198: What if you rescued everyone to save yourself?
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This Is Actually Happening features real experiences that often include traumatic events. Please consult the show notes for specific content warnings on each episode and for more information about support services. When I knew I was dying, I knew that I wasn't going to have the anxiety or the OCD brain. It was just going to be over. Even if there was nothing after death, even if it was just a black hole of nothingness, it was going to be over. From Wondery, I'm Witt Misseldein. You're listening to This Is Actually Happening.

Episode 198. What if you rescued everyone to save yourself?

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I knew from a very early age that if I didn't repent of my sins, God was going to smite me. I was a deep thinker and a heavy feeler. I remember thinking as a kid that being alive felt heavy. It felt weighty. It felt pregnant with responsibility.

Other kids were running across the lawn with popsicles, and I'm pondering the meaning of life, wondering how I can be of service to a God who I have been told loves me, but also if I don't choose him, I'm going to hell. And with parents who loved us, but in some ways they loved the version of us they wanted us to be, and not just for being ourselves. Yeah.

Every Sunday you're told, you know, for God to love the world, that he gave his only begotten son. And he's so jealous if I don't choose him, he's just discarding me and sending me to hell. It just, it didn't make sense to me. Pair that with, you know, that people pleasing, highly intuitive and sensitive personality. And so even as a little kid, I knew that I wasn't worthy of God.

God's grace and forgiveness and I was constantly reminded of that and I really internalized that. I was the youngest of four kids. I had three older brothers, was raised in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, had very hardworking parents. We were just kind of the perfect white middle-class Protestant family.

When I was seven, our family's really good friends were flying a single engine plane. The dad was a pilot and they had two boys and a girl. And the girl was my age. And the plane crashed and they all died. I remember actually being at summer camp when I found out that Caroline was dead.

We went home and, you know, my brothers are 10, 12 and 14. And I'm just watching my brother sob and I'm watching my parents sob. Everyone is just broken. And I'm thinking to myself, I've been trying so hard to be good. And I've been trying so hard to be lovable and help people. But this right in front of me, this scene of my entire family just in shambles,

And just the sounds of just the wailing and the sounds of grief just imprinted on my mind. This is the one thing death is the one thing that you can't fix and you can't make better for other people. I had an acute feeling that and this doesn't make any sense either, but that the deaths were my fault. Somehow I hadn't been good enough.

Going to the funeral of, you know, your little friend, I felt kind of outside of myself, like, this is the reality. Death is the one thing that's inevitable. Shortly after this family died...

We had a family in our church, our best friends actually, that we always hung out with. And this was all around the same time. I remember being over at this family's house and walking in on the father molesting two of the brothers and knowing something was wrong, but not knowing what. And he told me to shut the door and leave. And I did. And I didn't say anything.

When it came out that this man had molested his sons, I was asked if I had been molested and he had not molested me. But when trauma occurs to you at an early age and you don't have the capacity to understand that it's just trauma,

a bad thing happening and it has nothing to do with your worthiness as a person, if you don't have an adult telling you, you are fine, this bad thing just happened and it wasn't your fault. If you don't have someone saying that to you, that is going to fuck you up for the rest of your life. I was diagnosed with severe OCD when I was seven.

My grandmother had it. And around this same time in the 80s, she became so bad and so debilitated with OCD and depression that she had to be in the mental hospital. I remember visiting her in the mental hospital. And this was after she had actually climbed. I know you couldn't do this today, but she had climbed up to the roof and she was ready to jump off the roof of the hospital.

We went to visit her and I remember her just no makeup. She's just sobbing. And she just said, I just want to die. This is just too hard. I felt the weight of that. And I understood that. And all of these experiences kind of formed a person who knew that life was short from an early age, knew that children were easily victimized and

and often couldn't do anything about it. And I knew even at that young age that I wanted to be a part of this solution.

It's hard to think about acknowledging that the adults in my life didn't show up for me. It's hard to say that out loud because in so many ways, my parents are amazing people. They're kind and they're giving and gave us everything that we needed to succeed. But then there's a second layer of that.

