines as an English teacher, I would absolutely love to know of any remedies you could recommend! Thank you!