Episode 1: Simone The Not So Fearless

Listen to this episode on spotify: https://creators.spotify.com/pod/show/simone-aliya/episodes/1--Simone-The-Not-So-Fearless-e305dj9

Welcome to the very first episode of Growing in Not Knowing! My name is Simone, and I’m from the US but currently live with flamingos in the south of France. Well, actually living with them would be extremely noisy and make podcasting impossible. But. they’re only about twenty minutes away, and seeing them never fails to delight me. I’ll share more about my love for flamingos another time. For now, c’est parti—that means, here we go. I’m going to take the plunge and get started.

I want to begin by dedicating this podcast to my Grandma Helen, a Holocaust survivor who had undiagnosed OCD, specifically the hoarding kind. She didn’t let anybody into her house for twenty years, so we’d pick her up and bring her over to our house when I was a kid. Once, she opened her door wide enough that I saw a bottle of shampoo on the floor, and I remember thinking, “So that’s why Grandma doesn’t want us in her house. She’s embarrassed by the shampoo on her floor.” I must have been about seven years old. At our house in Boston, we’d sit together, mostly in silence. We held hands, watched “Wheel of Fortune,” ate Junior Mints, drew flowers, and played this card game called King’s Corner with rules she invented. In her Polish accent, she’d say, “Don’t tell nobody nothing.”

I think that, for my Grandma and also my dad, her son, silence was a means of survival. For years, to protect myself, I stayed quiet and hid my battle with OCD. But I’ve come to believe that not somehow sharing our stories is riskier than holding them in the light is. For me, as vulnerable as it feels, talking about my OCD and sharing a different kind of story about myself than the one my ex-fiancée shared about me on social media long ago has been one of the keys to my freedom. Freedom from the chronic guilt, shame, isolation, and fear that come with the disorder. In this first episode, I finally tell somebody something––offering how I came to create this podcast, its meaning to me, and my excitement about helping others with OCD live better with their doubt.

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