They didn't give us the space to have emotion or to ask about the grays in life. You know, everything was black and white and everything is judged. So the minute that I would say something, it would be judged by my parents as either good or bad. I could be honest with my parents when I was speaking in biblical truths, but when I led the conversation with emotion, they didn't know what to do with that.

And in the ways that my parents responded to my own trauma response, I see it now as an inability. But when I was a kid, I saw it as a refusal to just embrace emotion for what it was. And I grew up having my thoughts and feelings and actions constantly judged.

So when I was second grade, it was right after the plane crash. I had intrusive, obsessive thoughts. Sometimes if I had seen something scary on TV, then it would just play over and over and over again in my head.

It's like if you have an itch on your arm and then you tell yourself, I'm not going to itch that. I'm just going to go to sleep, say. And then the itch just gets worse and worse. That's all you can think about is that stupid itch. OCD is the same way. It's the thought gets stuck. It just gets stuck and stuck and stuck and stuck.

It's the doubters disease, they call it. And it's, you feel like you're a blame for everything. And you feel so much guilt. And you feel like, if you don't do X, Y, or Z, then someone else will be hurt. So it's all about responsibility. It's all about just the headiness of everything you do. It just brings about this enormous rush of anxiety.

I had something that's called harm OCD. So you basically, it's horrendous. You are constantly second guessing and rechecking whether or not you have accidentally hurt someone. So if I dropped a wrapper on the ground, what if another kid tripped on it and hit their head and died? The holidays were always stressful for me. And I would imagine that even as a young kid, I would imagine myself stabbing the people that I loved.

I had no idea what the hell this was. I would spend hours writing down the sins that I had committed mentally. So if I had a negative thought about something, I would write it down. And that part of OCD is called scrupulosity.

Every night before I went to bed, I had little slips of paper. Sometimes I had a hundred slips of paper and I would read off my sins. And then my mom had to tell me after each one, basically that I was absolved or that I was forgiven. Three was my number. So I would go up and down the stairs three times, like up three stairs, down two, up three more, down two. I mean, it was literally the three steps forward, two steps back. So it was pretty excruciating.

So the OCD was kind of like the pretty frosting on the disgusting cake. I knew deep down that the OCD was not keeping me safe, but I suppose it's like an addiction where you know that performing rituals or doing the drug is not good for you, but you get the relief right after you do it. But then the more you do that, the more you engage in the compulsions, the more you engage in the drug, the more it takes over.

Everyone has thoughts. For instance, you're driving down the road. I could just turn my steering wheel and hit this other car. That is a thought that someone could have. But the neurotypical brain is going to say, well, that's a dumb thought and move on. The OCD brain thinks differently.

Oh my God, what if I do? I want to do that. I'm evil. I want to run into the other car. Or my newborn baby is crying. I would just like to smack that baby. The neurotypical brain just says...

Okay, well, that was a thought. And the OCD brain says, oh, I want to smack that baby. Actually, what if I threw that baby on the ground? What if I killed that baby? I'm a horrible person. And then they'll perform compulsions. They'll avoid the child or they'll avoid any situation in which they think they might cause harm.

The harm OCD got really bad right after the trauma of the family passing away. And I loved my mother, but it was also like my brain attacked the one thing that I really loved. And so I would imagine her dying horrifically violently in a car accident because I hadn't told her I love you three times before she went out the door.

I remember one Christmas, she was using a knife to cut, I don't know, some food of some kind. And I thought, well, what if I stab my mom? In high school, my grandparents came to visit. We were all having a great time. And someone was using butcher knives to cut something. And I imagined myself stabbing my family.

The social stigma around harm OCD is that the person with the thoughts will actually act out on those thoughts. And the person with harm OCD is no more likely to act out on a harm compulsion than anyone else in the general population. But it's horrendous.

