I saw Nightmare’s call for creative nonfiction very close to the time that I saw a tweet (from @shiraisinspired), reshared by someone I followed, describing obsessive-compulsive disorder in a way I recognized, in a way that made me feel seen, made me feel not alone. And I’ve often embraced open communication as a form of exorcism, so I thought writing openly about my experience and how ultimately nightmarish it has sometimes been, would be healthy.

As sometimes happen, this essay started with a snippet, a small memory of walking back to my second or third or fourth grade classroom singing that old song about stepping on cracks. How some of us avoided them, already instilled with superstition, and how some, to tempt the gods or fate, did not. I had also been thinking about our collective American nightmare of school shootings, how even with all the awfulness of growing up in the ’80s, we never dreamed what we would face as adults.