Please, can any of you find it in your hearts to read this and help me? Okay so here’s the situation, I went through a traumatic experience a couple of years ago and have since deleted and gotten rid of everything that has reminded me of it. However, that also includes emails that I’ve sent to people. There was one specific email that I sent to my teacher in high school that I’ve gotten rid of, but the thing that’s really bothering me is the fact that it’s still sitting in her inbox. I want so desperately to remove it, but obviously I can’t. Would it be weird if I reached out to her on Facebook and asked her to delete it? I graduated almost two years ago. And I don’t know if it’s considered crossing a line, but it’s really driving my anxiety through the roof. If I were going to message her about it, how do you think I should go about it? Even though the thought of asking her also cause me anxiety.

Ok so this is going to be lengthy and probably have many mistakes so I apologize in advance. I used to live somewhere completely different to where I live now. I lived back in my hometown until I was 10. That was a living nightmare for me. I was bullied lots and had lots of very traumatizing things happen to me that are a VERY big part to my ocd today. When I was very young like 7 or 8 I was at a sleepover with another girl and she was pressuring me into doing things that I was very uncomfortable doing. She was pressuring me to take some of my clothes off. At the time I was very young and didn’t know right from wrong and didn’t know what to do so because she was being very peer pressure to me I did so because I was scared. I have never been able to come to peace with myself after this even though I have been told that I did NOTHING wrong and that I was very young and stuff. But then I moved somewhere completely different, and lost contact with everyone because I knew that it was too much for me to handle. Today someone from there reached out me ( a good person) and wanted to talk and catch up. I did talk to her for a little bit (it’s not the same person that pressured me) and I texted her after telling her how I needed to lose contact with here because so many of my intrusive thoughts came from living there, so being in contact with people was mentally not ok with me. She was completely understanding and all’s good. But I’m wondering. What happened with that girl. Should I fee guilt about? Or is this my ocd. I just need some other opinions. Please help me out!

My OCD is telling me I should write a long email to the guy in my past who I’ve been obsessing with and use the Hurricane Ian hitting Florida as an excuse to start a conversation because his family lives there. Or maybe use the “delay” feature on Outlook to send the email then delete it, so it won’t send. OR ask one of our engineers here if we have an internal system where we can unsend an email to someone. I feel so much anxiety right now, I feel lightheaded and nervous and shaky. I have this slight feeling of throwing up. Note that the guy and I only talked for about a month, and haven’t been in contact. He did say happy birthday through a fast click greeting feature on LinkedIn last year but that’s it. We do not have contact right now. But my OCD wants me to contact him or at least ATTEMPT to contact him but if I delete the email before it sends then I get that huge relief of overcoming something, then I “never have to do it again.” A part of me wants to know what that would feel like when I do all these things. It’s at my workplace too so… I need help because I’m trying to avoid my workplace now by taking half days for the rest of the week.

So basically I decided to reach out to the girl over Instagram and apologize for the incident. It was just really eating at me so I thought it was the right thing to do. And she left me on seen 🥲🥲🥲. Now my anxiety has been peaking like “what if she’s now planning to ruin your life” or “what if she’s telling all of the people you mutually know and ruining your life over this incident.” As selfish as it sounds, but it’s what it I’m worried about. I’m trying to keep my cool but it’s already unfortunately been a sleep away the whole day kind of day for me.