All That’s Left is the Hum of the Ocean
Callie Shaw
October 13th, 2025
“How will I get better if I genuinely don’t think I want to?”
Seven months ago, I sat in a beach chair at T Street. Bundled in a navy Fisherman’s sweatshirt that smelled like home, I watched the familiar winter waves ebb and flow. They crashed, flooding out to shore with a sense of urgency, then, as soon as it arrived, receded back to the place of true anonymity - the vast, seemingly never-ending ocean.
Toes burrowed in the cold February sand, I wrote in my journal about how three days prior, I flew home from Chicago with no set return flight - just the goal of beginning to recognize myself again. I remember the way I felt on that gloomy Monday morning - defeated, confused, scared. I had lost myself again, lost myself to the voices that live in my brain and convince me I don’t care… don’t care about feeling happy again, don’t care about being me again, don’t care about moving forward. At the bottom of those journal pages, I wrote in shaky handwriting: “How will I get better if I genuinely don’t think I want to?”
Today, I sit at my desk in my new apartment, watching the leaves change through my windows - a reminder of the unavoidable consistency of time. Somehow, someway - I moved forward. It wasn’t that one day I woke up and had a moment of clarity re: wanting to “get better.” It was more that I, and those who love me, forced myself to wake up each day and move through the motions - often lethargically, resentfully, angrily, anxiously - but moving, nonetheless.
Seven months ago, sitting in that beach chair, I didn’t know that I would go back to intensive treatment - this time for a new, unfamiliar kind of OCD: Existential OCD. I didn’t know that I would relearn the ways I had accidentally let OCD walk through the doors of my life again, inviting her inside and pulling up a chair, waiting on her hand and foot, as if she were some incredibly poetic guest whose words became biblical to me. I didn’t know that my feeling of “not wanting to get better” wasn’t actually mine - but was one so deeply entrenched in the depths of my hurting brain, one that was rooted in the fear that “getting better” meant continuing to live, and continuing to live meant one day facing the reality that all life ends, regardless of how fully you choose to experience it.
Existential OCD, in the simplest terms, means my brain gets stuck, spiraling endlessly on big life questions that don’t have clear answers. What if life has no real meaning? What if I never feel motivated or fulfilled again? What if even the things I love can’t reach me because my mind won’t quiet - and I’m left endlessly questioning whether I’m living the “right” life at all?
The intensity of those thoughts - the speed of the spirals, the fear of choosing “wrong,” the constant awareness of my own thinking - made it easy to fall back on the idea that if I had to feel this way for “forever,” I couldn’t do it for another day.
And yet I did. I did it every day - day after day, week after week, month after month. Life has thrown some serious shit at me and the ones I love most in this world in the past few months - dancing with death, pain, fear, change. I won’t lie and pretend to have already found all the silver linings hidden amidst the daily heaviness I carry. But I also won’t lie and pretend that joy doesn’t simultaneously exist in these days, weeks, months, if you let it.
I have shared full, hearty meals with my most prized people.
I have had dance parties in dimly lit rooms that glow with life and laughter and memories.
I have taken guitar lessons, learned to paint, cooked new recipes, made new friends.
I have travelled - I have seen the homes of the people who are my home, I have shared my home with the people who have become my family.
I have listened to music - new music, old music, music that reminds me of moments from the past, and music that helps me envision moments that I will one day meet.
But most importantly - I have moved forward. I have done it scared, done it tired, done it overwhelmed. I have stepped bravely into this new knowing of myself, of my brain, and met it with gratitude, hugging this newer, older, sometimes wiser version of Callie. I will hold tight to her, for as long as I get to, because she showed up for me when I couldn’t show up for myself. She stepped in and buoyed me, long before I even knew she might exist.
The loud crashes of life have yet to quiet or slow. The rolling whitewash pounding on shore with all its might, chasing my toes that sink into the sand. It rushes to meet me at the shoreline - only to quickly dissolve back into the deep, unknown, boundless body of blue. And I am me, again, waiting patiently for the next wave to steepen in its rhythmic pattern of push and pull.
I love this sound of waves crashing on the beach - it reminds me that I am still young, and that I am capable of the things I think I am not. That when the world quiets and all that’s left is the hum of the ocean, I will be there, sitting in a beach chair and enjoying the company of myself, as she is, in that perfectly uncertain moment.
