my ocd journey has been absolutely mental to say the least. it’s changed a lot from when i was a child to now, and there’s even been times where it’s gotten worse or better. i started showing signs when i was around four years old. i remember i couldn’t leave the room until my shoes were perfectly straight, and i would sit there for about five minutes until it felt right. and when i played games, i had to audibly confirm when the game was starting and when it was finishing otherwise i felt as if my life “wouldn’t be real”. it was like that for years, and as a child who knew nothing of ocd, i believed that this was normality. and for years after that, i kept believing that this was “normal”. there’s been a lot of things that i’ve gone through which have made it gotten worse. both my best friends died: i watched my nan die at 8 and my grandad die at 10 (my luck... i was in the same room as them at each of their deaths and saw their dead bodies). i saw my grandad battle cancer, my mum fight a rare kidney problem to then have her undergo surgery quite literally the day of my first GCSE. my kitchen caught fire, i’ve been to god knows how many more funerals, etc etc. point is, i understand now that my ocd got so much worse because i sat back and watched those i loved go through so much. as i grew older, the dominating compulsion of my ocd that was having to retouch objects until they felt “just right” and having to repeat phrases in my head morphed into more internalised intrusive thoughts. i still carry out many compulsions, but i never used to get thoughts like i do now. there was a period of my life where my ocd seemed to be fine though. and that was sometime around 2017. i still had it, but it seemed to be manageable. now i realise that was just a calm before the storm because starting school again that year made my ocd go spiralling downhill. at this point, i already knew that it was ocd, but it had become so normal to me that there was always a part of me that said nothing was wrong because i had lived this way my whole life. it wasn’t until the end of that year that i realised how much i needed help. besides knowing that i needed help, i never asked for it. it took me two more years of it spiralling downwards worryingly fast that i decided to finally tell my mum. i sat with her for two hours and blurted out everything. and this was only a few months ago! it was only back in october of 2019 that i managed to speak up. one thing that kept me from speaking up was the fact that i wasn’t diagnosed. i had tried to bring it up to my friends in ways that didn’t specifically say “i have ocd!!” because i knew that there was a chance that it might not have been. i stayed silent for around 12 years of my life. i kept it all hidden because i simply thought this was a normal thing. and what’s scary is it took me 10 of those 12 years suffering to even realise how bad i had gotten. so now i’m here at 17 years old and on the waiting list for CBT. things have been happening lately and i’m possibly at the lowest point i’ll ever be. but i keep reminding myself that pain is only temporary and that at some point in my life i will be able to go about my day unbothered by my ocd. i hope that one day everyone will be that way too ?