My great-grandfather really struggled with harm OCD. He would imagine himself hurting his Morgan horses. He loved these horses. He was an animal lover and he was just really kind and compassionate. But he would have these recurring thoughts of himself doing terrible things to these horses and he couldn't handle it anymore and he killed himself. So I'm glad that I have OCD in the year 2021 and not in the year 1921 because it's so much better understood.

So high school, I was involved in choir and was always just generally well-liked, but I would go home and cry and just be really depressed. I wasn't on medication yet for depression or OCD. Going back again to the church, a lot of people said, you know, you don't have enough faith or you're not praying hard enough or, you know, the things that well-meaning people say to people who are mentally ill.

So my senior year of high school, I tried out for a Mutico at my high school, music, dance, and comedy. I had a friend there who tried out at the same time, and we were just talking and laughing. And it was a rainy Wednesday afternoon in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. And I said goodbye to him and headed home. And then...

When I got home, I heard that there had been a bank robbery and that the robber had been shot by the cop who showed up on scene. And then the phone rang and my mom told me that that was actually Ryan that was shot. And that was my friend that I had just seen. Unbeknownst to a lot of people, he owed a drug debt and he didn't feel like he could talk to his parents about it.

He had written a suicide note and he went into the bank and demanded a certain amount of cash. And he had a ski mask on. And as he was running out, the cop that was responding to the call was just on his way back home.

Ryan had a fake gun and he pointed it at the cop and then he shot him in the hip. Ryan fell and then the cop ran over to him and he said, I've never seen such determination in anyone's eyes. But he looked at me and he raised his gun and pointed it just straight at my chest. And then I shot and killed him.

There's been a theme throughout my life ever since this family died. Ever since they died, there's been a theme of my trying to keep the people around me from dying. It's like this rasping for just the ultimate feeling of safety and security. That feeling was always just out of reach.

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someone around me who was my safe person. So my older brother in college, I went to the same college as my brother and we were very close. And then right after college, I was desperate to find a boyfriend and get married because that felt safe. My husband and I met right after college and six months later, we were engaged and I pushed that. And then six months later, we were married.

Luck was on our side. I would not advise moving into a relationship that quickly. But we are best friends still and we get along so well. And we've been married almost 20 years. Scott and I got married in 2003. And then we had our daughter Lucy in 2005. And she was born with several birth defects and had, oh gosh, 12 surgeries in her first three years of life.

And I had been taking Prozac, which really helps with OCD. It just, it cuts down on the compulsions and you feel like you can live your life. The doctor had said the Prozac didn't, there was no indication that the Prozac caused her birth defects that she was born with. But when I was pregnant with my second child, then I just decided to go cold turkey and not have any medication for my second pregnancy.

I was about eight months pregnant and I was standing in the kitchen with my daughter, who was two at the time. And I was mopping the floor and she was looking up at me. And I had this thought just come up out of nowhere. You could drown her in the mop bucket. And I had a vision of myself doing so. Like, I don't know if vision is the right word, but I guess that's what it was, is a vision. And that scared the shit out of me.

At that moment, I just dropped the mop. I mean, I could just hear the wood handle clattering on the tile floor. And I just gathered her up in my arms and I just cried. No good mother would ever think these things. Maybe I wasn't ever meant to be a mother because my first pregnancy was twins and my son died and then my daughter had all these problems. And now I'm here thinking about hurting her

after she had so many surgeries and fought to live. And now I'm bringing another one into the world. And I just felt, I felt so lonely. And I felt like maybe if I don't say something, it'll just go away. But then if I do say something, maybe someone can help me. But if I don't say something, what if I act on something that's irreversible?

But I knew deep down that it was a chemical imbalance in my brain. And I think that was the thing that saved me. Having the information and knowing that it was a chemical imbalance, I think that may or may not have saved my kids. And I actually thought of Andrea Yates, the woman who drowned her five kids. And that had happened just a few years before. But I thought, am I her?

