One of the hardest things for me to accept is that maybe my brain is doing all of this to me and that none of it is real.

I have really bed harming intrusive thoughts and sometimes feels like it’s feeling! The thoughts happening every day and the hardest part is that I’m testing my self in head all the time if that’s what I am or want!!! Also, so many times feels like I’m been tricking myself and doctor or people and maybe I don’t have OCD, just that maybe it’s me really!!!! How can I know who I am really 🥹???!!??

I've recently been on a journey to find an effective therapy for my chronic pain(migraine). It's exhausting and draining and horrible, sure, but the thing that is the worst for me is the idea that some therapy will work. I'm terrified that this journey will end, it will have a simple solution, an easily accessible medication, and my pain will go away. One of the reasons, the reason I'm more comfortable talking about, is that my pain is real to me in a world, and in a mind, where few things can have an intense reality like pain. Generally, I ocillate between being unconvinced of my own existence or critically aware of it. I'm all jumbled up, my head is a swamp of ruminations and thought-stopping illusions, but my pain cuts through it like a knife. When my migraines are the worst, there are no more thoughts, just pain. This isn't stopping me from looking for a treatment though, and I mostly think of it as an interesting quirk in my relationship to my pain. The thing that really scares me, that might hold me back, is that I will get an easy treatment, the pain won't be there, and it was never as bad as I thought it was. In fact, this thing that has defined me, been a bouy in the storm of OCD even, was never real. It was attention, self-obsession, and it can go away easily because I'm blowing it out of proportion. I don't believe I'm lying, I'm scared that I'll be told it is a small thing or that it's not there at all. I'm oversensitive. I'm crying for help. There is no migraine, there is only OCD. It's silly to me as I write it, with a headache of course, but this is the thought plaguing me. This is what holds me back and urges me to not call my neurologist back, I'm scared it will have all been nothing, and then it will be gone.

I sometimes see posts on here of people saying their OCD fears becoming true and it’s so so triggering for me. It makes me question if I ever had OCD and if I’m just faking it. I’ve tried to accept that my fear was real. Okay? Before I knew this was OCD, I really TRIED to accept it as a part of myself because I figured if I was even having those thoughts, it must be true. But in reality it just made me feel worse in the end. It wasn’t until several hours/few days after accepting the thoughts as true did I realize they were not and how uncomfortable it made me identifying with them that way, so eventually I went back into the rumination cycle. And I’ve done this multiple times. No matter how much I’ve accepted it as real, I never come to a conclusion in the end and I just get 10x more miserable. And I am still so scared of my fear coming true as those peoples did. But I know that’s what we all fear, otherwise we wouldn’t be here. And with a new fear I just developed, (all in the realm of the same theme) I’ve also tried to accept it as real when I felt SUPER convinced and even though it felt excruciatingly real, there was a part of me that couldn’t fully believe it, because I just know viscerally that it’s not. But the feeling of it being real is just too powerful and it overmastered any ounce of insight I had left. It wasn’t until my OCD spike calmed down when I was able to see through the viel. I hate this. I have no desire to do anything that my thoughts tell me. I know what I want to be, want to do, and it’s the opposite of those OCD thoughts. But these triggering posts won’t leave. (Not really the publishers fault, it’s my ritual that I engage in). They make me come all back to square one (if I wasn’t there already) and question if I’m using this as an excuse. I don’t want to do what my OCD tells me to do, but my brain just spits, “you’re just convincing yourself you don’t want this!” as it so often now does. I’m so tired. Please give me my old self back. Please give me 100% certainty that none of this is real and my fears are not at all based in reality. My brain cannot accept uncertainty and will not leave me alone. My brain is raged and powerless without knowing why, and spiels that anger back on me to get a reaction, and when it gets what it wants, the cycle continues. And goes way longer than I had bargained for :(