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Hi! I hate to be a bother, but I wanted to bring attention to my last post in hopes that some people could share thoughts/relate? Thanks!

When I read about other struggles people have and post on here who have a different theme than my own, I understand their pain they are describing but I also just feel like mine is truly the worst one. I don’t mean for this to sound invalidating to anyone because I do believe that pain is very real for others with different themes. It just is discouraging to be able to see through the irrationality of ocd when others post but when it is with my own theme (existential), I feel absolutely unable to see through it. Do other people experience this too?

So i need some help, i havent been diagnosed with ocd but i heavily resonate with OCD symptoms and have had symptoms for 10 years now and ROCD is a theme i seem to be dealing with for a couple of months. Can it be that your ROCD thoughts get to the point where you feel like your clarity is being hijacked by OCD and deep deep down you know that you have had better days and that this isn’t what you truly want but its making you think and feel like it is what you want/need like e.g I’ve been having a lot of thoughts like ‘you don’t want to be with him’ when this started again i tried to put what i learnt to practise to let it be there but i started to lean into reassuring myself that i do want to be with him, leading into a bothered feeling with the thoughts in the back of your head. To then feeling and thoughts like you will be better and happier if you weren’t with them. This is the first time in a while that i have felt really out of touch with my true self and its starting to feel like my true self is not my true self and that THIS is my true self. It started to not even feel scary and more like a fact that made me sad but still a bit uncomfortable. Ive had small moments of being like “thats not what i want” to the thoughts and being able to let them pass but when it gets bad it gets bad and it feels like you have no other option to really go in. It almost like distorts your brain even though a week ago i felt arguably the exact opposite of this. Its been like this for a couple of days now, ive seen him over the last couple of days so maybe the already sensitivity of it triggered it more being with him. (Side note i started my period the other day so i have felt overall more sensitive) please say im not the only one who is dealing with this and that its not just me, its kind of a nightmare. I hope this doesnt last forever because im also a bit worried that it’s never gonna go away and that its something i need to worry about.

Just venting. Lately I’ve been feeling more depressed specifically because of gender dysphoria (most significantly about my body). I usually refer to myself as bigender, because I definitely still enjoy having some masculine elements, but it’s been getting so severe that I feel like gender-affirming surgery might be necessary. Although I do sometimes enjoy the pleasures of male sexual stimulation, I usually feel disgusted on myself for it, and I can’t stop thinking about how uncomfortable my genitalia feel all the time (which may likely be due to somatic OCD). Then I start getting imposter syndrome (which I do realize is normal, but it still feels very real), but then I remember some internal signs from when I was younger for how I felt about my gender. When I imagine myself and how I should look on camera and in the mirror, I see both a boy and a girl, although none of them look like me. The boy version is cool and emo-ish. The girl version is chill and cozy. I feel like it would be best for me to transition my body so that I can express both genders like some kind of trans tomboy. I always think about how unfair it is that girls can look normal in boy clothes, but boys look weird in girl clothes. So if I was born in a female body, my perspective of my gender would be slightly different even though I would definitely still be lgbtq. I know that it’s perfectly fine to not fully know/understand one’s gender yet, but OCD really makes me feel so much like I need to be certain about it, labels help me so much. I’m at a stage where I accept that I know I’m lgbtq, but at the same time it feels so embarrassing, and I wish I wasn’t. Sometimes I feel like I’m too different to be normal, but also not different enough for the weirdos. It feels like I don’t even fit in with literal misfits. Everyone makes me anxious, and I don’t know who to trust. What are your thoughts?

