- Date posted
- 2y
The way I’d describe my experience with OCD.
TW: Moral scrupulosity There are many ways I can think of describing my experience with OCD and yet none of them can truly do it justice to the non-sufferer. If you have never been held on a death grip by a cycle of rumination, or been detached from all of reality as you know if coming out of that cycle, then I can not do it justice with my writing alone. OCD is one of those things that you cannot truly know until you have experienced it. But I can try, I can try to explain how it feels. I have concluded that it is bleakest war one could ever fight, bleak because it’s me against myself and yet neither of us can truly see things for what they are, like a dark fog clouding all sense of judgement. I have once described it like how I imagine being physically stuck in a liminal space would feel like, a space with no exits, just a backwards and forwards pacing with the extreme urgency to exit but to no avail. It’s a vicious illness, the harder you try to pull yourself out of the darkness, the quicker you sink into it - very much like quicksand. Now, imagine that battle internally, while existing in the outside world as one must, tending to all obligations and errands like every other person, but with this battle on constant repetition every single day inside the mind - that is what life is like for an OCD sufferer. It is brutally testing, and what makes it all the more brutal is the way a sufferer feels like nobody can or would understand. So we end up suffering in silence most of the time. Why does the sufferer feel like that? Why can’t they just talk to a loved one or a friend? Because that’s how OCD thrives, it convinced us nobody can or will understand, the theme is too horrific, too real, too bad to talk to anyone about it. What if it’s not OCD at all?…What if I really am an evil of bad person?…What if I deserve punishment?… What if someone realises I am really a bad person and I do get punished?…How can I figure this out?…How can I truly know? Before you know it, years have passed asking the same questions internally, seeking the same reassurance externally, and fighting the same battles daily. I have often thought, the only way it will truly end is in the grave, and yet I hope it’ll end sooner. I hope I’ll know one day what it feels like to live my life, to breathe and feel free like any other person. To see the trees for what they are, not for what they are and whether I’m deserving of being able to see the trees at all.