I want to hear your story, your point of view, tell me what happened to you.
Welcome back to Tell Me What Happened, the podcast that features folks from all walks of life telling
us one true childhood story and how that event, that experience, has impacted who they are today.
I'm your host, Jay Rehak, and like every listener out there, I've had my share of childhood traumas,
dramas, and happy stories. And I'd like to think that everything that's ever happened to me has
made me a better person. And everybody, I always tell people, I know that's not necessarily true.
Some of the things that have happened to me have probably worsened me as a person. But that's the
way I like to think. All right, today I have as my guest, Gabby Iori. Gabby is a born and bred North
Carolinian currently living in Baltimore with her partner and two cats. She's a publicist at
Quirk Books and the digital projects coordinator for Witch Pleas Productions, where she is the
video editor and associate producer of Making Worlds. She is a writer, home cook, and storyteller,
and she wants to make you laugh. Welcome to the show, Gabby Iori. Hi Jay, thanks for having me.
Great to have you on the show, Gabby. I know you through my daughter, Hannah, I know you to be
involved actually in podcasting as well as publishing, which is to me extremely cool, especially
since you're a young person and sort of living the artistic dream in a way. Mad respect for you,
that's all. Thanks, that's so nice. Well, listen, Gabby, are you ready to tell your story? I'm ready.
All right, I'm gonna get out of the way. I'm gonna mute myself. At the end, I'll come back and ask a
question or two specifically how you think story that you're about to tell me has impacted who you
are today. But take it away, Gabby. All right, well, funnily enough, I was thinking about this story
on my flight to Chicago when I stayed at your house to meet up with Hannah and the rest of the
Witch-Please team. So it's very full circle that this is happening. But the story I would like to
tell today is about growing up Catholic and the intersection of Catholicism and my OCD diagnosis,
and specifically my first confession in second grade. I was raised Catholic by a Catholic mother
and a Catholic father. Religion seemed to stick more with the with the former, but I grew up
going to Mass every Saturday and it was always a real drag if you know anything about a Catholic
Mass. And I also went to Catechism classes every Tuesday nights at 7.30. And you can tell that
that is a sticking point in my memory because I remember it this many years later. But we had our
first confession, which in Catholicism is referred to as the sacrament of reconciliation,
and it's supposed to be a holy act that essentially purifies the soul after the person doing the
confession shares their sins with a priest. And we had our first one in Catechism class. And it's
important to note that my Catechism class wasn't held at a church. It was held at the Catholic
school that was attached to the church. So I lined up in a hallway with 12 of my other
fellow second graders, and we all individually walked up to an elderly white-haired priest named
Donald. And we looked him in the eyes and told him everything that we had done wrong in our minds.
And I don't know, you know, most people when they think of Catholic confessions, they think of the
actual confessional where it's a little box type thing that you go into and you're sort of hidden
from the priest, you don't have to look him directly in the eyes and you share your sins that way.
So I was hyper aware of all of my friends in Catechism class leaning up against the wall
six feet away from me. And my voice was so low when telling the father my sins that he,
it's a wonder he was able to hear me at all. But after that, I realized how nice it felt to have
a clean slate of a soul, a pure heart and body and mind. And after that, I started to attend a
confession fairly regularly, because this might be a spoiler for anyone who isn't aware of Catholic
Church teachings. But it's kind of the belief that you're morally evil from the start. And
I started to all these thoughts that I was having thoughts about sex, anger with my parents, the
general hormone fueled bitchiness of being a teenager, they all started to feel morally
reprehensible to me. And I started to think, I need to tell someone about this. And so confession
became an outlet for me to become spiritually healed and not be the terrible person that I
believe myself to be. And little did I know that confession is a pretty early symptom of obsessive
compulsive disorder. It's a way to cleanse the mental palate. OCD is a disorder that really
preys on what ifs and the cycles of thought. And for me, it always went, think bad thing,
well, quote unquote, bad thing, think bad thing, confess, be healed, repeat, and it would be
cyclical like that for years. And I was thinking about this on my flight to Chicago, because I
realized that I still say the our father and the Hail Mary before I take off on an airplane,
which is something I've done since I was a kid. It was a really early flight. And so I was thinking
sort of defenselessly. I was like, well, what if I just didn't? And the OCD voice said something
terrible will happen. And I really started to sort of put together the connections that if I
hadn't necessarily been raised Catholic, I might not have OCD or I might not experience it in the
same way. And it was really interesting for me to reckon with because it was such a both things
were such huge parts of my life in ways that I hadn't put together. So Jay, I think that's my
I think that's my Catholic story. Oh my gosh, I it resonates with me so much, Gabby. I
really appreciate you telling it and sort of articulating the way you said it, which was
commit the sin or whatever, confess, feel better, the cycle, you know, and then sin again, repeat,
you know, the whole thing. And I remember as a young boy feeling similarly, which is when I'd
get out of confession for a minute, I go, I am, I'm in good shape, but it wouldn't last very long
to say. So let me ask you, how do you think and you, you began to actually already explain it,
but how do you think that what happened to you as a second grader, your first confession,
very public, by the way, I never had a public confession in my life that would be very painful
to me to have my classmates listening in. But how do you think that second grade first confession
has impacted you as an adult? Yeah, absolutely. So like I said, I have no idea at the time it was
the early 2000s and early 2010s, I had no idea that there was more to obsessive compulsive disorder
than obsessive handwashing and meticulous organization, because that's what was presented
in media. And that's just what I had grown up seeing. So after leaving the church in my 20s,
and finally getting a diagnosis, I realized that I wasn't a fundamentally bad person,
which, as you can imagine, opened life up for me in a way that I hadn't experienced before.