Hey everyone! I’m a bit new here and I’m not fully sure if I have OCD or not. But every post I read I feel like I relate a lot to. I have really bad anxiety and when I was 18 went through extensive testing to get diagnosed with ADHD I don’t take medications for either of them anymore but I do struggle a lot with both. I can’t seem to tell what is my anxiety and what is not. Examples of what I have noticed: I get super paranoid if someone around me is sick and I bleach and disinfect everything around me and around them if possible out of fear of getting sick. If I have a bump or any minor change in how I feel I go through rabbit holes on google and tend to think I have a crazy illness and even get to the point of needing to cut the area off if it “feels wrong”. I obsess over my teeth needing to be white and if they are too yellow or streaky I spend hours brushing my teeth and using whitening gels and strips to fix it. I also have always thought that secretly I am an evil person and I try to do things to prove that I am not but in the end it’s just my mind saying I am faking it and no one truly knows how bad of a person I am. I spend at least 10 hours a week cleaning and making sure nothing is too dusty or dirty in fear of bugs or a surprise guest coming over. I constantly doubt myself in everything I do and I even doubt the things the people around me do in fear that they are just trying to manipulate me. I constantly fear I may cheat on my partner and I tend to replay events in my head over and over again worrying if it has ruined the way a person perceives me. Honestly it’s exhausting and it’s never ending. I’m not sure if I have OCD but this is just some of the things I have noticed. I just wanted to vent somewhere even if it’s to a void. Thank you for reading this if you did :)

My fears have made me avoid things I would normally enjoy. It’s not in the background anymore and something I could push through but I have avoided everything. I have genuine dread thinking about events and I feel selfish for not going to things people invite me to but I know I’ll be spending the whole time spiraling or trying to calm myself down. The fun I end up having(if I even have any) isn’t worth the mental exhaustion.. Even church makes me scared. Everyone asks what happened and if I’ve been okay but I just stand there looking stupid because I can’t come up with a lie since I’m too scared to explain my fears and then I feel like a bad person and a liar for not telling people. But they wouldn’t understand if I did..

How did it take until I was almost 21 years old for everything in my life to catch up to me and start beating me down. I have too many awful Real Events, both from my younger years and my few adult ones. I have so many false memories that I'm slowly becoming convinced we're the truth that I just gaslit myself into not believing. I have watched so many morally wrong things online and am enraged that it took me so long for it to click. I have so many horrible thoughts and feelings that some of them have to be true. I'm probably the kind of person that ends up getting locked away and then a documentary made out of them. It doesn't matter that I care when I'm this disgusting and horrible. It just cancels itself out.