Like people look at Andrea Yates and think what a terrible, horrid human being. And I look at her through a different lens as someone who had nobody to back her up. And she was put into this position where her worth in life was producing children. And she had told many people she was overwhelmed and that she had these children

harm, obsessions, and that she didn't want to be alone with the kids. And nobody, nobody freaking listened. This guy that led the church was saying, you know, all of these terrible things. She was in a cult. And Andrea Yates was being told, your kids are terrible, horrible sinners. And if, if you don't send them to heaven, quote unquote, then they'll be doomed to hell. I mean,

And I knew enough about harm OCD to know that that's most likely what it was. I just think how lucky I am to have had the site or have the scientific knowledge to know like what I'm going through and how to ask for help. I was too ashamed to tell my husband because I thought he's going to think I'm a freaking psycho. I mean, who wouldn't?

I called the doctor and I got in to see the doctor and I just told her, well, I'm worried about the baby, you know, that I was pregnant with. And she said, well, everyone's worried, you know, before the baby's born. And then she started to leave. And I thought, oh, dear God, I have to tell her. I have to tell her. So I grabbed her arm.

And I said, I had a thought of drowning Lucy in the mop bucket. And then she looks at me straight in the eye and she said, oh, we need to talk. And so I told her all of it. And she said, this is classic harm OCD. And for some reason, when you're pregnant, it gets worse. And you need to have this baby tomorrow. And so I called my husband and I just told him that I wasn't doing well mentally and

So as soon as my son was born, it was like night turning into day. The harm OCD was gone. It was just gone.

And I didn't have those thoughts or any of those feelings anymore. And that told me that it was really, really very chemical. And whatever happens in my body during pregnancy is what happens in a lot of women's bodies after pregnancy, which is the postpartum depression and all of those things. It's just a part of the human condition. But there's just so much isolation and shame in not being able to tell anybody the things that you're thinking.

So we had Lucy and then she was three, Asher, our son was one. And then I had three miscarriages, one ectopic pregnancy that nearly killed me and I had emergency surgery for. Then after that ectopic pregnancy, I said to my husband, you know what? I've always wanted to be a foster parent. I think we should foster to adopt.

We took the foster care classes. And then literally the day that we were licensed, I found out I was pregnant with our youngest child.

I was told that I would not be able to get pregnant again. And we were totally on this foster to adopt path. And I was kind of pissed off that, you know, I was just going to miscarry again. So I wasn't even emotionally attaching to the pregnancy or anything. It was just like, okay, I'll probably miscarry around, you know, nine to 11 weeks. And we're just, we're going to go ahead and do the foster care route.

Our first placement was a baby boy who was three days old and his older brother who was two. I don't know what I expected, but I didn't expect the social worker just to drop off a screaming two-year-old in only a diaper. And then this brand new baby who was just sleeping like, you know, nothing was wrong in his world.

That first night was awful because we had a four and a six year old. And then I had morning sickness with my pregnancy. And then this little boy was trying to tell us what was wrong. And he was so little and he couldn't formulate his words. And I was crying and he was crying. And it was just really, it was surreal. It was completely surreal.

About three weeks into it, it was just so much work. And I told the social worker that we weren't going to be able to do this after all. And his toddler brother ended up going home to his parents. And we had the baby during my pregnancy. We had him for 10 months. I was his mom for 10 months. And then eight months in, I had our daughter,

After she was born, I had a C-section and everything was okay. Everything was great. I was wheeled back to my room. My husband went to get something to eat and we were joking and talking and super happy that everything had gone well and there were no birth defects. And then about four hours after the birth, I was lying on my bed in the hospital room and my father-in-law was sitting kind of at the foot of my bed

My husband walks in and he takes one look at me and he said to his dad, has she looked like this the whole time? What's wrong with her? What's wrong with her? He said, I looked just as white as a ghost. He just started screaming, you know, help, help. I remember him yelling and I remember pain. I remember a nurse running in and trying to use the phone, but the phone wasn't working and

She's just saying, fuck, fuck, fuck. And then all of these people start coming into the room. And then I hear the anesthesiologist saying, we're losing her. We're going to lose her. She's losing blood. She's obviously losing blood. At that point, my parents came from the waiting room and their faces were just gray. My husband was sobbing over me. And I remember looking at the baby at the foot of the bed thinking like, she's never going to know me. And I didn't even get to hold her.

