//mention of possible contamination ocd and not eating regularly warning this is a huge post lol i tried to resist posting something on this app but ive bottled up too many things for far too long 😭😭🤠🤠 so uh i dont really know if i have some form of contamination ocd or not. i keep seeing stuff about erp and avoiding reassurance and stuff but i dont really know what else im supposed to do to fight off the Bad Thoughts ™ i feel like i dont have the willpower to expose myself to my fears on purpose right now. and im not currently in therapy and i dont know if we even have the money for that right now im feeling really anxious lately and i dont really leave my room or eat and drink often anymore because im scared of contamination. im not really worried about getting sick though i just dont like touching or being near gross things. im typing this post in anguish because i left my bedroom to find that there was cat poop on the floor in the living room and i feel like i need to shower even though i didnt touch it or anything, i just didnt shower and went to bed to type this so im wondering if my bed is contaminated now. im also slightly worried about the food i ate since it was in the living room for a short time. Eating food that was delivered to our house makes me nervous because i haven’t found out how to clean our patio/ front door area off so i can feel comfortable again. I feel the need to clean that area because we live in an apartment so thats where the cats nasty litter box gets cleaned out and uh yeah ew. ive tried cleaning up the cats litter box in the past at least once a day but i usually had trouble maintaining that because of my fear of germs combined with not scheduling my day properly. when we got the cat we agreed that me and my twin sister wouldnt clean the litter box because that stuff grosses us out too much, but everyone stopped cleaning it regularly and only emptied it out once a month and it started driving me crazy so i tried to clean it but yeah that didnt really work out. I feel like i cant really live with pets at this point in my life, like i cant even touch the cat and i sanitize everything that the cat touches because i cant remember the last time she was bathed, and i dont think i have it in me to bathe her myself. Getting rid if the pets is out if the question though and also i would be very sad if that happened, i still love them even if i cant really hang out with them these days. My mom also has kind of become a walking contamination ocd trigger for me, so i dont want to touch anything she touches if i can avoid it, which is a huge problem considering we live in the same house and she touches pretty much everything as one tends to do in their own home. I feel like im starting to be too controlling of my sisters and mom because of the contamination fears, but i dont know how to stop. i dont have my own money so i have to rely on my mom if i want to pay for therapy or something, but i have a feeling that wont really turn out well since theres so many other expenses we are behind on. at this point i dont really know how to function like a normal human being, much less clean up after pets and stuff. im stuck in my house all of the time so that makes it even worse, although i did recently apply for a job. I want to move out really badly and i feel like thats the only way to really solve my problems, but i am extremely broke, and theres also the problem of having no idea how to pay for college. if i were to move out id probably want to throw out as many belongings as possible because they would be associated with how disgusting my current living situation is. i had something similar to this before, but it wasnt as bad as it is now. I started having fears like this when i lived with my dad every 2 weeks. After my dad forced me to do something i was uncomfortable with, i started thinking differently and started washing my hands more, as well as associating thoughts with the distressing event. I was able to recover after we stopped living with him and I was fine for a while, and i started doing more chores and stuff and my mom was pleased with me, but i feel like i relapsed into that past mindset in a way and now every day feels like a struggle and i dont really do much anymore other than laying in my bed. honestly this is more of a vent post than anything else, i dont know what im expecting for this post, sorry for the atrocious grammar. i realize this turned into an essay that kind if goes all over the place and is probably hard to keep up with lol sorry about that

(Long post warning) Hi, I’ve been struggling with severe OCD for six years now. it started in 2019 with my theme being getting sick/emetophobia. it devastated my life. I almost didn’t graduate high school from it. I remember washing my hands for three hours one day until they were nearly bloody while crying and asking why I could not stop doing it. I remember id have to write and rewrite sentences when I did my English homework and that’s why I nearly failed that class. I remember how I would spend up to thirty minutes to an hour pacing the halls of my apartment while my mom was asleep until I neutralized the thoughts about throwing up and I could finally go to bed. I don’t know when it happened, but my theme switched. Sometimes in late 2020 or early 2021, it switched to POCD. It started with a single thought, and I focused on it and it’s been my theme since then for four years. It has been absolutely destroying me. I feel so disgusted and lost and just tired. My compulsions are severe now. I thought they were bad before, but now they’re ten times worse. I can’t eat, drink, change my clothes, walk, or even do things on my phone normally. I’ve developed so many mental compulsions that it’s so intricate and complicated yet at the same time I’ve done them so much that they’ve become normal. An example I have is if im putting on a shirt and I have a “bad” thought, I have to take it off and put it back on two more times (that’ll make it 3 times I put the shirt back on - odd numbers are my safe number). I have to have a good thought on the third time otherwise I have to take it off and put it on two more times to make it five times I put on that shirt. If not that then I just put on a different shirt because the original is now tainted with my bad thought. I can’t open apps on my phone. It’s with the numbers again. If I open TikTok once while having a bad thought - I have to close it and open it two more times and so on. Sometimes I do it up to 30 times. So I just don’t do things usually. I don’t turn on the TV because I know I’ll redo it. I don’t open a book or grab it off my shelf because I’ll have to repeat the action. I can’t even lay in bed without getting up and redoing it even if im exhausted. I just feel so helpless. I don’t know what to do. I feel disgusting and even now my minds screaming at me that I am dirty and what I think is true. I just wish I was free of this, I wish I could just live my life. I’ve wasted hours and days because of my compulsions. I mask it so well around my friends. I don’t do them in front of anyone or I’ve learned to hide it well. But when im back home alone, it goes haywire. I just want to live again.