What is progress? Everyone has an answer ready before you even finish asking. Start small. Commit to this. Use this framework, use that one. Reflect daily. Fine. You can start small. That was never actually the hard part. The hard part is what happens when you miss a day, or two, or a week, and you’re back where you started, the way you have been for five or six years every time you’ve tried this exact advice before. Because here’s what nobody selling “start small” accounts for: you have started small. More than once. And it still didn’t turn into progress. So the panic underneath this isn’t “will I start.” It’s “I’ve started small before, and it went nowhere, so why would this time be different.” That’s the real weight. Not the starting. The history of starting and watching it not stick. There’s a second layer under that too, one you don’t say out loud much: part of you doesn’t even want to start small. Starting small feels like admitting something. It feels weak. Pathetic, even, set against five or six years of failure and lost time. Starting small feels like nothing, a rounding error against a debt that big. You know intellectually that small is the only honest starting point. But emotionally it feels like conceding you’re still at zero when you should be somewhere else by now. And underneath that is the clock. Your responsibilities aren’t shrinking. Your parents aren’t getting younger. At some point the time you’ve spent not progressing stops being an abstract regret and starts being a bill that’s actually due. That’s what’s catching up. Not just you, everything you’re responsible for. Effort is part of the problem, sure. But it’s not the whole question. The real question, the one you keep circling and never actually land on, is simpler and harder: what does progress even look like? Say you clean one part of the house, like everyone tells you to. Fine, you can do one part. But then what. Do you stop there. Do you keep going. Do you move to something else that day, or leave it and come back tomorrow, next week, next month. Nobody tells you that part. Say you study for five or ten minutes, because you haven’t studied at all in a month. What is five or ten minutes actually going to do. Is it a start, or is it just this month’s version of last month’s nothing, wearing a smaller costume. And here’s the part that actually scares you, more than any single outcome: it’s not that you’re afraid of failing. It’s that you genuinely don’t know what progress is made of. What it looks like in different parts of your life. How small an action is allowed to be and still count. How you’re supposed to get from fifteen minutes of work to four hours, to six, to eight hours of real, productive, quality work a day. Nobody who tells you to start small ever shows you the bridge from small to that. They just say start, as if the rest handles itself. You know, logically, that starting small is the only real way in. There’s no other honest first step. But knowing that doesn’t make it less anxious, because the only way in is small and slow, and you don’t actually know how you get from there to somewhere real. Your past says progress has been slow to nonexistent. Your future says you don’t have time for slow. So you end up wanting to move fast precisely because you’ve moved so little, which is the exact tension that keeps you from moving at all. So the actual question isn’t whether you should start small. You already know the answer to that. The actual question is what’s supposed to happen between the fifth minute and the four-hundredth hour, between one clean corner of the house and a life that looks different, between the first small step and the point where you can finally see, in front of you, real fruit from real labor. That’s the gap nobody has ever mapped out for you. And until you have some kind of answer for it, even a rough one, “start small” is going to keep sounding like advice for a problem you don’t actually have. The effort problem How can you be afraid of effort? Not bored by it, not annoyed by it. Afraid of it. That’s the part that doesn’t add up on paper. You want to change. You want to get better. You know this is the path, you know obstacles come with it, you know you’re dealing with anxiety, limited time, limited energy. You’re ambitious, and you try to stay honest about what’s realistic. So how does all of that add up to being afraid of the one thing that would actually get you there? Maybe it’s this. Five or six years of not much moving. Failure after failure, or what feels like failure, and you can’t even tell which kind it was: not enough effort, not enough ability, not enough time given to it, or it just wasn’t the right fit. Not knowing which one it was is exhausting on its own. It’s worn you down past frustration into something closer to hopelessness. And hopelessness doesn’t fight you. It just makes you too tired to keep fighting. Distractions aren’t the real explanation, they’re the easy one. Everyone has a phone. Everyone has something they’re hooked on. That’s not unique to you. What’s harder to sit with is this: the thing you want most, every day, every minute, is to feel like you’re actually making progress. Not performing it. Making it. And you have what you’d need. The tools, the knowledge, people have handed you exactly what to do. You still forget to use it, or you use it once and don’t come back. First try, second, third, even the fourth or fifth. You quit. Not because the method failed you. Because somewhere in there you decided you were the failure. Maybe that’s true. Maybe it’s not. You genuinely don’t know. But here’s what you do know: action is the only thing that has ever moved you forward, not thinking about moving forward. And you’re not incapable of action, you do things, you clean, you eat, you sleep, you see people, you walk. So the problem isn’t that you can’t act. It’s that you can’t sustain acting on the thing that actually matters. Two weeks into a workout, a study method, real studying, the business, and then a show pulls you in, or something you already know you shouldn’t be doing pulls you in, and it’s gone. You’ve never once made it to three weeks. You stop, and somewhere along the way you lost track of what effort even means. You’re not sure you ever had a clear answer. Part of the weight is volume. You’re not short on ideas, you’re buried in them. Years of collecting knowledge, tools, potential you can see clearly in your head, and none of it converts, because you’re trying to hold all of it at once, which means none of it moves. And every day you don’t act, you’re also replaying every day before it that you didn’t act. It compounds. So how are you supposed to be kind to yourself in the middle of that? If you were actually doing the ERP the way it’s meant to be done, the honest move might be to sit with “maybe I am pathetic, maybe I’m not” without needing to resolve it either way. You can do that. Until you can’t. Because part of you genuinely wants out, wants to be proud of the work, the relationships, the body, the effort itself. And another part of you wants to stay exactly where you are. Because it’s familiar. Because the self-pity, the rumination, even this, talking it through again, watching another video, reading another framework, gives you something that feels like relief. It tells you it’s not fully your fault. That’s not nothing. That’s peace of mind, technically. It’s also why you don’t leave. You know what the discomfort costs. Physically, mentally, socially, and you have a rough sense of what it costs later, even without being able to see the future. Five or six years of data on yourself is not nothing either. And that’s part of what makes this so disorienting: resisting the discomfort has become its own discomfort. So you convert it into something more manageable, you turn it into pity, into searching for the next video, the next resource, the next person who might finally hand you the real answer. Some part of you is still waiting for the moment that fixes this from the outside. It hasn’t come. It isn’t coming. So what are you actually waiting for. Why is it so hard to do the next thing in front of you instead of the hundred things in your head. Why does failing once mean stopping instead of adjusting. Why does discomfort get treated like a stop sign instead of a toll you pay to get through. You already know, somewhere in you, that effort, the unglamorous, repeated, often boring kind, is the only thing that has ever built anything real in anyone’s life. So the real question isn’t how you can dislike effort. It’s why you keep choosing the comfort of the hole over the discomfort of climbing out of it, when you already know which one you actually want.

