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Podcast Opener: There’s a lot of hard working Tasmanians out there / My boss is the boss of Tasmania / Tasmanians want us to get on with the job / North, south, east, west. I don’t care where you live in the state.
Airlie Ward: Hello and welcome to a TassieCast check-in. I’m Airlie Ward, and although I’m on break over summer, I wanted to pop into your podcast feed and introduce you to Elena. She’s from Hobart and is this year’s local winner of ABC Heywire, the annual storytelling project that gives young Australians a platform to share their voices. Elena’s story is about obsessive compulsive disorder, a duck and why seeing her experience on screen was such a big deal. Check it out.
Elena (Heywire Winner) : If you mess it up, you do it again. If you miscount, you do it again. If it doesn’t feel right, you do it again. I haven’t always had obsessive compulsive disorder, OCD. It started when I was 12. We had just moved from Flinders Island to mainland Tassie. Suddenly I was the new kid at a massive school and my grades plummeted. But that’s not when the OCD started. I was caring for a little wood duckling at home, one we had rescued. It followed me everywhere. I’d tap my feet a certain way and it would know we were moving. Duckles, its name was. We had planned to give it a proper name. But before we could, there was an accident. I remember my mum coming inside, telling me through tears that Duckles was dead. That night, the OCD started. It presented mostly as ritualistic behaviours. I had to tap my feet a certain way, walk up the stairs a certain way, brush my teeth and get ready for bed a certain way. It felt like if I didn’t, something bad would happen. I knew it made no sense, but I was too afraid not to. My parents noticed the behaviours almost as soon as they began. The new behaviours followed me to school. My friends thought I was getting lost or confused because I’d stopped to rewalk where we’d just been. I tried to excuse it by pretending I dropped something. Anytime I went upstairs, I had to drag my feet. All of my leather shoes got absolutely stuffed. The first time I heard anyone really talk about OCD was during an episode of You Can’t Ask That. As they talked about their experiences, I realised, oh, that’s me. And suddenly there were other people who understood what I was going through. I wasn’t just crazy. Knowing that I wasn’t alone helped me recover, along with the support of my parents and psychologist. I still have a long way to go, but I’ve definitely improved a lot over the last five years. I can leave my ritualistic behaviours behind when I leave the house now, and my shoes are a lot better for it. Having OCD is hard, talking about it is hard, but not as hard as having it and thinking you’re crazy and alone. So if sharing my experience helps someone else living with OCD, then I’ll do it again and again and again.
Airlie Ward: That was Elena, Hobart’s winner of ABC’s annual Heywire Project. If you’d like to hear more stories from young people across Australia, head to abc.net.au/Heywire. I’ll be back in the new year with more regular episodes of ABC Tassiecast. But in the meantime, you can always jump on the ABC Listen app to catch up on past episodes covering everything that matters most to Tassie. Until next time, cheers.
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