My name is Alexandra. I want to share my story with you, as I am not sure I have OCD, but reading the different forms it can take on your website and others, it really clicked for me. This started a few years ago and I have not realized until now that it might be OCD. I was in a very stable relationship with my now-fiance and something just triggered my relationship-OCD. I randomly started having this thought that I was going to fall in love with his best friend, or with anyone. I was scared that when I will start a job, I will fall in love with someone at the office so I became really alert with who I engaged with. Regarding his best friend I started having this phrase in my head constantly “I love… “. It scared me out so bad, because I knew it wasn’t true, but at the same time it made me unsure of my feeling. I started questioning everything, if I love him, if he is beautiful enough, funny enough, if he is the right choice, if our kids would be beautiful. I would sometimes cry when we had sex because I was feeling so guilty that I had those thoughts. As a compulsion, I started replacing the obsession “I love *his best friend*” with my fiance’s name. I would force myself to not think that. However, it fade away after aprox. 2 years and my fiance proposed to me back in June. Apart from the excitement I felt, I was scared that my thoughts never really got away and I was still unsure of what they meant and a feeling of guilt covered me. 2 weeks after our engagement, I started to look out for this symptoms online and I stumbled across relationship-OCD and ERP therapy. I thought this is what I needed and I tried to talk with my fiance that I wanted to see a therapist, without giving him all the details, because I was ashamed and scared that he would not understand and leave me. He thought it was not necessary because I didn’t give him all the details and for him it didn’t make any sense. One night I started feeling really bad, it was a feeling of depression, like something sucked all the joy in me and began feeling really scared for no aparent reason. I fell asleep really hard that night and randomly had this thought “you should kill yourself”. The next morning I was feeling the exact same way and I didn’t know what was happening and almost passed out in the bathroom. I didn’t think it had anything to do with those thoughts. First I thought it was just a calcium drop, then I was scared that I had depression, because the thought of suicide just got stuck in my head ever since. I was so scared I would kill myself. I looked at the balcony and thought I would jump, I imagined how I am gonna strangle myself, how I am going to cut my veins and so on. I would try to shave and I would be scared to hold the shaver because I thought that I would use it to harm myself. I started doing psychotherapy immediately after I had this breakdown and it helped me a lot, but these thoughts, however, never dissapeared. I still have them and actually they’ve taken so many forms as an existential OCD. I started thinking what’s the meaning of life, if it’s just work, seeing friends from time to time and have a vacation once a year. Then I thought I was living in a simulation and had really nasty feeling of depersonalization and derealisation. I was asking who really are those people around me, I was questioning the existence of my parents as my parents or just as strangers who are supposed to be “mom” and “dad”. I also had feelings that I was never asked to be born and now I am here and forced to live a live. That I “have to”. These thoughts scared me out so bad. Some fade away, as the realtionship-OCD ones, but some still stick around and somehow, it’s always something new that revolves around life. Currently, I have this question in my head “do I really want to live?”. Or this idea that “life is monotonous and boring and the same thing happens everyday and it’s not really something great”. I wake up with this question and very often I try to confront my thoughts or to give it reasons that I would never kill myself or that life is worth it etc. But I think this maked it worse, because those obsessions still come back. I am scared of this, because I LOVE LIFE. I am the kind of person who enjoys the little things, that finds pleasure in doing the most boring activities. I am not like that and I don’t know what happens to me or why this happened, but I want my life back. I sometimes say to myself, when I really have good time “please don’t think something bad about this”. There are moments when I am just thinking about how I will enjoy my coffee tomorrow and my brain just goes “so what? You did that yesterday too. It’s worthless”. It sucks away all the joy. I want to overcome it.