- Date posted
- 2y
on the other side of this
i first learned i had ocd in mid-august. i’ve been dealing with so-ocd since early july. i could tell you the exact moment it hit me: it was a comment a friend of mine made about my dating life. they said they thought i might be aromantic. i cant tell you exactly why, but i freaked out over this. i suppose the idea of being perceived differently than i saw myself struck me as significantly threatening. i remember walking into the bathroom in a panic, mentally reviewing every crush i ever had to scour my brain for any proof of my friend’s observation. i remembered a boy i liked in second grade. i remember thinking he might confess to me and being so nervous that i ran away from him. looking back now, it seems so obvious. i was a kid. of course i was nervous. i was 8. but at the moment it hit like a lightning strike. a bomb went off in my brain. i hunched in on myself and asked, so anxious i was nearly nauseous: “am i gay?” and was sucked inside my own brain for the next several months, completely detached from happiness or reality. i don’t have to tell you guys how awful it was. you all know. i did everything. i went on lgbt+ reddit forums, desperately trying to compare my experiences to them or to see where we differed. i compulsively watched porn. i read the lesbian master doc upwards of maybe twenty different times. i cried. had panic attacks. couldn’t eat. took every single sexuality quiz i could find. read up on sexual fluidity. ruminated constantly, imagining different sexual scenarios and seeing which ones i liked best. all the while, i was so confused. i knew, logically, that i was acting completely irrationally, but more than anything, i wanted to scrape the doubt from my chest where it lingered persistently, taunting me. i *knew* my answer, yet at every turn, it was snatched away from me. it was like sisyphus rolling a boulder up the hill. everytime i was 99% there, another “what if” question had me back down on the bottom, hopelessly confused. it wasn’t until i accidentally came across an ocd article that i realized what i had been dealing with. i remember bursting into tears when i saw it because i finally felt seen. i was looking for the perfect label to encompass the truth of my sexuality (because why else would i have these doubts if they were not, on some level, true?) but it was in reading about a mental disorder that something resonated with me. still, though, i was so stuck in the process of rumination that getting me out of it seemed almost impossible. i was of two minds: on one hand, i knew i had ocd. i was diagnosed. i was proactive about getting diagnosed. on the other, what if? what if, what if, what if? what if it wasn’t ocd? what if it was ocd AND a sexual identity crisis? didn’t i owe it to myself and my future partner to know? it was irresponsible not to, i told myself. like dr. greenberg said, i was only justifying my addiction to certainty. i was willingly and happily making myself worse in the name of “self-discovery.” i’ve been here for a while. many of you have probably seen my worst moments. my ocd has ebbed and flowed between being absolutely unbearable to being moderately okay. but it wasn’t until recently that i really, really started to see the futility in this. i was driving myself insane over hypotheticals that literally may never happen. i was putting myself in every single imagined scenario to see how i would react, knowing that those situations were fake, a product of my neuroses. i was engaging in some kind of twisted form of self-harm, deliberately making myself uncomfortable and distressed in the name of problem-solving. and for what? because i didn’t trust myself? because i didn’t trust my wants? because i was scared of making decisions i know i didn’t want to make? it was futile. all of it was futile, almost laughably so. i knew myself and yet i engaged in this torture anyway because, what if? what if, what if? it was stupid. i hear a lot from sufferers and specialists alike about acceptance and uncertainty, and i get it. those are important. but in this case for me, at least, it was understanding that i didn’t need to give a shit. i needed to get over myself. i had to stop being such a control freak. i had to learn to trust future-me to do what she wanted to do. i had to take the stick out of my ass and see the forest for the trees and dedicate myself to living again. i won’t lie to you and say that the instinct to check isn’t still there, but everytime it rises back up, i tell myself: what’s the point? what’s the fucking point? i’m not gonna be satisfied with the answer anyway. i wasn’t the first few thousand times i did it. and i won’t be the next thousand times i do it either. so yeah. i still can’t tell you with 100% certainty what my sexuality is, but that’s okay. i also cant tell you with 100% certainty that i won’t die immediately after posting this. it’s fine. it’s all gonna be fine. you all have the strength to see past your ocd’s taunting and return back to yourselves. i believe in you💖