In getting to the lowest dose of sertraline I’ve ever been at, I began doubting my relationship and sexuality more than ever before. I’m scared that though more than doubling my dose since, I’ve grown a lot less panicked, but is that just suppressing my true self a bit? I should add I am NOT anti-medication, I went up so I could function again. I guess I’m just seeing if anyone else has had my experience.

Did you ever feel like giving up ? I sometimes think my ERP isn't working. I worry over if I have sexual attraction to my partner. I love my partner i always knew he wasnt all that physically attractive to me but still attractive and I didnt mind bc i truly do love him he's my best driebd. But im constantly analyzing how I feel questioning why I didn't feel a certain way and its all we talk about so no intimacy is actually being built. I feel 100% certain it is ocd but what I've been doing is noticing my desire to talk about it look it up etc and not doing so and most of the time I'm uncomfortable , then I forget about it. Lol

sometimes i’ll read/listen to older adults speak about having OCD for 20, 30, 40, 50, 60+ years and i feel a sense of dread wash over me. i feel bad because they’ve been suffering for so long, but i feel bad because i know i could suffer for that long too, and then i feel even worse because why would i compare two separate circumstances when someone is being so vulnerable?!?!?! i feel like im going crazy because i can’t stop assuming people’s emotions/experiences before my mind overtakes me and i start thinking about all the ways i can one-up people or make my experiences seem worse than theirs. i worry that this mentality is what’s going to make me have OCD for so long and ill become like them, and sometimes im unable to realize that we’re our own people and i cannot “become” another person or try to emulate/copy them because everyone’s OCDs experiences are unique and deserve to be valued regardless of how long or “severe” OCD might be. does this even make sense??? idk, i just know i need to work on my competitiveness before i lose everyone and everything.

This post is going to be really complicated to make, because it genuinely feels like an issue only I have. I have had an addiction to porn and hentai for a long time now. One of my fetishes is one that is literally impossible in real life, so animated content has been something I've regularly consumed for years. My idea on animated characters was, as long as they aren't so obviously a small child, it was easier to just head canon them as an adult, just because that was easier in the long run. I even mentioned this idea to a friend of mine, and they had agreed with me that it was just easier. But now that my POCD has flared up beyond belief, this ideology doesn't... Work, anymore. I'll see an animation or post of a fictional character aged up, and, despite them LOOKING adult now, I can't help but violently panic over it. So then, the classic OCD rumination began. I remember random videos I've watched pertaining to my fetish (which isn't inherently illegal, mind you) and realized just how many had depicted animated children and I simply never thought about it that hard. I just told myself "yeah these are adults" because that was easy to do. Or I didn't realize that a particular video was fetishizing something horrible because I wasn't focusing on that. And that's only covering my concerns over animated minors. I have seen so many other weird things depicting animals and what have you that I had viewed in pursuit of my specific fetish(s), and then in retrospect I am like, horribly disgusted. I dunno. Maybe I sound insane. But I just feel so gross. I keep looking back at stuff I had watched without really caring, and am now realizing how truly disgusting some of it was. I was so good at separating this stuff from my reality for a while, but now it all feels like proof that I'm attracted to some of the worst possible things. Despite that never being like... The REASON I was watching any of these things.

