I can't have one moment of peace without my brain digging up a mistake I've made whether I made it today or 10 years ago. My OCD leaves me completely heartbroken. I have 0 self esteem because it makes me feel like I'm horrible and evil. I know I've done truly awful things but I was a kid. Now all I do is fumble and hurt over every decision. I've become extremely paranoid - I feel the need to delete all social media and photos and traces of myself, for instance. I regret every text message I send. I'm struggling so much you guys. I don't want to post too much but I'm really really struggling.

Never feels like I can fully put my mind to rest. The problem with OCD for me is once I'm over one worry there's another buried deep into my mind that I'm not fully over. The two events I'm not completely over is when I tried to help a 17 year old with POCD when I was 19 and the topics unfortunately were detailed and even then I explained to them I wasn't comfortable with talking to them. I guess I just had a hard time saying no to someone needing help but it eventually made me so uncomfortable that I stopped talking with them altogether at some point. Then the other thing is being so worried that I committed a crime because my elbow touched someone's behind when I didn't want that to happen at all. I didn't want to listen to my OCD by saying move my arm or something horrible is going to happen so I didn't and then something bad actually did happen. I thought it would just be a light touch while zipping a bag up but then it was worse than I ever wanted it to be and it was so awkward and I hated it. I feel like I just won't be able to get back to the way I was before OCD started all of this. Aside from that I've just had extreme health anxiety but am too afraid to reach out to a PCP even though I need to. Something deep down is telling me I should do this but I'm just so anxious and embarrassed about sharing things to them. I can't even enjoy the things I used to do because this is constantly just messing up my life. I'm hoping I get a start of positivity next time I see my therapist. This just sucks. Feels like others around me are doing so much better than I am and I'm just kind of stuck on these same problems and feeling absolute shame and guilt from the past over and over again. I'm just so sick of dealing with this every single day so I just use escape whenever I can. Even that doesn't really work. I just wish I could go back in time.

I would really appreciate it so much if someone took the time to read this and help me. I don’t know what to do anymore. I haven’t posted here in awhile. I had my OCD managed pretty decently for a year or so on medication, but I had to stop taking it, and after around 3-4 months, the OCD has become unbearable again. It used to be much more surrounding existential themes, eating, and others, not really real event/false memory stuff. But now it’s gotten really out of hand and I don’t know how to do it anymore. It’s surrounding a time of my life a long time ago. It was a dark time. I wasn’t myself and I was going through a lot of things, and I did a lot of things I regret. I self-destructed, embarrassed myself, and wasn’t good to the people around me. I was able to get my mind off of it for a long time, even though I would still think about it a good amount. I was able to be in the present, at least moreso than now. But now that I’m off medication, the guilt has become my obsession again. I can’t move on. I can’t do anything without thinking about all of these memories. I’m obsessed. I’ve started hating myself again, so much so that it’s hard to do anything anymore or believe I deserve anything good. The people around me tell me it wasn’t even that bad, but to me it was. To me, I failed myself, lost myself, and failed everyone around me. I can’t stop thinking about every person I said something wrong to or every time I screwed up. I’ve now started to convince myself I did terrible things I can’t remember, and that my mind just can’t deal with it. And that’s why I feel so guilty. There’s nothing to really support this though. But I’m starting to really convince myself that’s true. I’m trying not to listen to it, because I’ve convinced myself I have hit people with my car before and haven’t remembered when I absolutely didn’t and I know I never have. I drive back over and over to check there’s no one, even though I never heard any bang or felt myself anything. I can convince myself of some crazy false memories. So I know that I shouldn’t listen. But it’s hard not to when I have this guilt gnawing at me constantly. I come to conclusions that this guilt must be because I did something terrible that I don’t remember, even though I already think the things I remember were bad enough. But I would know by now right? If I did something bad I don’t remember? I don’t feel like this all the time. But it’s a lot of the time. But maybe that should be reassuring, that I only start obsessing like this when I think to. The past haunts me though. And I can never be in the present. I’ve started to resort to some unhealthy behaviors to distract myself or help me work towards something. I am starting to hate myself so much and feel like there’s no way I’ll ever be able to get out of this loop. I feel like I just can’t do this anymore. Maybe I need to go back on medication. But I don’t know. I don’t really want to. But will I ever fix this without it? Why do I feel SO guilty, all of the time? I do all these things for people because I feel indebted to them, because I feel undeserving of everything. I feel awful about myself. I don’t know what to do. Does anyone else deal with this?

I honestly don’t know how I’ve made it this far in my life. OCD has had its claws in me since I was 7. I used to lay in bed and tell myself over and over “it’ll be gone when I’m older, it’ll be better” but it just got worse with age. I’m 25 now and I’ve lost so many years to this. Or to pretending to be someone else in order to avoid it all. I can’t say or do one thing without analyzing it to death. Everything is black and white when it comes to me and my own morality. I overcompensate by allowing everyone else around me to be gray. I don’t allow myself that same grace. I try, everyday. Sometimes I sit and look back on my life and just wonder why. And how. I carry every mistake I’ve made with me from day to day. It rules me, it owns me, and it chips away at the person I could have been without ocd. I mourn myself.