That Time I Killed (My Obsession with) a Rockstar

How I healed my OCD diagnosis with "SymbolSpeak" — and how you can, too

I’m about to expose myself like never before.

But hey, we’ve already talked about overcoming porn addiction, mommy issues, and surviving child abuse… so what’s another self-disclosure? 🤷🏽‍♀️🤸🏽‍♀️

And unlike those past disclosures (where I shared my journey to remind you that healing is possible), this time, I’m sharing my story to teach you how to heal yourself.

See, I used a method I call SymbolSpeak, which I’ve developed through direct trial-and-error, tested thoroughly on myself, and successfully applied to heal 17 years of menstrual pain, overcome crippling phobias, and resolve relationship issues… just to name a few things.

We’ll get to that soon.

First, here’s the story:

I was obsessed with a celebrity for years.

Let’s call him Charlie.

I first encountered his music at age 12. Little did I know how things would spiral from there.

When I say I was obsessed, I mean obsessed.
Not in the cute, “infatuated” sense of the word… but in the debilitating, pathological, “I eventually got diagnosed with OCD because of this” sense of the word 😭

I thought about Charlie constantly.

Not an hour of my life went by where I didn’t have at least one invasive thought about him. But more often, it was like a steady stream of mundane thoughts, ever-present in the back of my mind:

What’s he doing right now?
Where is he?
What’s he thinking about?
What if he were here right now?

Charlie was like the soundtrack of my life, incessantly droning in the background while I ate, showered, ran errands…

every single minute…

of every single day…

for years.

Hantise (Obsession) (1894) by Odilon Redon

Let’s be clear: I didn’t want to have these thoughts. My own mind felt like an enemy, invading my head with thoughts (upon thoughts, upon thoughts!!!) that I couldn’t stop, no matter how hard I tried.

Know what made it even worse? He was actually an acquaintance of mine.

As in, he added me on Facebook after I did a cover of one of his songs.
As in, we chatted online here and there.
As in, I helped him with a creative project, and he helped with one of mine.
As in, we hung out once, and he invited me to an upcoming event at his house (that by a strength only God can give, I declined attending).

So no, I wasn’t some psychotic who had an imaginary relationship with a celebrity and believed they were speaking to me through the TV or anything like that — but I was aware that such people existed, and I feared being perceived as one of them… which made it impossible to talk about the obsession with anyone.

So I tried, stupidly but sincerely, to figure it all out on my own.

Melancholy III (1902) by Edvard Munch

I asked myself:

• Where were these obsessive-compulsive thoughts coming from?

• Why couldn’t I make them stop?

• Why was my brain obsessed with him and not one of my other pseudo-celebrity acquaintances?

• I wasn’t attracted to him, so why did I think about him even more than I thought about my actual boyfriend?

Then, I tried answering all those questions by myself…

…but unfortunately, each question I asked would only lead to more questions. The more I thought about thinking-about Charlie, the more complex and “sticky” the thoughts became.

Desperate, I consumed even more of his music and writing, thinking maybe there was some answer or meaning I’d missed between the lines, but to no avail.

Eventually, my mental landscape became an increasingly tangled red-stringed wall of elaborate but incoherent theories…

…until I genuinely did feel crazy.

On top of the obsession itself, I lived in a constant state of dread that I might lose control one day, open our Messenger chat, and confess everything to him — every thought, every feeling, every embarrassing theory.

If that exposure ever happened, I would never recover from the shame.

Chance Meeting at the Park with a Key-Keeper

I suffered silently with this excruciating secret until one day in 2020, when walking around Green Lake in Seattle. I saw a man sitting on a bench with a handmade sign that said “Have a conversation with me.”

So I sat with him, and we talked for hours until the sun set and everyone else went home.

What did we talk about?

OCD.

He confided that he’d been diagnosed with OCD, and that it’s not what most people think it is.

“Most people are familiar with the version of OCD that makes you act compulsively — turning lights on and off, washing your hands too much, that sort of thing,” he said. “But there’s a type of OCD called ‘Pure O,’ or Pure Obsession, where the thoughts themselves are the compulsion. So you feel like you can’t stop thinking the Obsessive thoughts, no matter how much you want to.”

He gave some examples: some people with ‘Pure O’ OCD have compulsive intrusive thoughts about stabbing their spouse, crashing their car into a wall, or harming children.

Little did this park-bench-stranger know, but he had just handed me a Key to my healing.

See, at this point, I had developed multiple obsessions. It wasn’t just Charlie anymore. Now, I was also experiencing intrusive thoughts about more disturbing things… like cutting my own head off, Chhinnamasta-style.

I had encountered this self-decapitating Hindu “goddess” only briefly, but my brain decided to get stuck on her gruesome imagery.

I wasn’t suicidal, and again, I didn’t want these thoughts — but I couldn’t make them stop.

And like with the Charlie obsession, I was terrified that I’d lose control and act on these thoughts, against my own will.

When I found a news article about a man who actually did attempt to cut his own head off in devotion to Chhinnamasta, I realized this was no longer a problem I could “live with.”

This OCD thing could literally kill me.

It was time to get help.

“Help”

So, after this chance meeting, I went to a church for the first time in a decade and asked them to pray for me, thinking I’d become demon-possessed. Sadly, that didn’t work. The obsessions continued.

But there was hope! Because now, I had a word for my problem: OCD! So I went looking for therapists who specialize in OCD.

You can probably guess what happened next.

Just like how allopathic medicine didn’t do shit for my menstrual pain, it didn’t help my OCD either.