Never considered this a possibility until every recently when everything felt like it clicked. I had met my current best friend in Junior year of highschool, and we only became truly close during our Senior year and the following few years. She's been basically the only person I've associated with (outside a few buddies I had before graduation) amidst my depression and my life basically falling apart. I've done a lot of rumination over my handful of years of having her in my life, and the conclusion I've come to is that I've been absolutely terrible to her, despite the fact that she swears up and down that it's not the case. The first point of rumination is just all the times I've said creepy/perverted stuff to her, tried to engage with her in a sexual way, etc. There's been so many moments throughout our 4+ years of knowing each other where I would say something dirty/flirty in hopes something would blossom, and it was either so ill timed she would call me out on it, or she didn't really realize the implication. A handful of occasions I had been a bit pushy/trying too hard without really realizing it, but as I've grown as a person over the last few years I end up remembering and feeling gross about it. I'm also struggling with a couple of false memories, or at least, what I HOPE are false memories, convincing myself that I either have tried/wanted to touch her without her wanting it at some point. She tells me that I haven't done that and she would remember if I did, but I'm so scared that I've wanted to do so at some point and the thought horrifies me. I sometimes feel like I only ever became her friend for sexual reasons, or something. Something I'm horrified could be true. A point my mind holds against me often is how I'll video call with her when she's in a state of undress, and it's like, I'll want to do it more because of it? As scummy as that sounds? What makes it worse, is that I talked to her the other night about things that we often do together that in my eyes are an intimate thing, whereas she sees them as stuff she does with close friends. Showering on the phone, stuff like that. Which makes me feel worse for pursuing a relationship like that with her when it was never there at all. The second point is largely a byproduct of the first point, where I had often felt immense guilt over my previous actions and would profusely apologize and deliberately avoid her for long periods of time. She's told me that I've caused her a lot of pain doing that to her, despite me feeling like it's the right thing to do quite often. So despite everything I've talked about, like I said, my friend doesn't have any issues with me. She swears up and down that I'm too hard on myself, and when I ask what exactly she wants out of our relationship, she says she just wants me to keep being who I've been, who in her eyes, is her chill friend she can talk about whatever with and play games with. All of what I've talked about isn't even a factor. Something me and her have talked about is how she's pretty dense when it comes to social things, so part of me can't help but wonder if I really have been as horrible as I think I have been, and she simply hasn't had it click. I care about her so much, man. Maybe high school me was only thinking about sex. I don't know anymore. All I know is that even if I didn't care back then, I DEFINITELY do right now. She's such an amazing person and easily the best HUMAN I've ever had in my life. That's why this is tearing me apart so thoroughly. The idea that I've been so horrible to the only person who actually CARES about me at all makes me lose sleep.

This song and music video came out over a month ago and it really struck something with me. I know that gracie abrams has ocd herself and i have been listening to it constantly because it feels like a vent for the deep turmoil that i have dealt with. She has a lyric that says "I want to be stable but i do cave" and that hit really hard especially with the way she looks into the camera on the video. I included this as a trigger warning because there is a mention of violence and hallucinations. I believe that the violence is a mention of harm ocd as opposed to actual harm and the hallucinations are a reference of how we can almost hallucinate that something is a real concern.

