This time last year, I was pleading with my parents to get us a tornado shelter. In the meantime, the basement was prepped with pillows, a mattress and blankets under the staircase, and my bags were packed with all the necessities for an evacuation in hopes that my parents would let us move up north for the season. As I readied myself for the earth shattering storm I was convinced was on its way, a familiar knot of dread grew in my stomach. It felt as though preparing for the storm was somehow summoning it. And now that I was convinced I had summoned a storm, I couldn’t snap out of the cycle.
I can remember the exact day my weather phobia started. April 17, 2024, a tornado lockdown at school. Every time it rained, I was transported back to that hallway, shaking and struggling to breathe. I felt like something was wrong with me, because none of my friends seemed to have felt that same sense of terror. They simply thought of it as an excuse to get out of class.
I lived with a sense of impending doom throughout the season. When fall came, I could finally breathe, but I found myself worrying about the next tornado season months in advance.
There were behaviors and routines that I felt the need to do, but I couldn’t explain why. All I knew was that if I didn’t, my brain told me I would summon a tornado.
Walking and kicking the ground on every third step was one of the most frequent compulsions. If I messed up, I had to take three tiny steps back and then start again. I later learned that these compulsions were OCD.
The spring of 2025, tornado season was particularly brutal. I stayed home from school twice and went home early multiple times. But that spring, I also began exposure therapy.
The exposures played a huge part in helping me overcome my phobia. Each time I completed one and nothing terrible happened, I was taught that maybe storms weren’t the end of the world. I was also encouraged to ignore my compulsions, which proved to be very difficult, but ultimately made me less reliant on them and showed that nothing bad would happen if I didn’t do them.
Today, this specific phobia has practically diminished, but it triggered a cycle of obsessive compulsive behaviors and hyper fixations that have severely impacted my life since.
Still, overcoming my weather phobia was a huge win, and it showed me that it was possible to escape the seemingly never ending cycle. Although my anxiety and OCD will probably never go away, I now realize that it is possible to manage it, whereas I used to be convinced that I would be controlled by it for the rest of my life.
In order to conquer my anxiety disorders, it is necessary to keep pushing back against compulsions and stop accommodating my OCD compulsions. I admit that I do still struggle and give in to impulses and try to find ways to reassure myself, and I’m certainly nowhere close to “healed”. But I now know that every time I recognize a compulsion and choose to let it pass, I am one step closer to reclaiming the life I had before the storm.
