Right now I’m having a moment where it feels very real. I don’t know whether to trust the feeling. I’m getting the urge to ‘come out’ but I don’t even know if it’s true. Or maybe I’m lying? Do I really ‘not know’ or am I just pretending I don’t know? I feel very sick in my stomach and nervous and keep going to cry. I keep going to stare at myself in the mirror to figure myself out and I keep repeating phrases such as ‘I’m gay, I like women, I’m a lesbian’ to see if it feels right but I don’t know if it does. Yesterday I had about 6 breakdowns and read articles and I was so sure I wasn’t gay. Now I’m having like a wash of ‘I must be!’ I don’t know whether to trust this feeling or not ughhhhh.

I had a bad rumination spiral yesterday and went to bed hoping I’d start over in the morning. I was wrong. I had dreams about liking women and not being attracted to men anymore and my entire body has been in a state of anxiety since. I genuinely feel like I’m gay and just need to accept it. I have this urge to accept it. Maybe if I do I’ll get some sort of relief because this feeling is awful. I feel like my brain is telling me that I’ll get relief if I just accept it and come out. The intrusive thoughts don’t even seem to be around sexual images anymore, just to come out.

I feel like the thoughts and feelings are getting stronger, to the point where they feel like they are my own and that I want them and want them to happen. Recently I’ve even had feelings of ‘wanting to be gay’ and that I ‘don’t want to be straight’, or that being with a woman would be nice even though that’s literally the one thing I don’t want otherwise I wouldn’t be constantly thinking about it day after day surely and if I wanted it I would just know? I feel numb and sick and terrified that I’ll just be what I’ve feared all this time. Why does my brain do this. I feel like I’ve lost so much already, I couldn’t concentrate on university work and I’ve had to delay my degree for a year, I’ve lost my purpose, and I feel so ashamed that I can’t tell anyone the real reason for it (I just told everyone the course was too much stress and was causing me anxiety) and it just feels like it’s getting worse to the point that it’s actually coming true, and I’m going to have to leave my boyfriend because I can’t be with him anymore. Why do the thoughts sometimes feel good? Why does it feel like real attraction? Why why why does it feel like DISAPPOINTMENT with the idea of never being with a woman wtf this is literally what I don’t want and never have? Even just writing that out my brain is telling me ‘it is’ and ‘I’m lying’ and I just can’t even believe myself anymore. I’ve tried telling myself the whole maybe maybe not but it just doesn’t work. It feels like if I accept I like woman I’ll want to be with one and leave him. Why does the idea of being with a man not fill me with excitement like it used to why do labels terrify me I genuinely just want to give up I still haven’t even told anyone about this cause I just feel like they won’t understand and that they will just think I’m struggling with my sexuality and the worst thing is I don’t even know what I want anymore cause of the thoughts and feelings I don’t know what to believe what if I am actually just struggling with my sexuality cause nothing feels right anymore

Okay so today after I woke up I had an absolutely unexpected thought about a girl, but I DIDN’T MIND IT. So all I felt that it was unexpected but I didn’t feel shame or guilt or something. I started pacing back and forth my room and it was like my brain accepted that I’m bisexual and I started getting anxious about what my family and friends will think about it then I had the thought “If I’m afraid of coming out, that means I’m actually bisexual” and I started asking ChatGPT about what is happening to me and it wrote the usual answer “That’s typical with OCD, it doesn’t mean anything” but it didn’t calm me down a bit and it was just so confusing because for about twenty minutes it was like having this certainity about being bisexual but it didn’t help I was stressing just like before. I know this means I’m not comfortable with the thought and it’s not ego-syntonic, but I wasn’t necessarily anxious about the thought just anxious in general. Then I started fantasizing about men, and it gave me anxiety too but it felt more right. I tried out how it would make me feel if I fantasized about women but all those fantasies lasted barely 3-4 seconds after that my brain just shifted to other thoughts. I can’t listen to one of my favourite songs because it’s sung by an attractive woman and I’m getting these thoughts about me liking her. I don’t understand what’s going on with me, because whenever I read a story here by someone who's struggling with SO-OCD they always write “I don’t want to be gay, I want to go back when everything was normal” but for me every time I get a similar thought it’s immediatly overshadowed by “Of course you’re bisexual, look at all these evidences, you want to be bisexual, you’re just in denial, look at these people, they are real OCD-sufferers, you don’t, you’re welcoming the thoughts, you want them, you’re not comfortable with your heterosexual identity, you always wanted women” etc. etc. It’s so confusing because all along my journey with OCD I had the certainity in myself that I like men but now I feel like I lost this and it feels like a real sexuality crisis now.