Recently I have been feeling overwhelmed by OCD thoughts and doubts about my relationship and my sexuality. I keep questioning whether I truly love my boyfriend or whether I am actually in love with the idea of being in love. These doubts become especially strong when I notice changes in my feelings, body sensations, or reactions. Today, I was worried about whether I miss my boyfriend enough while we are apart (I am in South Carolina and he is in Texas). I know he did not text me yesterday because of his strict mom, but I started worrying about what it means if I do not feel a strong sense of missing him. I questioned if I even love him anymore. I also had moments where I felt happy. For example, earlier I told my mom that I want to live with my boyfriend someday. Later, when my sister mentioned my boyfriend while we were talking about future plans and finances, I felt really happy. When my boyfriend texted me and we talked, I also felt happy. However, afterward I started analyzing my feelings and wondering why my body felt heavy or why I did not feel a stronger emotion all the time. I became triggered when my sister mentioned that I had talked about being with a girl. I do not remember saying that I wanted to be with a girl. I remember telling her that I was forcing myself to think about these things and that I was scared because I was experiencing OCD for the first time. I remember crying and trying to explain that these thoughts were upsetting me. Hearing her describe it differently made me feel like I was back at square one. I mean when I explained it to her what I was doing it sounded like it like forcing the images and stuff but I didn’t want to be with a girl. I also became triggered when my sister talked about how she did not fully discover herself until her late 20s. It felt like my brain immediately connected this to my fear of not knowing myself and started worrying that maybe I will discover something different about myself later. I have also been experiencing intrusive thoughts and mental images involving women, especially masculine presenting women but it’s going away a bit but I keep focusing on one masc presenting woman who triggered me. When I remember seeing her muscles or certain features, I worry that I felt genuine attraction. The feeling can seem real, but it also feels like it is not truly me. I repeatedly ask myself if I am attracted to masc women or if I am bisexual. Anyway , I have been testing myself by intentionally imagining scenarios to see how I react. For example, I forced myself to imagine being with a woman, touching a woman’s body, or being in romantic/sexual situations with a woman. Sometimes I notice physical sensations or arousal, which scares me but it’s like I don’t care and i feel numb, anxious. I then analyze the sensation and ask myself what it means. I also tested myself by looking at or imagining images of women and checking my reactions. When I notice any sensation, I get a heavy heart but no reaction it’s like I’m tired of it and question whether it means I like women. Sometimes I get tired of fighting the thoughts and say things like “I like girls” or “I am bisexual” just to see what happens. Sometimes it feels real for a moment, but it does not feel like something I actually want or see myself pursuing. I feel confused because the thoughts and sensations can feel convincing. I have also been sleeping very poorly. I stay awake at night and sleep during the day, sometimes sleeping from around 4 AM to 3 PM. I feel mentally and emotionally burned out but I’m getting better. But I keep overthinking if I’m Love him . We’ve been together for three years now and I’m happy and I’m excited for our fourth anniversary because we are gonna to top golf together but anyway I keep questioning if I truly love him, if I’m only afraid of being alone, or if I’m just attached to the idea of being in love. I constantly check my feelings during calls, when he texts me, when I look at his pictures, and when I think about our future. I still have moments where I feel happy and connected with him. For example, when my sister mentioned him while talking about future plans, I felt happy . When he texted me and we talked, I felt happy. I have also told my mom that I want to live with him someday like I said earlier. But idk during our relationship I’m always overthinking if he loves me or not or if he’s using me and it feels like it switched . Sorry if it’s too long 🥲

*Long Post* hello, I’m just looking to get some advice maybe some kind words and some motivating messages I have been really going through it the last two weeks. I’ve already been through all this before and been through therapy but now it seems to be coming back. I’m guessing because I’m in the process of moving right now and I’m just a bit extra stressed. The past two weeks I have been experiencing really bad panic attacks and or agoraphobia if I leave more than 10 minutes from my apartment. If I do go 10 minutes away from the apartment I have a hard time staying at the location whereas I try to rush back home. I have been diagnosed with OCD. I have all types of OCD this one particularly that is bothering me is I have a fear that I am going to go into psychosis if I get too far away from the house where I’m going to lose my mind and I feel like I’m gonna forget everything and I’m gonna lose my memories and then I’m gonna lose who I am. I have this fear that if I get too far away from the house, then I will lose the memory of getting back home and how to get back home. I also have a fear that if I’m around people and I’m panicking like this I fear that if I’m panicking and I’m at least 10 minutes away from home and I’m in public I fear that people are going to trigger something in me to where I go into psychosis and I don’t remember myself and I don’t know how to get home. I fear that if I’m around people in public, they will catch on to how I’m feeling and send me a way to a mental institution. I have to go 10 minutes away to the doctor tomorrow because of my carpal tunnel and I’m dreading the entire day all night. I’ve just been thinking about the fear of going and what might happen if I’m in a room with the doctors and I fear that I will go insane and will not be able to get myself home. I have these thoughts that what if I have to to run back to the car and leave in the middle of my appointment. I also after that I have to go to my parents house who lived 20 minutes away and the last two times that I drove there I was driving recklessly because I was so panicking. I’m usually fine when I get to my parents house but I have a fear that if I drive there, what if I black out and I don’t remember anything. I do not do any drugs. I do not smoke or drink. I’m not sure what brought this on because I’ve already been through therapy for all of this, but it just seems like it’s just gotten worse and harder this time I’m going to have to push myself to go out because my carpal tunnel is making my fingers numb so I know that my health is priority but this anxiety is crippling. I take 125 mg of luvox every day and I see my psychiatrist on 1 August so I’m gonna see if she can update my dose and see if that helps this is kind of the same fear but another fear that I have is what if I get so stressed in public and I completely go into psychosis because I am so stressed and what if the stress brings this on like I fear that what if it gets too much and psychosis hits me while I’m in public and I can’t drive home Another core fear that I have is I have this irrational thought that everybody around me is not real and I am the only real person and I have this thought in my head that this whole life is just a fake scenario in my head. I feel like what if this world is not real and it’s just all made up in my head or I fear that I’m the only real person and the other people are like paid actors. I know this thought is irrational and when I start to do compulsions which are mental compulsions for me I tell myself there’s no way that that’s true. I tell myself people are living their own life as well but I think that makes it worse when I tell myself. So I also have this thought that everybody in this world is me but just different versions and I know this is irrational like everybody is in their own person and I can tell myself that all day but then it’s just the anxiety will not let it go.

