Here is something most people don’t know about me: I live with obsessive-compulsive disorder. Along with it come anxiety and depression.
The problem? I look completely fine from the outside.
I have a career, a family, and responsibilities. I show up for people every day, all while my brain can be running a marathon I never signed up for. It doesn’t show on my face. It doesn’t slow my step. But it is always there — some days quiet, some days loud.
I’m talking about it now because I think silence on this has a cost. Not just for me, but for everyone who’s managing the same thing while trying to convince the world they’re fine.
If you’ve never experienced OCD, you probably picture someone who likes things tidy or organized.
That’s not what it is.
OCD are intrusive thoughts that won’t leave. Your brain grabs onto something — sometimes irrational, sometimes terrifying, sometimes totally random — and insists you solve it right now. And if you don’t? The anxiety ramps up until it feels unbearable. The loop is the same regardless of the thought: Figure this out. Fix it. Resolve it.
You know the thought might not make sense. You know the probability is tiny. But your brain doesn’t care about probability. It cares about certainty — and certainty is something life almost never gives us.
The worst part isn’t the thought itself. It’s the loop.
I remember one night in particular. It was late, the house was quiet, I had work in the morning. It had already been an exhaustingly long week. My brain had locked onto something I couldn’t even articulate clearly — not a real problem, not something with an answer. Just a loop that kept cycling, each pass a little more urgent than the last.
I knew it wasn’t rational. I knew exactly what was happening. And it didn’t matter.
I lay there for hours, watching nighttime turn into daytime — running a marathon in my own head. Unable to stop. Unable to sleep. Unable to just let it go.
That’s the part people don’t see.
For a long time, I handled it the way a lot of driven people do: I just kept pushing harder.
Work more. Work harder. Think more. Think harder. Analyze more. Control more variables. Solve the problem.
If you’re used to being capable and high-functioning, it’s easy to convince yourself that mental health should work the same way — that if you apply enough willpower, you can outthink it. You can’t. OCD doesn’t care how disciplined you are. Anxiety doesn’t negotiate with logic. Depression doesn’t respond to reason.
What actually helped was something far less dramatic but far more effective: treatment.
That meant therapy. It meant learning how OCD actually works. It meant building strategies to interrupt the cycle instead of feeding it. And yes, it meant medication. For a lot of people, medication still feels like a last resort, or a sign that something is wrong with you. That used to be me.
I see it differently now.
OCD is a genetic disorder. I didn’t contract it. I was born with it. My brain was wired differently from the start. If your brain chemistry needs support, getting that support isn’t weakness — it’s healthcare. Medication didn’t change who I am; it helped quiet the noise enough to actually use the tools therapy gave me. Neither one was a magic switch. But together, they created space between the intrusive thought and the reaction.
That space changed everything.
Here’s where I want to say something that I don’t think gets said enough — especially in the context of leadership.
OCD doesn’t like uncertainty, and leadership is full of it. Every major decision carries unknowns. There’s always more information you could gather, more perspectives you could weigh, more second-guessing you could do. A brain wired for obsessive thinking can be very good at exploring every possible angle of a problem. The downside is that if you’re not careful, you get trapped in analysis when the moment actually requires action.
Managing OCD has forced me to confront that directly. Therapy isn’t just about quieting intrusive thoughts — it’s about learning when “good enough” really is good enough. It’s about recognizing when you have the information you need, making the call, and moving forward.
But there’s another side to it.
The same mental wiring that creates those loops also creates a deep sense of responsibility. When you’ve spent years examining your own thinking patterns, you develop a habit of questioning assumptions, stress-testing ideas, and trying to understand the consequences of decisions before they’re made. You learn that thoughts are not always facts. You learn how to sit with uncertainty — which is one of the hardest skills a human being can develop.
Leadership shouldn’t be about ego or false certainty. It should be about listening carefully, thinking seriously, and recognizing the weight that decisions carry for other people’s lives.
Living with OCD has made me very aware of that weight.
Living with this has also changed how I see other people.
Millions of people manage anxiety, depression, OCD, and other conditions while raising families, building careers, and contributing to their communities every single day. They’re teachers, engineers, nurses, small business owners, parents, neighbors. The colleague who seems distracted. The parent who seems overwhelmed. The friend who suddenly goes quiet for a while.
You never really know what someone is carrying.
Once you’ve experienced that internal struggle, you stop seeing those moments as weakness. You start seeing them as evidence of how hard people are working to stay in the game. And that changes the kind of leader you can be — if you let it.
There’s still a quiet stigma around mental health in public life.
The expectation is that the people stepping forward should somehow be immune to the struggles everyone else experiences. But true leadership was never about pretending to be invincible. It’s about understanding people — including the parts of life that are hard.
Living with OCD, anxiety, and depression hasn’t stopped me from building a career, raising a family, or stepping forward to run for Congress.
If someone reading this is dealing with the same thing and wondering whether it will hold them back: it doesn’t have to. Treatment helps. Support matters. Asking for help is one of the most human things we can do.
I know the brain I live with isn’t perfect. But it’s the one that makes me curious, persistent, analytical, and deeply determined. Once I learned how to work with it instead of fighting it, I stopped seeing it only as a burden. It’s also a source of strength.
The marathon is still running. It probably always will be.
But I’ve learned how to run it.
This piece was inspired in part by Jason Brown II, candidate for Virginia’s 4th District, whose own openness encouraged me to share mine.
This article was originally published on Ethan Wechtaluk’s Substack. Republished on TANTV News with permission.
