Hi, I'm Otto. Welcome to Ellen Sarah's podcast.

We are very excited to have you on our podcast because relationships and anxiety, these are

things that are very popular topics on our podcast. Our listeners are really paying attention.

You wrote a book that has a fantastic, fantastic title called overthinking about you, navigating

romance, relationships when you have anxiety, OCD, and or depression. So I mean, it's

like we basically just read the book front to back on the podcast because I think every

single page is going to be fascinating for people. But will you give everyone an understanding

of like how you got to the point of writing this book? Why you wrote the book? Like give

us your story. Yeah. So I actually got diagnosed with OCD when I was four years old. So

four? Yes. Oh, my God. Wait, I'm sorry. I'm about to ask how old you are. Yeah. I'm about

to turn in June. I'm turning 33. 33. Okay. So I'm just thinking about like the 80s, the 90s,

like I'm trying to think of when kids were getting diagnosed with stuff and that seems like

early. Yeah. It was really early and it was also incredibly early to be put on medication

for it as a kid. But my case was kind of so severe that my parents were like really proactive

about it and you know, didn't listen to like the societal stigma and put liquid pros

act in my apple juice. And what kind of stuff were you doing that it was so obvious you had OCD?

So I had something called pandas, which basically means that I had strep throat and then the

strep throat activated the OCD in my brain. So it came on pretty strongly where my behavior

changed so quickly. My parents thought that I might have had a brain tumor. Oh, my God. I've

never heard of anything like this. Yeah. It's honestly a lot of mental health professionals aren't

even that familiar with it. But it is a thing that happens. I mean, I feel pretty confident

now feeling like I would have developed OCD at some point in my life just due to my genetics.

...