The Mind of an (Almost) Typical Girl

I want to start by confessing that I am not publishing this book under my full legal name. Grace is my name, but not all of it. It is not that I am ashamed of who I am. I am proud of how I live with OCD and mild autism and anxiety. What I am not proud of is how people treat other people with these disorders. I love this cause, but I am not ready to be a martyr for it. I think that the best thing I can do for myself and other mentally ill people is live a normal life and writing under this name allows me to do that. I have many reason for writing a book like this, or rather collecting the materials to publish it. Among them are the fulfillment of a childhood dream to be a published author, but that’s not the main reason I decided to write this book at this time. I’ve been through a lot in my life, but the hardest part of everything was always how alone I felt and how hard I found it to explain how I was feeling. It took me years, my whole life really, to be able to talk about things in the way I do now. I understand more than most people that years can be too long to wait for understanding. I hope that, by writing this book, people will have something to point at and say “this is how I feel” or “read this if you want to understand.” I never had that. There wasn’t that piece of material for me to point to so I began writing my own. I wanted to be able to tell people how situations felt to me. I worked very hard and poured over metaphors, some seen more than once in the course of the book, to explain different feelings. I made my own material. When you read this, please try to forget that I have bad OCD and that I’m very mildly autistic and that I suffer from anxiety. When you read this, please try to see me as a person. Just another person. Please try to relate to me as a person, not a person who has OCD or autism or anxiety. That’s where I believe true understanding will begin.