This is it. I'm 32 years old, and this is how I die. In those moments, I was not afraid to die at all. I was afraid of the judgment of that God from my childhood who was out to get me for not being good enough. And I remember just praying, okay, God, please just accept me. Please just accept me into heaven. I just remember that. And then I coded

And I had this thought, like, again, this is how it ends. Everything was in slow motion. But I thought I didn't do all the things I wanted to do. I didn't help enough people. I didn't. So then we're in the OR. The doctor tells my husband, you need to tell her goodbye. And he says, oh, okay. And she said, no, goodbye, goodbye. And so he's just like hunched over me and I can feel his tears on my cheeks. And he's saying, you're the best wife. I love you.

And I'm sorry I didn't always show it. But you're the best thing that ever happened to me. Please don't die. And that's the last thing I remember. And then I remember waking up and I had the tube down my throat. And I said, I'm alive. I'm alive. And the nurse came running over and she said, yes, you are. And I can't believe it. I can't believe you're alive.

When I woke up, at first I thought, well, I must be in heaven, but heaven doesn't have beeping. I don't know how I would know that. Heaven doesn't have beeping. And then I screamed, I'm alive. And then I had this feeling of betrayal.

I was pissed off because when I knew I was dying, I knew that I wasn't going to have the anxiety or the OCD brain or have to deal with all that past trauma anymore. It was just going to be over. Even if there was nothing after death, even if it was just a black hole of nothingness, it was going to be over.

realizing at that moment that I was going to die and there was nothing my parents could do about it. There was nothing the doctor could do about it. There was nothing anyone could do about it was the most freeing feeling I've had in my entire life. Waking up was actually the most traumatic thing of my life. Waking up and realizing, I've got to deal with this, the shit storm of life again.

When you nearly die and when you know you are going to die, everything becomes just crystal clear. You lose fear. You understand so many things. I don't even know how to explain it. It's like in normal day-to-day life, the Tuesday afternoon life, you're looking at things through goggles underwater.

And then when you're about to die, every sense is heightened. And you realize that all of that striving for safety, all of that trying to fight the after effects of trauma, mental illness, all of that, like it's all okay.

So as everyone was rushing around the room and as I was realizing that I'm dying and this is the end and I'm flashing forward in my mind, like I'm not going to watch my daughter go to preschool. I'm not going to see my husband as an old man. My parents are going to bury me. All of those things were going through my head. And there was this nurse just sitting there just to the right of my bed and

And she was holding my hand and she said, look at me, Rachel, look at me. Look at me, Rachel. You're okay. You're okay. All she said, look at me. You're okay. She was beautiful. She just kept saying those things and patting my hand, like kind of, kind of caressing my hand. And she gave me such peace. I mean, she was there when they were running down the hall with me. She was there when the doctor was telling my husband to tell me goodbye and

And then the next day I asked who the nurse was who was right there, sitting right there by the side of my bed. They said there was no one up there by the side of your bed. I know that sounds ridiculous, but she was there and she was so calming. She was the coolest energy. I don't know what to think about that. I don't know what to think about that. So the recovery, I had to have a hysterectomy because I bled out over half the blood in my body.

We were planning on adopting the baby that we had fostered. And I knew pretty immediately that that wasn't going to be possible because I was going to take six months to a year to fully recover. So the little boy that we had had since he was two days old ended up going at 10 months to be adopted by friends of ours.

And I can't quite explain what it's like handing a child that you've loved from almost day one over to somebody else.

I felt like I was letting him down. And I know that foster kids often have many instances where they feel that rejection. And I felt like we were just adding to that painful story of rejection for that child. So not only was I dealing with the aftermath of nearly dying, but I was dealing with the pain of losing a child myself.

