Does anyone else make necklaces to mark a new beginning as a compulsion? I only realized this week that what I have is probably ocd. It's taken over my life and I'm exhausted and I've cut off all contact with friends and family and my thoughts and days are on a loop And I'm broke with no job and I want my LIFE back SO So So desperately. Daily I I 4, 6, 8 hours a day on whittling a button or rock into the perfect rose pendant, or melting a tiny piece of glass into the perfect heart pendant, (while I can say I have gotten pretty good at carving tiny things out of found material, and even though I make probably 2 ot 4 a day, I can't seem to hold onto any of them after I use them because I either lose them, throw the last one away at the start of a new one, or overwork them to death. I used to buy necklaces for this purpose and I spent way too much money on them because when the last one didnt work (which was every day or multiple times a day), the next one had to be more special, made with more valuable materials if it was going to work like the last one didnt. But as my ocd progressed and started taking up a disproportionate amount of my time....

I can't say I've had this one. It sounds hellish. Regarding a job perhaps you could sell the things you make on Etsy, they sound beautiful, I would buy one. Perhaps they can be ones intended to mark a new beginning for the people who receive them. It feels good to bring joy to other people's lives, it can get you to spend time out of your own head. It sounds to me like this could be part of an avoidance compulsion. I'd recommend trying to do ERP in response to anxiety and triggers rather than crafting. But you can still craft. Heck, people who have a 9-5 job spend those 8 hours avoiding their OCD too. It sounds aggravating to you that you feel like each one has to be better than the previous, that's setting a higher and higher perfectionistic bar for yourself rather than lowering it so that it can work and your skills can improve and you can feel fulfilled by your success. If I bought one from you, I wouldn't want it to be something which caused you a lot of stress to make it "perfect", I'd want one made with self-compassion and which is definitely NOT perfect. Flaws would make it unique and special for me. It's ok for it to take time to make, it's a labour of love and should be reflected in the price of you sold them. But I wonder if there are some resources about perfectionism which could help you out. I took up painting a few years ago and because I knew there was a risk of becoming perfectionistic and obsessive, I have made a deliberate point right since I started of showing people my unfinished paintings, and stopping when others said they felt it looked done to them, despite all the discomfort and sense that it was incomplete. Other than that, it does sound like you could benefit from some therapy and I do recommend it. It's quite severe to have cut off contact with others for an extended period. How would you feel about cutting down on the amount of time you spend crafting the necklaces, and adding something else back into that time even if it's not something social? I believe that you can break out of your comfort zone in order to get your life back. You only have to do it bit by bit and it will be uncomfortable but you'll adapt.

Thank-you so much for your insightful and well-thought-out response. It made me cry just now getting some feedback for the first time in my life about this (I always think, how do I explain to people that I have a necklace addiction and that's why I haven't called them back, and then of course the longer I avoid, the harder it gets. You hit the nail with the word avoid. You say you have a tendency To avoid too? Are there things you do that help you break that cycle of avoidance? Do you think of it as a cycle, in a way? You know, something my late husband told me before he died a few years ago, when he he was diagnosed with terminal cancer. He was reading me something he had written, a summary of his Hope's and wishes and appreciations for everyone he was leaving behind. He wrote a paragraph about about everyone in our world, even the guy down the street who we barely knew. The guy had a developmental disability, and my husband definitely wanted him to be included because he always thought that it would really help him if more people would just say hello to him and acknowledge him. He started out by saying that he wanted everyone to get along and find happiness, and that he truly believed we would all "make it", basically. In the part about me he said something like: "but out of everybody, the one that I really think will do great things is Aniat". And then he listed ALL the weird things I did obsessively, compulsively, and spent way too much time on, stuff that he usually would tell me to stop obsessing over: the tiny pendants, my spray paint addiction, etc and he said that it was those things that made him think I will thrive. What you said about selling them reminded me about that. I sometimes think, I've spent way too much time perfecting the process of whittling the perfect rose, or speedboat in a tiny bottle, or geode heart, to not make it something I profit from. I'd love to see one of your unfinished paintings, by the way. And thank you so much for commenting