Eisner-nominated creator Lily Williams’s new graphic novel, Exposures (First Second, out now), follows tween Peyton, who is diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder and struggles with its impact on her relationships as she enters exposure therapy. Here, Williams, who has been diagnosed with OCD, reflects on how she brought parts of her own experience to the story and how an early diagnosis could have changed her life.

The first time I remember being “caught” having OCD, I was six. A school lunch lady asked me if I had chickenpox. I didn’t, of course, because I was literally at school when she asked. The takeaway for me wasn’t that I needed to stop picking my skin compulsively or tell someone why I couldn’t stop creating scabs—it was that I needed to be better at hiding the things I couldn’t stop doing.

From age six all the way to my mid-20s, I tried to hide all of my habits. The thing is, kids aren’t great at hiding things. When I got caught, I explained everything away. These habits? Oh, just silly quirks. I’d poke fun at myself, all while secretly knowing it was serious. But I also knew that if I didn’t do my habits, my parents would die a painful death. The problem with doing these things unmanaged—picking skin, tapping corners, repeating things in systems, and putting on ChapStick 23 times every night before bed—is that eventually they all add up and become a nightmarish, unstoppable burden.

This is what happens to Peyton in my graphic novel, Exposures. A big panic attack uncovers all the things she’s been doing in secret. Her parents are confused and her twin sister is worried, but Peyton is panicking. And suddenly, in the heat of the moment, with everybody looking at her, she discovers that none of her habits are helping her anymore. She can’t calm down. Peyton is lucky though. She’s 12. She’s young and resilient, and she is so much braver than she knows. She also has her entire life ahead of her.

I hit that tipping point in my mid-20s. It would take another year to even understand what was really happening and what I could do about it. All my routines became longer, I struggled to do basic tasks (like go to stores and coffee shops), and I slept less and less each night. Eventually, with the help of a wise friend, I found a cognitive behavioral therapist who specialized in obsessive-compulsive disorder therapy. Together, my psychologist and I embarked on intensive exposure therapy for OCD.

Exposure therapy forces you to confront your deepest fears over and over. You do it in the therapist’s office and at home. You go to the places you fear and practice there (alone and with the psychologist). You practice all this while recording your levels of distress in worksheets. You do it so you can feel less afraid. Slowly, the fears become less scary and you delay your compulsions until, one day, you don’t even notice you forgot to tap the corner or count the steps. You learn how to handle the distress that comes with uncertainty and you just... start to live.

While going through this therapy, I couldn’t help but wonder what would’ve happened if I’d been diagnosed as a kid—when six-year-old me, with scabs on my face, learned to feel shame in her habits; or when eight-year-old me wouldn’t take off her “lucky” headband for half a year; or when 19-year-old me got her finger locked in a car door because she couldn’t stop tapping it compulsively. If I’d gotten an OCD diagnosis as a kid, who would I have become as an adult?

When I write, I write for little me. I write for a world I wish existed for me as a kid. I write to honor my pain and make sense of my own experience. And I write because if I tell the stories I didn’t know I needed, maybe it will make the world a little better for another kid.

Kids are already experiencing complicated things, because kids are complex. They, like adults, just need the words and tools to make sense of their lives. They just need the stories to relate to, to laugh at, and to help them contextualize this world. In the process of writing for my younger self, I just happened to meet Peyton.

My future got brighter after I began exposure therapy. Peyton’s future is bright, too. She faces her fears, and despite all of her deeply troubling anxiety, she chooses bravery. As she tells her sister, Taylor, “It’s okay to be scared... being brave isn’t being fearless. It’s doing things in spite of fear.”