And then I thought back to that nearly dying and thought, you know, I heard it somewhere and it stuck with me ever since. Between now and dead, what do I want? What are my core values? What are the things I believe in? It's a very short time between now and dead, right? What is the legacy I want to leave? So at that point, Scott and I thought about it some more and just decided that we were going to foster because there were so many kids that needed just a safe place to land and

The desire to continue to foster was born out of that deep grief of losing that child. So I think also selfishly doing the foster care and being so busy helped alleviate some of the OCD because while I was back on Prozac and in therapy, when your mind is busy with other things, then you have less time to compulse or to think about what you might or might not have control of.

And I think also the question hanging in the air would be, how does someone who has harm obsessions foster other people's children?

Our fostering agency was extremely and is extremely well-versed in mental health and mental health disorders and issues. And I was very honest with them about the things that I struggled with. And at that time, I was functioning well and it was pretty well controlled with medication.

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Some of those kids would just stay for a week or two. It just depended on the situation. One time we had three sisters who were 7, 10, and 12. One night, the 10-year-old, she had a meltdown, and she said she hated me, and she was going to slit my throat and burn down the house, and she was so angry.

And I stayed up all night with her. And this amazing thing happened where she went from that like stereotypical angry foster kid with the scowl to this just like broken human soul who had had so much trauma and hardship and grief that it was palpable. You could see it on her.

We just talked all night. I told her, you know what? You are valuable and you are loved and you're going to get through this. In those moments, I realized that so much of what we as humans judge initially or immediately, you know, at first I was like, oh, she's angry. She's dangerous. We have to get away from her. She was just fucking done and she was hurt. And she was a 10 year old kid who had nobody.

And I had the privilege of telling her that she was worthy and that there was hope and that she was loved. And we still have a relationship with her today and she's doing really well.

We had one little girl who came to us as a happy little six-year-old. And that night at dinner, my husband had a Corona beer out and was drinking it. And she said, that's what mommy's boyfriend puts in me. And mommy laughs. My husband just, he dropped his fork and looked at me and just mouthed, holy fuck.

What do you say in that moment? How is this the reality for this kid? This beautiful, lovely little shining piece of humanity has gone through these horrible experiences and she's just saying it like it's a normal everyday activity or happening.

She ended up, one parent was a severe alcoholic and nearly killed her in a drunk driving accident. And we fought tooth and nail to get her to the other parent. And so now she's with that parent and she's just turned 14 and she's doing amazingly well. I mean, if I were to die in my sleep tonight, what do I want to do between now and dead? It's that.

It's looking past whatever trivial stuff is happening in my own life and helping other people. Because at the end of the day, other people and relationships are the only thing that matter.

The hardest thing about foster care is knowing that you can get these children to a point of equilibrium. And then in a lot of situations, you have to every week bring them back to the person who is their abuser. Now, I'm not saying that all biological parents are abusers. In fact, there are many cases where reunification happens and it's beautiful.

But when you know, when a child has told you without prompting what this parent has done to them, and then you have to go and expose them to a predator, you feel like you're part of the problem.

In looking back over our fostering, I guess, career, you could call it, I do struggle a bit with thinking that there were situations in which I, you know, followed the rules, but I exposed innocent children to people who were not safe because I was told to by, you know, the machine or by the state. That still bothers me.

But I really do believe in the power of just showing up. There are so many people that I know who could just as easily do the same thing and have the same kind of impact if only they would just do it. I'm not anything special. I get angry and upset and impatient. I just saw a need and I filled the need.

When you look outward instead of down, you find so much joy because you suddenly go from this posture of everything is terrible to everyone can do something. And it doesn't have to be foster care, but just do something good. And between now and dead, what do you want that to be?

In the foster care world, there's this thing where if you're a good foster parent, if you take good care of children and help them reunite with their family in positive ways, you're kind of seen as a bit of a Mother Teresa. And I think for a large majority of foster parents, there's a bit of an addiction to that praise. And I realized about three years in that that was maybe part of it for me.

