Sometimes, my gender theme with OCD takes an existential turn. I felt great this morning after writing down most of my fears and when I feel better about most of my main theme using exposure, my OCD moves to something similar but different. *Possible Trigger Warning* When my TOCD/Gender Identity OCD calms down my mind moves to a different question: What if we don’t know what we actually like? What if humans are just blobs with no definition? Can we know anything about ourselves? The thought of this came after being scared of the idea (that I’ve seen maybe two people on Twitter suggest) of getting rid of “he” and “she” and everyone just being they. To me I would get scared that people want to turn everyone non-binary and therefore everyone would become a blob with no definition - even though non-binary people IRL aren’t “blobs with no identity”... I would get thoughts of how the hell would I know who my mom is? How would I know who my dad is? My friends and family? With these thoughts, no one would have any identity or definition. I think when people talk about gender being a social construct and getting rid of certain things, I think they mean getting rid of gender restrictions and everyone being equal. I agreed with this for a long time and it never scared me. However, my OCD recently took this as getting rid of “he” and “she” pronouns and maybe getting rid of names too. Then I saw a book in Target from TIME magazine called The Science Of Gender and one of the small boxes/sections was “beyond she and he” which I thought meant going beyond he and she and getting rid of them in the future. That’s not what it was at all in the actual book, but I was already triggered and the thoughts are in me. I think this absolutely hooks into my history of existential OCD, as I suffered with it majorly in 2017 (while not knowing what it was) and a little bit in 2019. It gives many of the same feelings, I think due to wondering about the nature of self. With my existential OCD I would worry a lot if the self/ego doesn’t exist after seeing that old Jim Carrey interview and looking at some Buddhism stuff that talked about their belief in no self. This theme feels very similar but with a different subject in a way. I also get thoughts of “what if I have to accept that gender doesn’t exist and we’re all blobs with no definition, and therefore I’ll lose my identity and everything about self?” Which is very similar to my main existential theme of “what if I have to be a nihilist now that I’ve thought about the meaning of life and what if I can’t believe anything else other than nihilism? Do I have to accept it and lose what I love and feel like shit?” I don’t know how to do ERP with this. But it’s really nice to type it out!