A Negotiation with the Uninvited: What OCD taught me about boundaries, bugs, belonging

Fellow Seekers-

There is a particular kind of freeze that people with OCD know well. It is not the stillness of meditation. It is not the pause before a wise decision. It is the moment when the distress becomes so large and the choices so many that the mind simply — stops. Locks. Goes white.

I know this freeze. I have known it since I was young. And this past season, it came for me in my garden.

The Loss

The four-lined plant bug found my peppermint.

If you have not encountered this insect, know that it is small, fast, and thorough. It does not simply nibble. It devastates. What it left behind on my peppermint — the leaves stippled, curled, brown at the edges, the plants listing sideways like they had given up — looked like a kind of grief made visible. Because it was.

That mint patch is not just a planting bed to me. It is a place I have tended for years. It holds relationships — with the Land, with the small spirits that have made their home in and near that patch, with the medicine I have made from those leaves and offered to people I love. To stand in front of what the bugs had done and feel the full weight of it was to feel something more than gardening disappointment. It was genuine loss.

I pulled up the plants. There was no saving them. I stood there with dirt on my hands and felt the freeze descend.

The Freeze

Here is what I want you to understand about OCD, especially if you don't live with it yourself: the distress patterns that OCD generates are not the same as ordinary worry, and they are not the same as heightened attunement to the world. They are their own thing — intrusive, recursive, specific to fear. When something genuinely hard happens, the OCD brain does not respond with sadness and then move toward problem-solving the way a less complicated nervous system might. It responds with a cascade. The loss triggers the distress. The distress triggers scanning for all the ways this is worse than it looks, all the things I should have done, all the choices now branching out ahead of me like a thicket I cannot see through.

What do I do? Replant immediately? Wait? Treat the soil? Kill the bugs? But killing the bugs — the bugs are living things. But not killing them means losing the peppermint again. But pesticides are out of the question. But the organic options — which one, and how often, and what about the other plants, and what about —

And underneath all of it, quieter and more corrosive: Is this my fault? I am a naughty gardener. I plant my mint directly in the ground rather than in containers the way every sensible guide recommends. Did I invite this? Did my stubbornness, my attachment to the way I have always done it, bring this devastation down on the very plants I love? The OCD mind does not just spiral outward into impossible choices — it spirals inward too, looking for the place where you went wrong, the moment you could have prevented everything if only you had been better, smarter, more careful.

And there it is. The freeze.

What I have learned over years of practice, both clinical and spiritual, is that the freeze — as horrible as it feels — is not the enemy. It is a signal. It is the nervous system saying: this matters too much to act on from this place. The compulsive action, the panicked decision, the reaching for whatever will make the feeling stop fastest — that is what causes harm. The freeze, paradoxically, held me.

It created space. And into that space, my practice arrived.

The Ritual

The first movement was grounding.

Not metaphorical grounding. Actual, physical, deliberate contact with the earth beneath me — feet on soil, breath slowed, attention drawn inward and downward before it could spiral upward and outward into the cascade. I moved into energy work from there, letting myself feel what I was actually feeling rather than managing it away. Grief. Anger, a little. The particular tenderness of losing something that held relationship.

I did not skip this step. This is important. The temptation with OCD, and honestly with modern life in general, is to move past the feeling as quickly as possible and get to the solution. But the feeling is part of the ritual. You cannot ask the garden what it needs if you are still standing in your own distress reaction.

When I had settled enough, I asked.

Not what do I do about the bugs. Not how do I fix this. I asked: What do you really need? What does this whole garden need to be healthy and whole?

That shift in question is everything. The first version keeps me at the center, problem-solving, managing. The second version makes the garden the subject, the living system the authority. It is an animist question — it trusts the garden has intelligence, has needs, has something to say. In my experience, it always does.

I brought compost tea as an offering. I sat with the garden and I spoke to them — not at them, with them — about what had happened and what work lay ahead. I prayed. I drummed. I placed protective stones around the hardest-hit areas, not as superstition but as a physical act of intention, a marking of: this place is worth protecting. I am here. I am paying attention.

The ritual did not fix the mint. But it changed the question I was asking, and it changed the ground from which I would act.

The Negotiation

Here is where my animism asks something of me that a purely clinical framework does not: I had to reckon with the four-lined plant bug as a Spirit, not just as a pest.

This is not sentimentality. It is a recognition that every living thing has its own integrity, its own right to exist and move through the world. The individual bugs I find on my plants — yes, I am removing them. I will not pretend otherwise. But the Spirit of the four-lined plant bug, the intelligence and life-force that animates the species itself, is not something I am at war with. It is something I am in negotiation with.

What I am practicing is boundary-setting, not extermination. I am saying: your overabundance here is causing harm to something I am responsible for tending. I need you to recede. This is a negotiation of responsibilities and obligations — the same kind that governs all of my relationships with the more-than-human world. I have obligations to my garden. The garden has a relationship with the bugs. The bugs have their own sovereign existence. These things are all true at once, and acting from within that complexity is what it means to be a practitioner who takes animism seriously.

It is not comfortable. It is not tidy. But it is honest.

The Tending

What followed the ritual has been slow, physical, and ongoing.

I am removing damaged leaves by hand. I am finding and killing individual bugs — yes, I said it — as an act of boundary enforcement, not rage. I am spraying with an organic solution that takes time and consistency to work. I am tending the soil, because the health of the whole garden is what makes individual plants resilient. The peppermint will be replanted later in the season, when the bed is ready.

I will not pretend that consistency comes easily to me. It is the piece I am still working on. OCD can make consistency hard — not because people with OCD are lazy or undisciplined, but because the same nervous system that froze in the face of overwhelm can also struggle to sustain the long, unglamorous middle of a process once the acute distress has passed. There is no dramatic ritual for the fourteenth day of spraying. There is just the spraying.

But I have learned to treat consistency itself as a practice, not a personality trait I either have or don't. I return to the garden. I return to the question of what it needs. I return to my values — no pesticides, no shortcuts that harm the soil, no acting from a place of disconnection from what I actually believe — and I let those values be the structure that holds me when motivation is thin.

This is what the good ritual does, in the end. Not the compulsive ritual — not the checking, the repeating, the performing that OCD demands — but the ritual rooted in relationship and intention. It gives you a framework to return to. It makes the unglamorous middle sacred enough to continue.

What the Freeze Was For

My peppermint bed is still recovering. There are bare patches where the worst-hit plants were. I have not yet replanted. The bugs are still present, though less.

And I am still in relationship with all of it — the soil, the plants that survived, the spirits of that place, the bug whose Spirit I have negotiated with, the medicine that will come again from that bed when it is ready.

The freeze, that terrible white stillness, did not betray me. It stopped me from reaching for pesticide. It stopped me from acting from panic. It gave my practice time to arrive.

For those of us with neurally complex minds, this is perhaps one of the stranger gifts — that our very capacity to be overwhelmed can, when met with the right container, become the doorway into something more thoughtful, more relational, more aligned with who we actually want to be in the world.

The garden asked me to slow down. My nervous system made sure I did.

I am still learning to say thank you for that.

Stay wild and true,
Emily

Emily is a nature-based therapist, community herbalist, and practicing witch based on Mni Sota Makoce, Dakota Homeland. Still Wild Healing offers sessions, sacred tools, and plant ally offerings rooted in animist and earth-based practice.

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