sorry if im putting to much detail in here I can take it down if it is too much and makes people uncomfy. Last night was watching some ex*pl*cit content while lying on the rug in the room in my house I spend most of my time and where my family usually goes into and it caused a physical reaction. I went to the bathroom to clean up and then sprayed the shower done and put bleach on the floor but I wiped the floor with a towel to kinda clean it but idk if I put enough bleach to clean it and if I got it in the areas that mattered and I sprayed Lysol on the bathroom counter to make sure no germs of my earlier reaction got any where but I ran out of Lysol after spraying everything but I made sure to spray the rug with some Lysol before I ran out but idk if I got everything I mean I focused on the rug but I didn’t spray all of it and I didn’t spray all the stuff that was in the room. And to make things worse after my reaction earlier I put my devices and charger on the floor of my room before washing my hands or my devices so I had to clean the floor in my room I used bleach but I didn’t put it everywhere on the floor which makes me anxious and idk if I cleaned my devices or charger well enough and I’m scared they are still infected. But back to the rug i sprayed it down with odoban it says disinfectant on it but I think it’s only for hard surfaces it disinfects but I still sprayed it around on the rug but I don’t know if it actually disinfected anything. And of course to make matters worse my baby cousins toys were in the room so I sprayed them with what little Lysol I had left but idk if I cleaned it well enough but I already put them with their other toys so idk what to do. After I thought I cleaned everything I put my devices on my mattress I don’t have my blankets on my mattress yet cause I washed them like a week or 2 ago and they are just laying on my bed but not put on my mattress so I’m scared my mattress if infected since I’m laying on my mattress with my feet on my chair and my devices are on my mattress. And idk I don’t want people getting those bad germs in them and I,worry about this a lot and Ik a lot of people will say that it isn’t that huge of a deal and I want to,believe them and it helps but my mind is always telling me that even if that’s true I have a responsibility to make sure everything is clean so people don’t get hurt and it doesn’t help that I’ve been so,itchy and idk why and my little brother is also itchy idk if it’s because I don’t clean well enough and it’s my germs or not but I’m tired do I need,to clean my mattress and covers again and reclean the rug I think I do but I’m trying to go against that thinking but it’s hard because I feel like a bad persons. And today I’m scared to leave my room i feel like I’m filthy and that the rug in the other room is contaminated and it doesn’t help I need to go to the doctor today when I’m feeling like anyone I’m around im infecting

Also Im sorry for posting so much about this type of stuff I’m just genuinely terrified and don’t know what to do Ok so last night I (16M) made a mistake of watching some stuff and had a physical reaction and I have a huge fear of bodily fluids and them infecting things and getting people infected because I think that would basically be a crime and of course I was in bed when this happened and worse part is I was on my bare mattress since I washed my covers a week ago and didn’t put them onto my bed yet but they were sitting on my bed if that makes sense and so I decide to shower change clothes spray the part I was laying down on with Lysol and also my chair and I feel asleep thinking I would clean it my room in the morning and also use my deep cleaning rug machine in the other room because I was scared thay room was also infected. So I wake up and my mind is ringing with fear telling me everything is filthy and what really scared me the most was my little brother and I used to share a room and so he had like a pile of his clean clothes on his bed which was by my bed but separated by a dresser and our room is small my chair is in the middle of our two bed and so I was scared that his clothes are now infected and I was panicking so I decided to just get up start cleaning up in the other room in order to clean the rug and I also swept the floor so I could mop later and of course chaos ensued the machine to clean the rug wasn’t working for a good hour before I got it working and then I cleaned the rug and then finished sweeping and I was going to mop before of course I made the same mistake I did last night and now my brain things everything is infected again so I quickly go shower spray the shower with Clorox foam and Lysol on the shower handle and head and I was going to wash it all off later after it sat for a bit but and I sprayed the floor with some Clorox foam just incase someone went in there before I mopped the bathroom floor and wiped it up with a towel I start preparing the mop and yep of course something else happens the pipe in the bathroom I just showered on frayed and water was pouring everywhere I told my dad he stopped it and of course I had to take everything out of the cabinet put it on the bathroom counter but my dad out some stuff in the shower and of course I’m grossed out because I didn’t rinse the Clorox out of it so to me that stuff got dirty and my dad can’t fix the sink until tomorrow so everything in there is sitting in limbo and my dad also used the mop I was gonna use to mop the house to get the water up that was covering the bathroom floor. But I mopped anyway cleaned the floor in my room and the bathroom along with what I could get in the house. Afterwards I start cleaning my room more wiping down the chair with a Lysol wipe and the dresser separating out bed I started throwing slot of stuff away like cards, coins, mail it was cluttered anyway and I tired wiping everything down to clean it the dresser the tv controllers my phone and iPad stuff like that I put some of my coins in a back I out back onto my dresser after wiping them with a Lysol wipe or ATLEAST trying and I threw some of my brothers clothes into the laundry room because I was scared it was infected I moved some stuff out of my room because I’m honestly scared to go back in there because I don’t want to get dirty again. So now I’m lying in a different room typing this terrified I forgot to clean something which would put someone at risk and thinking of how I need to go back in my room to wash my bed covers and clean my mattress but I’m so stressed I have a headache and my laptop is broken I think so another thing on my plate and I’m spiraling and have no idea what to do