I wanted to, you know, just like from when I was a little kid and I wanted to perform, I wanted to be good enough or to do enough good works to get into heaven. I felt like I was still repeating that pattern, but I wasn't willing kind of like with the addiction, you're not willing to give it up because there's a part of that praise that you like and there's a part of that. Being able to help kids is awesome.

But then I slowly realized that though we were good at foster care and that we were a positive for so many kids, a lot of it was centered around my own hustling for my worth. You know, I was still that little five-year-old wanting to do and be and make myself worthy.

I thought back to the ways that I wasn't allowed to be emotionally vocal or emotionally honest. And so much of even doing the foster care was feeling that raw, just feeling that power of rescuing myself, of rescuing kids that just shown with that vulnerability that I had, that I had no protector. I realized that I had the ability, I had the power that I never had as a kid.

And then working through that, I found freedom in realizing that I had done so much for so many kids. And there are always going to be hurting people in the world. But you do have to come to a place where you're at peace with just being and just accepting the trauma that has happened in your life. You don't have to be happy about it.

But just accepting it and realizing that you are safe and that you're not responsible for, you know, just random bad things that happen to you. You don't have to be stuck in this endless cycle of rescuing yourself because that's miserable. Now, in my case, it was beneficial to a lot of other little people. Right. But I've realized, yes, we could still be fostering, but I don't need to be rescued anymore.

Our last foster placement was a little girl who was a year older than our youngest. So our youngest was five and she was six. And...

It's kind of sad how our fostering ended, but we always had a door open policy, you know, just to make sure that nothing happened with the kids and just to keep everyone safe. And my older daughter's friend walked in and our little six-year-old foster daughter was attempting to sexually perpetrate on our five-year-old.

So I called the agency and I said, look, this is what happened. She's been abused somewhere along the line. And they said, well, how do we know it's not you that did something to her? And at that point, it was just like, OK, this is serious. We had to stop because we had to protect our own kids. And I don't regret that.

So we stopped foster care and I was offered a job writing for the fostering agency and trying to recruit new foster homes. I've written a lot for the Huffington Post and Scary Mommy and other random websites and just decided a couple of years ago to go into special education. So now I teach high schoolers with autism.

Foster care was great for me because I was able to just pour love into these kids and fight for these kids. And then there was this...

kind of come to Jesus moment where my husband and I talked and we realized it was great for me, but it wasn't great for the rest of the family because the rest of the family was suffering. And that's actually kind of a common thing in foster care. You kind of get so involved in that savior complex that you sometimes forget about the people right around you who need you the most. And so I'm proud of myself because I did have enough self-awareness to realize that

We needed to stop. The fear though in that was, so I was busy with all of those things that stopped. And then the OCD really kind of started to take over again. And with OCD, when things are going well, you're having a great day at the park with your family. Well, someone could come by and shoot everybody. Or what if tonight at dinner, someone chokes on their food and they die?

Medication has always helped tremendously, but it wasn't until we stopped doing foster care in about 2017, I decided then to go pretty hardcore into cognitive behavior therapy. There's a form of cognitive behavior therapy called exposure and response prevention.

A lot of therapists want to reassure you. So if I said, I'm certain that if I don't rewrite the list of items that I have to get at the grocery store three times, my husband's going to die in a 15-car pileup, that therapist would say, well, you know the chances of that happening aren't very high.

To an OCD brain, it doesn't matter that the chances aren't high. It only matters that it's possible that it could happen. And so the exposure and response prevention, that therapist says to you, yes, he could die. And even on top of that, your entire family could die. And then you have to sit there and

And it's hell. You have to sit there with that anxiety and feel it. My therapist would go as far as imagine their funerals. Imagine what they're going to wear, what you're going to dress them in. Why am I doing this? You know, you're not supposed to do this. You're not supposed to focus on the negative. But with OCD, in order to conquer it, in order to silence the beast, you have to face it.

