This reminds me of myself. Feel like I’m obsessed with this old version of myself and I feel like I have to live up to it. It really is always in the back of my mind that I “need” to be this person that I feel like I’m not. I’m constantly checking my behavior and think and feel like I’m doing everything wrong and I’m putting on a facade. Meanwhile everyone, I mean everyone, is telling me that I’m a good person and I’m not asking them if I am. It’s because if someone asks me to do something I always do it without complaining and usually don’t have a second thought about helping. I am quick to take action and in my head it tells me I “seem “ helpful but I’m actually not. “Why am I doing this to myself?” is also how I feel. Because I feel like I’m doing this to myself, beating myself up in my head. I’ve had OCD my entire life pretty much and it came and went in my childhood, and after experiencing trauma when I was 16, then I was 17 and was pushing through it until I met my ex which seemed to fix my problems. I lived my life while being abused and then it got to a point where I wasn’t living my life. I read a letter my mom wrote to my nurse practitioner at the time, during the worst of my perfection ocd, I spent 7 years organizing it said. I was pretending I was ok, when I wasn’t. I’m still traumatized and I’m on a lot of medication, which I feel like life events all caused. Saying that, in this moment it is making something click in my head, that life events triggered all of this. Not me, not anything I did wrong, but everything that’s happened to me, and I’m not everything that happened or happens to me, I’m me and everything is external and I can’t control what goes on around me but I can control my environment, which i understand now is why my mom said to me, that’s why I did all the organizing ocd for that long, because I couldn’t control what was going on around me but I could control how my environment was set up, my house, I would organize it every day, all day, it’s all I would think about, or talk about, I’d even go to sleep thinking about it , I did this so I didn’t have to think, I’m realizing this right now as I write. I’m so grateful for this platform and getting to share my story and read your story and others. This is so helpful for me and I thank you immensely for responding to my post. I feel hopeful and will start give myself grace. Which I feel like can happen right now. Thank God and thank you, I feel like I am able to get a lot out information about myself out right now, and understanding myself better after reading and responding to your post. I will use this information I’m gathering and to better myself and strive for the day this goes away. When I was younger the ocd just went away and the same ocd never started again. The ocd started back up in my adulthood, I have thousands of pictures and an old Instagram page which I don’t have access to anymore, documents My OCD in real life, and you can see what I’m doing to my house. Glad that’s over, I don’t ocd clean anymore and I’m hyper aware and if I ever catch myself with the urge to ocd clean and organize I usually try to focus on something else and distract myself. What else… ya I will focus on believing myself, which is something I came up with after conversing with my bf, so I will start believing other people when they tell my I’m a good person and believing myself that I am indeed a good person, and my actions prove it. I’m not hateful and I try really hard to feel at ease and I’m very aware of when I feel at ease and in my essence. I want to be in that all the time but I also plan on ditching the fear that something terrible will happen to me if I’m in my “essence“. Thank you for reading my post and replying to it. I’m very appreciative, thank you. I really appreciate people like you, I stress this 🙏🏼🙌🏽
