A reminder to everyone on here reading through other people’s posts looking for reassurance: put your phone down! Close the app! I know this feels like the most important thing in the world right now, but you’re just continuing the obsessive compulsive cycle. Listen to music, or go for a walk, or read a book. Do something that isn’t trying to prove or disprove whatever your fear is. I’m betting you’ve done this a thousand times before, and I’m betting that you still don’t have a satisfactory answer. What makes you think that this time will be different? I’m writing this to myself as much as anyone else; I just went down a reassurance rabbit hole, triggered by reading a post on here.

Is it just me or is reddit and quora the worst things to be on when you’re in a spiral or just in general when you have OCD? Why is it always mostly negative replies on there or just ‘move on, get over it’ ‘break up’, ‘what’s wrong with you?’ responses? I’ve accidentally made it a habit/compulsion to go on there when I’m freaking out about something and it always makes me worse - especially when it comes to ROCD! It always make me doubt my own thoughts and emotions :(

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.

Finding this app has helped me a lot in feeling like I'm not isolated and I've definitely met so many kind and helpful people here. You guys have helped me on my darkest days. However, because of my fragile state of mind, I think scrolling on here is becoming a compulsion and I feel like I end up triggering myself more by scrolling through some posts. I think it just ends up adding more to my intrusive thoughts and more ammo for my false memories and POCD to latch on to. And I know exposures are good for treating OCD, but this level of exposure seems to be doing more harm than good. So I will try to be less active (maybe I won't, who knows lol).