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 ?

I’ve come to a point in my life where I can be very happy. I have a safe environment, a loving community. Yknow I’ve really healed through or moved on from a traumatic past and as I say to my boyfriend from time to time like a broken record: I feel like nowadays the only thing bringing me stress or at times misery is myself. I am a fairly joyful person, when I’m comfortable I’m very goofy and like to sing dance and have fun. I find that I relate to so many amazing people I meet that are the nicest, most fun, elevating individuals, who also struggle with the hardest sometime debilitating things. It truly sucks because when I find those moments of peace I see the power of what an ocd mind could be as a person. We are people who may over analyze, but I myself also always find the good in people. And aye if in a moment I don’t think anything is doomly wrong and if I don’t try to understand it I may parish 😅 then that moment feels like the best one in the world. But on the other side of that when I’m not in a quiet mind moment and I’m left with myself to take control of what life in front of me looks like in or around me. I almost have been crumbling. Like I said at the beginning of this story here, the life around me is not so situationally stressful. And it’s also fairly simple. My boyfriend and I live together in a small cozy trailer with our two cats, he works full time very hard and I work part time where I spend as much time as I can working and then have a few days around the house. We’re saving for a home and are quite content with our lifestyle at the moment with work and being “lazy”, or resting and going out for fun now an then on our time off together. Most times though I do have day or two off during the week by myself, which usually goes one of only two ways. Like I said before I do like to work hard, especially now that I have a part time job that’s fairly easier than others I’ve had in the past. So I work 6-7 hours then drive home, air up my tires and wash my car sometimes because I like doing something after work while I still have energy.Or I go to the store. Come home make food, prolly nap and not really worry about too much because I’ve worked all day. But on my days off. I find myself waking up with a lot of anxiety. I usually fight it off by going back to sleep. But my OCD is heavily circled around shame. Even though I only sleep in till 10-11, 12-1 at the latest. I find myself thinking about how wrong (in nice terms) it is to do that. And the funny thing is the older I get (I’m a 21F). I’m not as pressured by this thought, even though it’s still stressful it literally just feels like a thought I can’t escape from. To put things in simple terms. I truly psycho analyze my actions breath by breath and my intrusive thoughts are critiquing those actions bit by bit. I’ve recently have started medication and it was a tremendous difference in the beginning and it helped me cope with the acceptance and letting go (f it or just care less) of those thoughts. But let’s say I forget to take it, or I wake up one morning by myself all day and I’m super tired or unmotivated. That day will feel truly debilitated. And now I’m definitely to the point where I’m battling that, but also have a thin vale behind that where I now know what is going on. And the thoughts are shameful for “not trying to get better or be better” Because I do Like I write a lot, and it truly is one of the best coping mechanisms for working through intrusive or obsessive compulsions. I could also write all day, and if I don’t listen to that ease of the anxiety from writing. And try to keep going the writing will turn into a compulsion itself I feel like I should not stop or critique it as well. But luckily I’ll hopefully find my place in explaining the cycle of what I do when my brain is very loud about things. The next time it’s too loud:)

Last year during April I started to experience groinal responses when I looked at kids. I was terrified of what it could mean and decided to attempt two weeks later. The very next day I had those responses I decided to attempt. I didn’t really have the courage to do so at that time but I started experiencing images about disturbing things done to kids and as days went by it got worse. April 16 was the last straw and I couldn’t take it anymore. I ended up in a mental hospital but before I ended up there I had searched up what I was experiencing. That’s when I started to understand that it was OCD. I felt relieved for a few moments until I felt the urge to get more information. I saw lots and lots of things and many comments saying that it wasn’t normal and that people who went through this were disgusting people who shouldn’t be allowed to roam free. That’s when my anxiety and fear became worse and I tried to get rid of it but nothing worked. I shook the entire time I was awake, I didn’t have motivation for anything anymore, I just felt so disgusting. In the end, I’m so glad I ended up in that mental hospital or else I wouldn’t be here with my friends and family. Thank you for reading my story, I’m so glad that I’m not alone

I’ve always had OCD, and for most of my life it was little things that seemed manageable at the time or something that would phase out of my head within a couple days/weeks/months. But, the older I got the more severe it became, I’d find myself collapsing deeper and deeper within my own head trying to out think the thoughts that bothered me. About a year ago I had a thought that rattled me to my core. My brothers and I were watching a movie in our mother’s room when my youngest brother turned to me to say something. His close proximity to me triggered a fleeting sexually explicit image in my head and that thought caused me to spiral. Asking questions like, “are you attracted to your minor brother? Are you attracted to minors? Are you gay? Etc.” a couple days went by and my mental stability continued to crumble until I broke down to my mother, she was understanding and we found a a psychiatrist. I got on medication and for a while everything was slowly but surely trending in a positive direction. The thoughts would still pop into my head but they were becoming more manageable. As we all know OCD and mental illness comes in waves. Currently my OCD has been pretty severe. I feel those intrusive thoughts latching on in my head and it’s been very hard to kick them. It’s gotten to the point where I find myself being uncomfortable being in close proximity with my little brother because I feel as though I am capable of harming him in any way. And the more uncomfortable I become being around him the more I find myself lashing out in anger towards the people I care about the most. Those moments of anger cause me to spiral even farther as my head fills with ideas like “what if you are capable of hurting someone or even murdering them?” There’s times where these thoughts rattle me so much that I feel like it would be better to be in prison where I couldn’t harm someone or that even being dead would be a better solution than possibly running the risk of hurting someone in my life I care about. This is about the jist of it, a majority of the OCD I have is centered around the idea that I am capable of harming my little brother physically, mentally, sexually. It’s been exhausting and it feels like there is no end in sight.