Trigger warning: Does anyone have fear of hantavirus? I’m trying to do imaginary exposure but it’s still to intense. In my old apartment, we had mouse/rat problems-visible mouse/rat poo. In the city, roaches and mice are common and it didn’t bother me then. Now it’s a different story. I’m in a building where there’s mice/rat problems. The thing is I hate killing them. It’s really not their fault for carrying the virus. And humane traps mean I need to go out and release but I can’t get out of bed. It was easy for me to help out a trapped mouse from an empty garbage bin but burying a dead mouse was difficult. Fortunately I don’t think there’s any in my apartment but...I “hear” when I’m half asleep/half awake. And that’s enough for me to be anxious. And because of the past apartments, I feel like I’m covered in their poo. I had to do a lot of disinfection with my stuff from my old apartment but you can’t do everything 100% which is causing me anxiety and exhaustion. And you don’t know what things were touched. I try to throw stuff out but I have a fear of losing things. So when I throw stuff out I need to check to make sure nothing important is being thrown away. This fear was a lot stronger than my contamination but now it’s slightly stronger. That’s because my contamination fear escalated. I also do compulsions in the middle of my sleep several times which causes tiredness and exhaustion. Without proper sleep and having the urge to have to check and decontaminate, the thought of the process is exhausting. Thinking the best way to do these compulsions is exhausting. So by the time I get to checking I’m so tired I start to lose focus and because my anxiety is high I experience depersonalization. Going on autopilot, I’m not paying attention to what I’m doing so I have to repeat. Unless I’m recording myself. And then I question if I missed anything while checking. In the past I would be looking for something and while it’s right in front of me I don’t see it until someone points it out to me. So now I’m just avoiding a lot of things but it’s not right. I don’t know where to begin or how to tackle my fears. How to tailor my erp. I’m scared I’ll do it wrong. Like no one in their right mind would touch mouse poo for exposure. But then how do I expose my fear of hantavirus? There are bags I need to throw out but the longer I go without checking and throwing them out the more it’s contaminated. I can’t even say for certain there are mice but if I start throwing these bags out and come across poo, I know how anxious and tired I would be. And that thought alone is exhausting. I tried playing out the possible scenarios in my head as an exposure and it makes me cry. There are places in my apartment where I need to decontaminate but have to check first but just so tired. Tired from the anxiety of the hantavirus, mouse poo, checking, and all these thoughts. I’m sorry if I’m all over the place. I’m also scared of forgetting things and right now I feel like I’m missing an important information to get help for this.

My last and almost life long theme/sub-theme largely subsided recently and my ocd felt like it wasn’t even an issue. Then I went on winter break from uni and being alone made my mind come up with a whole new topic to obsess over. TLDR on my fears, my advisor wouldn’t email me back for a while about signing up for classes so my mind started to worry “what if he doesn’t in time and you can’t enroll this semester and you lose this whole life you just built and all these new friends” So when that issue was resolved my mind found other scarier ways I could be uprooted from my current life and friends that I’ve grown so attached to. Then my mind remembered back when I was struggling with false memories and scrupulosity and I essentially made a post on a forum 2 and a half years ago saying I did something or was convinced I did something that I never actually did. Now I’ve been spiraling about someone finding it reporting me and I either get seen as a horrible person or arrested or something over something I never actually did but “admitted” to out of fear of going to hell. My mind won’t let it go and keeps finding new reasons for it to be “valid” “logical” or even inevitable. I feel like it’s just hanging over my head and I can never rest easy. Especially when I try to focus on my daily tasks or plan for the future I get this horrible flair up of “why plan for the future when this could come back in that future and you get uprooted from all of it” my mind won’t rest without certainty being uprooted won’t happen but certainty doesn’t exist, at least not with ocd. This sucks and I miss being care free.

back in october i made my first post about my specific type of ocd, how it mixes in with my day to day and how i “deal” with it. i talked about the starting point, how it gradually got worse, and then how it was going just a few months ago. i always think it’s insane how much can change in just the course of a small to a large amount of time. right now, i honestly feel like garbage. to be quite sincere i really want to give up, i’m barely holding on by a thread. and if i cut that thread, i really doubt anyone would care. i’ve never considered myself to be a suicidal person, and i still don’t consider myself that right now. it just gets to a point where it’s just, a lot to deal with. i don’t really enjoy things a lot nowadays. sure i have good days like everyone does, like today, when i was just enjoying my day without worries. but then it all comes crawling back twice as bad the following days. i take online college so i’m usually just stuck at home most of the time. but, when i do decide to actually go out and leave my house, my ocd just explodes because i have this whole routine i need to do or else i feel like i’ll contaminate wherever i end up going. i’m not going to go really deep into my compulsions because it’s hard enough to live with them, much more having to type them all out in detail. but when i go out my compulsions go from wiping down all my stuff i’m going to use after showering, to washing my clothes/cleaning the washer + dryer. i also have separate things (or two of the same thing) i use specifically in my house, and items i use when going out. such as shampoo/body wash, deodorant, lotion, hair curler, etc. as if that’s not draining enough, i also feel the need to fast a couple days prior to any plan i make because i’ve forced myself to believe i need to feel empty in order to be clean. i’m not sure if that’s my past eating disorder talking, or my ocd, but my brain can’t help but think any food in my house is utterly and completely contaminated. i’m so tired of this feeling, feeling like nothing will ever be clean again. feeling like my ocd is trapped in my childhood home. feeling that wave of diseases rushing through my veins the moment i step foot into what’s supposed to be “home”. and i’m so scared of therapy because what if i do get healed, and then everything comes rushing back the second i step into my room. i’m planning on moving somewhere far from my current house in this next coming year, so sometimes i feel like just waiting it out. but it’s insufferable when going to hangout with someone. i miss my friends, my family, and my partner. it’s crazy to me that i’m dealing with all this at the young age of 18 but, i’m sure lots of people have it way worse. i just want to find a way out, any possible way. but i keep pushing myself deeper and deeper that when i finally find a way, it will no longer exist.

I started dealing with OCD when I became fixated on health issues, particularly the fear of contracting a life-threatening disease. If I experienced any kind of medical symptom, no matter how small, that even remotely hinted at something potentially fatal, it would drive me crazy, and I couldn’t stop obsessing over it. Then one day, I started having intrusive thoughts about accidentally hitting someone with my car, and I would end up driving in circles to check if I had. Eventually, I found myself overwhelmed by a flood of new obsessive thoughts and compulsions. One day, while I was at the park, a squirrel came near me, and for some reason, I felt like it attacked me. I Googled it and learned that squirrels could carry rabies, which spiraled me into a deep fear of rabies. I became consumed with the thought I received a bite from a squirrel, raccoon, or bat any time I’m in areas that trigger me. It started off only being inside then transferred to even being in my own home. This made me obsess over every physical sensation in my body, compulsively checking to make sure nothing was wrong. One compulsion that I hated the most would to be putting rubbing alcohol on me to make sure that I had no open wounds. Every day feels like I’m walking around in a fog of anxiety, constantly worrying that I won’t even make it to old age. Sometimes, it gets so overwhelming that I just want it all to end. It stresses me so bad at times to where my brain feels like I’ve been studying all day.