The author feels content today.

A stranger at a party was telling me a story about his bike getting stolen, but all I could think about was the knife on the table behind him in my friend’s kitchen, where they’d been cutting limes for beers. It had been left on the cutting board and it terrified me. Even as a friend nudged me to pay attention, I couldn’t get past the potential weapon lurking over his shoulder.

Recently, I had developed an intense phobia of knives completely out of nowhere. Every time I saw a knife, all I could imagine were the bad things that might happen. What if I accidentally cut off my finger, or accidentally cut my partner? I became so afraid that I secretly threw out most of the knives in my house, leaving behind only the blunt ones.

At around the same time, I found a crowbar while out walking and I begged my partner to pick it up and throw it away so that it couldn’t hurt anybody. It was a few months later that I attended the party and had to leave early, exhausted by the fear brought on by the small knife on the counter. I had no idea that it would take six years of treatment and self-understanding before I would be able to own a real set of knives again.

As a child, I felt like I had to do the “right thing” at all times. I simply wouldn’t allow myself to make any mistakes. I was also highly afraid of germs and I couldn’t eat anything that I had touched.

This was exacerbated during anxiety-inducing times like the early days of high school, trying to find a job after college and a few months into my first job in the media industry. In my 20s, I began to suffer from intrusive thoughts like suddenly imagining a bus hitting me. They were very distressing and I was afraid that if I ignored them, they would happen against my will. While I had intrusive thoughts about all kinds of frightening events, the knife phobia felt like one that I could control, as long as I made sure not to use them.

After a few months of working for a major broadcaster, panic attacks took over and I would have to touch my face multiple times a day to make sure that I hadn’t suffered from a stroke. I desperately wanted to leave my job, but my boss didn’t want me to go ― the lack of........

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