I felt dismissed by my Zoom therapist (who seemed to think I couldn’t see him playing with his phone off-screen while I cried to him about how much my thoughts scared me). All he really did was recommend a book about OCD, which I immediately ordered and hungrily read.

But the book basically said that “your obsessive thoughts are meaningless. Don’t identify with them. Remind yourself that they’re just thoughts, then detach and let them go.”

Umm… excuse me???

Meaningless????

Fuck no.

Something in me, knew better.

I knew there was a reason my brain had chosen Charlie, of all things, to religiously fixate on for years — and later, Chhinnamasta.

Of course it meant something.

But what?

The Penitent Magdalen by Georges de La Tour

Enter SymbolSpeak

2 years ago, it finally occurred to me that I might be projecting myself onto Charlie.

Stepping back to observe the progression of this obsession, I realized that though I had been a fan of Charlie since age 12, the obsession with him didn’t start until I was 18.

What else happened at age 18? I stopped singing.

Though music had been my life growing up, I repressed my “inner musician” for many reasons, mostly having to do with trauma and low self-esteem.

Feeling fractured, my psyche then found a way to signal its deep desire to re-integrate my “inner musician” back into my Consciousness, by choosing Charlie as a conduit for the symbolic message.

The key was for me to realize I was not actually “looking at” or even “thinking about” Charlie. I was actually projecting aspects of MYSELF onto him that I’d disowned in myself and thereby forgot had originated in me.

The rockstar confidence I thought only he had, was actually my own.
His talent, also my own.
His ambition, passion, drive — also mine, also mine, also mine.

Charlie wasn’t special, and in fact, neither was I. I just wanted to make music — a very basic human desire!

But somewhere along the way, I adopted the erroneous belief that he had some special music-making privilege that I didn’t have (and therefore could only experience vicariously through him).

Thus, my obsessive “consumption” of his Art was my attempt to become “like him” — not realizing that the only satisfying way to integrate “his” qualities was to become MYSELF again!

That’s the key: Even if I’d devoted myself completely to his Art, for example by surrounding myself with posters of him like a fucking serial killer (LOL), this still wouldn’t have “satisfied” my mental hunger, because Charlie was never the true object of the obsession.

Charlie was a symbolic representation of the true object of the obsession, which was my own repressed Self.

This is how it works with anyone in our lives we envy, hate-watch, judge, or feel triggered by. They are not the issue.

They are the signpost, pointing us back to our Inner World to resolve the real issue there.

And contrary to what modern mental health rhetoric would have us believe, the brain is not a strictly physical, computer-like mass that “glitches” for no reason. There is always a meaning and wisdom behind its mysterious functions — no matter how seemingly absurd or insane — that we will find, if we first dare to seek.

Angel of the Revelation (Book of Revelation, chapter 10) by William Blake.

Alternate Universe

Before developing the SymbolSpeak process, I intuitively understood that because the Unconscious “speaks” to us in symbols, we can “speak back” using those same symbols. Thus, Symbolic Issues need Symbolic Resolutions. This is essentially what Magick is.

Art-making is one way we can Resolve an Issue Symbolically.

So I tested this theory on the Chhinnamasta obsession by writing a whole poetry book about her, and wouldn’t you know it? The obsession stopped!

Do you understand what a big deal it is that I successfully stopped an obsession about cutting my own head off by making Art?! Especially after being told that my obsessions were “meaningless”?

This wasn’t just any Art, by the way — but Magick Art that brought me back into my power. It’s one thing to make Art that just “vents” for catharsis. It’s another thing entirely to make Magick Art that ritually alchemizes our Unconscious “lead” into Conscious “gold.”

Now that I knew the power Art had to make the Unconscious Conscious, I decided to test this “SymbolSpeak” process on the Charlie obsession.

It just so happened that I was in the middle of producing my first album at the time, RUN RABBIT RUN!, and the original ending-song just didn’t feel like “the one.”

So now, with a surge of inspiration, I decided to “bring an end” to this obsession once and for all, by writing a new ending-song about being the rockstar that, prior to this moment, I had only allowed Charlie to be.

And I chose to scream in the song — something that I’d previously felt silly doing, but now saw as a necessary symbolic expression of my own power and shamelessness.

I screamed,

I’m not your fucking groupie
I’m not your fucking fan
It’s my turn in the spotlight
I am the fucking band

Then I sang, sincerely,

Thank you for the pleasure
Thank you for the pain
Thank God I figured out that
we really are the same

In both the wild screaming and the melodious singing, I meant every word.

One step remained in this Symbolic Resolution: to put the album out into the world.

So I did. Now I was officially a musician. No longer held back by fear or self-doubt, I gave myself the gift of fearless self-expression, freeing myself to make the music I always wanted to make. I’ve been making music ever since.

As a result, my obsession with Charlie finally faded.

I rarely think about him anymore.

I am officially free from the obsession that once dominated my life — no medication or psychotherapy required.

All it took was to recognize that my Unconscious was attempting to speak with me through the Symbolic landscape of my life, and then to Consciously respond in that same Symbolic language, thereby “bridging the gap” between my Unconscious and Conscious and bringing them back into a state of unification.

The best part is: You can do this too.

I’ll teach you how:

My course, SYMBOLSPEAK: Decrypting and Rescripting Reality for Health, Wealth and Happiness, is live now! Click here 😁

If you want to “test drive” the course first, you can take my mini-course, QUESTIONS: THE KEY TO THE UNIVERSE, which is an excerpt from SymbolSpeak:

This offering has been a lifetime in the making. Every awful trauma and ordeal I’ve ever been through, has helped me refine the soul-medicine shared in this course. I truly hope it’s as healing for you as it has been for me.

Love,

~Alicen Grey