Jamie Mittelman ’10 found that managing mental illness meant not only facing her fears of death, but also finding life.

In December 2023, Mittelman shared her story as part of the “Purpose and Place: Voices of Middlebury” event during the Boston launch of For Every Future: The Campaign for Middlebury.

Listen to Mittelman’s talk above or read the transcript below.

Transcript

I really didn’t want to like Middlebury. My dad had gone there. My brother was currently there, but I visited and I fell in love with it. You all get it, as do both of my siblings, and both of their Middlebury spouses.

It is the end of August, my parents are moving me into my Battell cinderblock of a closet, and I’m pumped. I’m walking onto the soccer team. Now, growing up, soccer was my happy place. It’s where I was my biggest me. My dad had been my coach, and many of my greatest memories were playing the game. 

So, I’m ready to go. The next day, it’s the fitness test, and I come in first place. Hell, yeah. The next day, we actually start to play soccer, and I notice how the coach is talking to some people and my gut drops. I start to freeze. I’m cut, and I’m crushed.

The next year, I make the team and I expect my anxiety, these fears, to go away, to dissipate. I made it, but they get worse. I’m now puking before practices. I’m in the locker room an hour before practice, before games, repetitively checking my shin guards, my cleats, making sure everything’s in the right place. I can’t sleep at night. 

Now it is the summer after, the team has just gotten back from a trip to Germany, and I’m in the kitchen with my mom. I’m bawling my eyes out. I’m not telling her about the awesome things we did in Germany. No, no. I’m telling her I goofed this play. I missed this ball. I messed up this pass. Her eyes start to well up, and she reaches for my hand, and she says, “Jamie, we’ve got to get help for this.”

What she sees in me that day is what I was later diagnosed with, obsessive compulsive disorder, or OCD, which is manifest by intrusive, obsessive thoughts and rituals that have the ability to take over your life. And that’s exactly what happened to me.

So growing up, sport and soccer in particular had been my coping mechanism. At Middlebury, soccer became the trigger. 

Now, to be clear, I knew OCD, my thoughts, my rituals, they were irrational, but a part of me thought if I did not do them, that something really bad would happen to my loved ones.

So, that summer, I start the excruciating process of desensitization, of weaning myself off of these thoughts, off of these rituals. My first night of therapy, I go home to family dinner, I sit down at the table, and I do not touch the silverware. My dad is directly across me. The knife is pointing at him. 

Now, growing up, to me, a knife pointing at someone across the table means that that person’s going to die. What I do that night, I do not flip the knife around like I’ve done my entire life. I fist up my hand, I put it in my lap, and I breathe. That night I go to bed wholeheartedly convinced that my dad’s going to die because of my inaction. I toss and I turn. I cannot sleep. I wake up the next day, and what do you know? Dad’s fine. 

But I had to do this for each of my rituals, and I had about 20 of them. So, day in and day out, cutting them back, tossing and turning at night, cutting them down, tossing and turning in fear. I did this the rest of that summer, my junior year at Middlebury, the summer before my senior year. 

Then I went back to Middlebury and I thought, “Hey, I’m going to tell my besties what’s going on.” They were pissed. I had hidden this massive part of me and this was a huge deal. They were incredibly grateful that I had finally let them in. To be honest, things got a lot easier, because I was no longer carrying this on my own.

So, by the time I graduated Middlebury, I was well on my way to beating this thing. But the day I knew I actually beat my OCD was the saddest day of my life. My family was at home and we were gathered around my parents’ bedroom, and we had just lost my dad to brain cancer. 

That night, I went to bed next to my mom in our parents’ bed. Now, to me, this was the ultimate desensitization, because I realized in that moment when I’m lying in bed, my younger self never could have done this. But it was through my love of my dad and then wanting to be there with my mom that I made myself get over my fear of death.

Now, my journey with OCD is not over yet. Just about a year later, I’m with my mom. We are in our kitchen in rural Colorado, about three miles away from the nearest home. We’re making breakfast. She’s making her great green goodness smoothie, and she walks over to me.

Her chest is heaving, her eyes are bulging, she’s in immense pain, and she says, “Jamie, I’m going to go lie down. I’m going to take a nap.” 

Immediately I launch into action. This is not naptime. I’m on the phone with 911, I’m sending them our GPS coordinates. Meanwhile, my Tevas are on, we’re walking out the door. My brother Andy, who’s a doctor, is on the phone. He’s telling me exactly what to do. I’m monitoring her skin color, making sure her oxygen intake is okay. We are driving down the mountain, crossing double yellow lines.

And finally, when we get to the ambulance, I take a very narrow, deep breath. And seven hours later, the emergency room nurse calls me and says, “Jamie, your mom’s going to be okay. She had a 2% chance of survival, and every second of her way here really did matter.” 

Now, this is the first time in my life where I think that my OCD, this thing that I have been distancing myself from my entire life, had actually been my boot camp. It had been my training, because in the moment when I needed it most, I could show up for my mom, because I had obsessed about that actual moment, so I knew exactly what to do. 

In that moment, I realized that my OCD, this thing that I had hated, I had hidden, I had beaten, maybe it was actually my superpower.