Hi all, just need to rant because I'm exhausted. CW for body and sexuality OCD. Sometimes I really wonder if I'm strong enough to get through this. I understand now why I've only had the strength to deal with OCD at discrete points in my life, times when I would be completely consumed by terror and not know why. But as time has gone by and I'm more actively working on my OCD, I can't push it down anymore. Part of me misses that, even though I know it's better to be working on my response to thoughts as well as the trauma underlying them. My OCD shifts between body/health and sexuality obsessions, and my compulsions are largely mental. The thing that has put me in a bad place the past couple days is just the unrelenting nature of the thoughts. I know you're not supposed to fight with them but it's so hard for me not to. But whenever I successfully defuse one obsession, another takes its place. Today it was defusing a freakout about a hormone test I got back this week (spoiler: contact stress can alter your hormones); I finally accepted that the results are not an indication that my body is broken or that I'm going to be alienated from my sexuality forever. Later on in the day, I was triggered by a picture of an actor from an old Nickelodeon show: my brain freaked out when I saw it because I took my reaction as attraction to someone underage, which of course must mean I'm a pedophile. And being a pedophile all this time (despite a lifetime of evidence to the contrary) would explain why I've felt disconnected from my sexuality the past year. In short, I feel like even when I'm not actively being tormented by intrusive thoughts that challenge the very nature of who I think I am, I constantly live in fear and even avoidance sometimes of being triggered. I know a LOT of the weirdness around sexuality in the past year is simple fear of being triggered, by something that "may" being lying buried beneath the surface. It's exhausting and it makes me fundamentally distrust myself and my ability to know myself. At the end of the day, I get glimpses of who I could be if I wasn't at war with this almost every single day of my life. I know the content, peaceful, compassionate person behind all of this. I may have in the past, but I don't believe myself to be the monster my OCD tries to convince me I am, which makes it maddening to still be subjected to this abuse day in and day out.