So I feel like that first confession started a really unpleasant arc, a really unpleasant
through line for the rest of my life up until I was about 21, where I would feel morally
reprehensible because I had thoughts, because I was a person who had thought about things, and I
would do my confessions. And eventually, sometimes those confessions turned into
just telling anyone who would listen. I have a vivid memory, not to bring in another memory,
but I have a memory of asking my mom when I was a kid if I could do confession with her,
because we couldn't go to church. And she was like, sure, but it's not going to have the same
effect. And I was like, I don't care, I just need to have it done and get that reassurance that I
wasn't the bad person that I thought I was. So once I left the church and I stopped believing
that I was going to go to hell because I was rude to someone or had an impure thought, that was
another big one for me. I felt like the world opened up for me in a way that I had never
experienced. I have been a journaler ever since I was in my early teens, and I have journal entries
from probably when I was 20 or so and just starting to leave the church and get this diagnosis
and start medication and things like that, where I wrote that it felt like someone had opened the
curtains in my brain and opened the windows. And I was able to feel fresh air for the first time
in my life. And I think people who don't have OCD don't necessarily realize how time consuming it
is to have OCD. So I'm spending so much time checking my thoughts, checking myself, putting
on clothes in the right order so that nothing terrible would happen, things like that. And
then spending an equal amount of time telling everyone about it. And everyone would say,
well, okay. And it was only a big deal to me. So now with the curtains open, I'm able to push those
thoughts away in a way that I've never been able to do before. And I feel like the last four or
five years that I've been medicated and not a practicing Catholic have been some of the most
rich and fulfilling of my life. I love it. I'm so happy for you to peel that away. I think
I have a generic understanding of OCD too, of when washing of the hands or whatever,
or following a certain ritual. And the idea of, unfortunately, the Catholic church and the cycle
of making you feel bad or that we were all born rotten people and all we can do is keep more or
less washing ourselves over and over again is really what they're suggesting is a constant
washing of the brain or whatever. And it can become obsessive compulsive. And I think I'm so happy
you broke out of it. It's leaving me with thoughts of my own ruminations where I
get into continuous cycles of good person. No, I'm a terrible person. No, you know,
and the fact that I think that I'm a good person makes me a terrible person. And the fact that
I'm a terrible person, no, I'm not. That's just my brain telling it. And then you get into,
and as you said, the exhausting quality of the cycle and those people who suffer from genuinely
how hard that must be because just exhausted all the time, I would think. Yeah, a lot of the time,
it's like a constant wheel turning or always spiraling about something. And I've read so many
beautiful books about people living with OCD and more eloquent metaphors than I've come up with.
But it really, it really is so interesting that I didn't put these two things together until
so recently. I was only in Chicago a couple of weekends ago. So you're getting it fresh.
Well, thank you very much. I have to pull back a minute and just say, I started this podcast
four years ago. I was a high school teacher. I was modeling the students that I required everybody
to make a podcast. And they said, well, let me see what you're doing. And I said, all right,
I'll make this podcast. And the reason I made the podcast in my heart was because I wanted to have
young people understand from older people that when you're young, there's a lot of things that
happen to you that you can unlearn or undo or just become aware of. And your story resonates with me
as a helpful story to other young people and older people too. I don't mean that,
but I just want you to know that my audience skews younger. I think there will be somebody out there
who will be touched by what you're talking about and go, oh yeah, I guess I don't have to be.
I guess constantly washing my brain of because it's impossible because we're all thinking people and
you know all this. I don't mean to be preaching or talking about it, but I'm trying to say thank you
because my audience, some of my people in my audience will really resonate like it's
resonating with me. That's what I'm trying to say. Thank you. I really appreciate that because
it's really important to me that if there is someone like me who I could have really used
someone saying this back when I was probably not in second grade, but probably when I was 13, 14,
19, I really would have appreciated hearing this from someone, I think. So I really appreciate
you giving me the chance to talk about it. Thank you. All right. Well, thank you, Gabby. You're a
great story. Great ending. I appreciate it. All right. Well, that's our show. Until next time,
this is Jay Rehack asking you all to please stay safe out there and try not to hurt anybody.