So I heard one my best friends saying she has OCD. All she did was considered perfectionism and she was organizing peoples stuff on school. I do organize my suff but as a compultion and it is not like it bothers me , I HAVE to, I don’t think she understands. I would be torturing myself instead of organizing ppl stuff, is not like she didn’t want ppl to watch it.I think she wanted attention or smth, but I felt offended about it .

If you are anything like me (and most of you are, because let’s face it, we are all on this chat), you have OCD. Real OCD, not the organisation, matching colours everyone thinks it is. Real OCD. I’ve always known I was different, known that my brain does some waking things and deep down, I’ve always known I’ve had OCD. But there is just something that changes when you finally get the diagnosis. It makes more sense, you have an explanation for your behaviours. So naturally I told my friends. When they ask why I had to stop and step four times on a tile I said ‘oh, I have OCD’. I finally had a word, a tangible concept that I could explain to people. But nobody warned me about the massive misconceptions about OCD. Instead of support or acceptance, my friends seemed to question the diagnosis saying ‘that’s not ocd, don’t you just like things organised?’. And no matter how much I explain it they don’t seem to get it. And that’s the part that feels so cruel. I go through hell in my head and it can all be reduced to a phrase of ‘oh, aren’t you organised’. So please be careful out there you guys, and if someone try’s to downplay your experience, know that you are valid and that what you are going through is probably something that they could never handle. It’s a lesson that took me time to learn, but it’s important because our experience matters. Our real experience.

Today I heard a girl say ' no, I know I have OCD because I need to have a clean car'. I asked ''what are you worried about happening if you don't have a clean car' and she told me 'nothing'. And she told me she has to organize her cutlery. She continued to be...well.... oblivious and it's almost like she sees it as a trend for social media. Like what even is that??!! It was so bad for me last year and After all the debilitation I have worked through, it's kind of somehow insulting when someone thinks it's trendy to have. Like why am I still mad about it. This was 12 hours ago and I'm still urked but I know people would get it if I wrote it here! I need absolutely no reassurance, I feel how I feel I'm just mad!

hi yall im new here but not new to ocd. for as long as i remember ive had tendencies and ive had compulsions. when i was like 6 i remember counting my steps and that started this life long thing. i get looks in public because ive been touching each side of my face for the past 10 minutes because it “didn’t feel right”. about every one in my life knows i have severe ocd and that’s fine but my grandmother told my mom behind my back one night that i was ‘manipulating’ her and that my ocd could be fake. this is because i can’t take the trash out of the track can because i can’t risk getting sick from old food, i cant use cleaning products on my hands to clean them. i have no probably taking the trash out it’s just removing it from the bin. i can’t do the dishes because its not clean and ill have an anxiety attack because its just simply too overwhelming for my ocd. those aren’t the only things but the list is just too long to write out. but we don’t live with my grandmother anymore. when we did my ocd wasn’t as progressed as it is now and i was able to hide most of my compulsions and “rituals” (what i call them) in private, therefore she doesn’t see how much it can affect my every move. this happened a while ago but i keep thinking about it and i get in my head. when im really struggling it’s hard to not convince myself that i’ve been lying to myself and so many others for 18 years. all my compulsions and intrusive thoughts and the goddamn hallucinations i’ve had from ocd are in fact real but how can my own grandmother call me manipulative like i don’t get it truthfully. i cannot imagine a situation in which someone would go through the trouble of washing their hands 4 times, of blinking 16 times before shutting their phone off. rewriting a whole text to their boyfriend because i misspelt a word and so now the whole text is wrong or any other of these things i and SO MANY people who have ocd or ocd tendencies would go through the trouble because it is SO paralyzing. clearly i’m not going to explain myself to her because i don’t have that energy esspecially if she is going to ‘mhm’ me and then go again behind my back and tell my mom (who fully understands and has tendencies herself and knows i don’t make this stuff up) that im a manipulator.