I’m withdrawing from college on Wednesday. I’m leaving all my friends to go back home and get intensive treatment at the Rogers OCD Center. It was the hardest decision I’ve ever had to make. There was all this fear swarming in my mind. “What if my friends forget about me and stop caring? What about my dnd campaign? What about the guy I like... what if he thinks I’m crazy? What about my classes? I’m supposed to graduate this semester.” All these thoughts terrified me. I couldn’t even imagine living in a world where every possible thing went wrong. However, after a while, things started making sense. I needed to get help. I couldn’t just keep pretending that everything was fine. Today I told my friends that I’m withdrawing. They cared so much. We had an impromptu party and all my friends were there. It was the best day I have had in a very long time. I’ve never felt so loved. I talked about coming to visit in the future and returning for fall semester. I talked to my dm about continuing our dnd campaign. Tomorrow, I’m saying goodbye for good and I’m even gonna work up the guts to ask the guy I like to play guitar with me one more time (we’re in a band together). What I mean to say is this: never scare yourself outta getting the help you need. When you do what you need to do, everything else will fall into place. Who knows, maybe things will be even better than they were before.

Thought I’d just make one last post before I go: Tips For Recovery • The key to OCD is to accept the uncertainty. You will never know for 100% certain if you’re gay, if your hands are contaminated, if your relationship is doomed, or if you could stab someone or molest a child. Sound scary? Good. Fear is your friend now. Seek it out and face it down • ERP does work, but its not a quick fix. You have to do it repeatedly every day for increasing amounts of time. Remember, fear is your friend. • Stop avoiding situations that make you uncomfortable. When I was deep into OCD I was too afraid to be near dogs. Fortunately, I’m also a dog minder. Being around dogs all the time was an excellent exposure, and helped me recover really quickly. • Medication is a band-aid, not a cure. Using it to relieve your symptoms while you undergo therapy is fine. Staying on it forever is unhelpful and unnecessary. • You don’t need to make sure your intrusive thoughts are a specific subtype of OCD. Your OCD might not match anybody else’s. Mine didn’t, and that’s okay. • Remain positive! If you start thinking you won’t get better, you won’t. • Take care of yourself! You put your body through tremendous strain just by worrying. Eat well, drink plenty of water, do gentle exercise. And get a good amount of sleep. • ACCEPTANCE! You have a mental illness. If you could think yourself out of this, you’d have done it already. If your compulsions were going to fix the problem forever, it would have happened by now. Stop fighting and feeding the cycle. • You have an anxiety disorder. Part of recovery is being responsible about this disorder. Getting drunk and smoking weed is going to make you feel better for a short time, and make you feel like crap in the long term. Same goes for caffeine and excess sugar. We have to be those annoying health nuts now, sorry. • Stop obsessing over your recovery. It won’t happen overnight, its not a linear process, and you won’t feel better tomorrow, or even the day after. You’re making the effort to improve yourself in the long term, and that takes time and commitment. That’s all I could think of! Thank you guys again! Recovery is possible for all of you, I know it!

Hi...I decided last night, after thinking about it for a long time...that I need to leave college. My mental health is not good...so I really need to focus on that. This is a really hard decision that I know will come with many regrets...but I’m barely able to take care of myself at college...let alone pass my classes. I’ve been going back and forth about this for a while now. But I think I have finally decided that going home to heal (as much as I hate it) is the next step that I need to take... That’s it. That’s all I wanted to say. I just wanted to share that with somebody...

for the last several months, OCD has had an absolute chokehold on my career as a self employed artist. Just constant new subtypes and intrusive thoughts popping up one right after the other, all boiling down to the fear of me potentially losing my career. I'm not currently in therapy (nOCD does not take my insurance) but currently waiting to hear back from a therapist and OCD specialist while taking advice from OCD resources in the meantime. I've been doing everything I possibly can to keep my life going and working through my OCD, but it is so exhausting. I'll be working on a project and when intrusive thoughts pop into my head, I do my best to do some self ERP and tell myself the usual "well, maybe!", or "oh well!" ect, ect. but the anxiety will still linger and i will experience such extreme anxiety symptoms like sweating, dizziness, disassociation, and nausea to the point i will start gagging while I'm still trying to get my work done. It's become physically debilitating to deal with, it takes so much longer for me to finish work, and I don't even enjoy what I've created once it's done. I decided in a few weeks I'm going to take a short hiatus from my art account, so I can take a break from having to deal with the constant physical symptoms ontop of dealing with social media/algorithms which have also been frustrating me. I even plan to wipe my page so I can come back to a clean slate when I decide I'm ready to post again. But now my OCD has taken a hold of me wanting to take a step back. 'What if you don't recover when you come back?' 'What are you hiding/running from?' 'Maybe OCD is just telling you to take a break?' I am so tired lol. I don't know what the right choice is for me right now. But I do want to take a step back from work to work on my mental and physical health. So I think I'm at least going to listen to what my body and brain needs. if anyone has some advice or words of encouragement (not reassurance) pleaaase drop it here bc I'm gunna need it!!