The therapist says, what's your anxiety scale? I've got tears in my eyes just thinking about this. What's your anxiety scale? One being the least amount of anxiety, 10 being the worst. And I said, it's a 15 or a 16, just imagining this. Okay, just sit there, sit with it. Your brain can only handle so much anxiety. It's like jumping in a cold swimming pool. Eventually your body adjusts, right? And that's what happens with your brain. So I sit there,

And I'm thinking about this. And at first it was hell. I would have a score of, you know, 15 and then it went down to 13 and then, you know, nine, then seven. I mean, it just, it just kept going down.

after a certain point, and I can't even tell you when, I would listen to these loop tapes in my head and they actually became boring to me. It's not that I was okay with it happening. It was that it was a more rational response. It was a more neurotypical response of, yeah, that's terrible. If it happened, we would deal with it. But even with this exposure response prevention, even with

doing the OCD workbook, even with this medication, I feel like I'm still stuck in my own head so often. My oldest daughter is starting to drive. She's driving right now. And I'm thinking, you know, she could be in an accident right now. Because of the therapy I've done, and because of the work I've done, that thought doesn't make me want to sleep all day. However,

Every morning when I wake up, there's some type of fear that pops in my head. And 42 years of that is a long time. So at 42, it's been 10 years since I almost died. And I open my eyes some mornings and think, okay, we're still doing this. I'm still doing this. And I actually, I find myself a little bit jealous of the Rachel who died on the table. And sometimes I think, okay,

Why couldn't I have died on that table? Because this is so fucking hard. I realized after I woke up and after I screamed to the nurses, I'm alive. I realized that I was back in this body with a broken brain. And I was ready to go because I didn't feel I had any regrets. And I prayed that I would live because I wanted to see my kids. I wanted to see my kids grow. And I wanted to love my husband more.

And there have been so many awesome and wonderful moments and amazing moments. And I've gotten to see my kids grow in the last 10 years. And I've gotten to love my husband. I've gotten to see my parents. And I've gotten to move and love and live. And every morning. Because there's somebody out there who just wants it to end. And I am saying to you...

that I fully get that 100% and I understand that. And I'm gonna sound like Pauly freaking Anna when I say, even if you don't feel it, whip those covers off, put your feet on the floor and do something. It might be making coffee. It might be taking a breath. It might be looking out the window and noticing the green leaves. That might be all you get done. Sometimes the meaning is in the struggle.

And sometimes the meaning is just in the, gosh, that coffee was good. That conversation around the fire was amazing. I have those hard days and I have those days where I don't want to get out of bed. But I also have this amazing gift to see things that most people can't. And I can fucking write. I can draw stories out of people and help alleviate their hurt. And that's something a lot of other people can't do.

But I am bound and determined to live the one life that I have been given, broken brain and all. And this sucks. And it's also breathtakingly beautiful. Today's episode featured Rachel Hillestead. You can find out more about Rachel on Facebook at facebook.com slash Rachel Hillestead. That's R-A-C-H-E-L-H-I-L-L-E-S-T-A-D.

From Wondery, you're listening to This Is Actually Happening. If you love what we do, please rate and review the show. You can subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, the Wondery app, or wherever you're listening right now. You can also join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app to listen ad-free. In the episode notes, you'll find some links and offers from our sponsors. By supporting them, you help us bring you our shows for free.

I'm your host, Witt Misseldein. Today's episode was co-produced by me with special thanks to the This Is Actually Happening team, including Andrew Waits and Ellen Westberg. The intro music features the song "Illabi" by Tipper. You can join the This Is Actually Happening community on the discussion group on Facebook or at Actually Happening on Instagram.

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Thank you for listening.

Hey, it's Guy Raz here, host of How I Built This, a podcast that gives you a front row seat to how some of the best known companies in the world were built.

In a new weekly series we've launched called Advice Line, I'm joined by some legendary founders and together we talk to entrepreneurs in every industry to help tackle their roadblocks in real time. Everybody buys on feeling, Guy, like everybody. So if you don't give them the feeling that they're looking for, they're not going to buy. A lot of times founders will go outside of themselves to build a story. And

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