I’m a 21 year old guy soon to be 22 and I am still a virgin. I talk to a lot of girls and I think some like me but I’ve never even held their hand or kissed them. Am I a loser? I go to college, get good grades and run collegiate cross country, and have a great family but I still feel like I am a failure. Any advice?

Hey everyone, I think this is a safe space to share what's going on. I am diagnosed with OCD and Schizoaffective disorder. I am dealing with severe paranoia. This paranoia involves fearing people are watching me in public, judging me, or mistreating me and it is severe. It's gotten so bad that I don't like wearing glasses in my own car while driving because I think people are still judging me for my glasses. When I walk outside, it always feels like people are watching me and judging me. I fear talking to any person including disliking phone calls because I fear I will be mistreated. When I walk outside it really does feel like people can "sense" me being there the same way they can sense my wearing my glasses or not in the car. I think I look better without glasses. My vision isn't terrible but it's nice to see more clearly when I am driving and I am actually taking them off because I believe people are still judging me and may even treat me a certain way that is bad if I wear glasses. My current life looks like avoidance of nearly all people and places. I feel safe when I am at home. I am not going to grad school nor working because of my paranoia and dislike for people. I am living on a large inheritance which I am blessed to have. I tried applying for disability income anyway since I am disabled and have no income from job. I didn't qualify because of my assets which makes sense. I am disabled, my OCD and paranoia is preventing me from functioning normally. I today had an experience at the restaurant where I felt like I may have been mistreated. What happened was I entered the restaurant to pick up a to-go order I placed online. I was reaching for my bag and they stopped me to check to make sure I was the correct person (because I learned that people steal other peoples orders a lot there and on that day they said someone stole $90 worth of other people's orders). So I showed them my confirmation on my phone as usual and told them I am a regular who comes in all the time. They said they don't see my name on the confirmation on my phone and I told them they always accept it when I show them. They then said they both don't recognize me when I said I am a regular but then they said "but that doesn't mean you don't come in often" and I have OCD doubt that they said something opposite like they doubted I came in often which would be mistreatment but it sounds unlikely they would have said it that way. So I had to wait a little longer than usual for them to check to make sure I was the correct person for my order. Then one of the older ladies bumped her arm against my arm to get my attention and said, "someone just stole $90 worth of food earlier." I felt like she was invading my space and I felt a small pain even just from that. Then I chose a time to say "I wouldn't want someone stealing my food and she was turning around at the time like she ignored me or didn't hear me." Then I said it again to the other lady and she agreed by saying of course. This was very significant because I felt the need to clarify that I understand why they wanted to check me because I wouldn't want someone stealing my food to make up for the annoyance of waiting. But yeah, I just feel like I was mistreated and I don't like how she touched my arm, when the first one didn't acknowledge when I said I wouldn't want someone stealing my food (My OCD involves feeling the need to clarify, explain, and confess information which can get really overwhelming at times which is why I avoid talking to people to have more peace of mind) I am actually getting off my medications which were helping me just so I could drink alcohol. I want to drink because it helps with the boredom and does make me feel better if I don't over drink. I recently have been acting irrational where I got back on meds and quit drinking then I reverted back to drinking and not on meds and I keep changing my mind. I also notice that some days my surroundings feel dreamier and hazy like I am in disconnect from reality, like a derealization.

I cannot fucking stop myself from ruminating. I feel so lonely and I don’t know what to do and cannot distract myself or get my mind to stop racing!! My closest people are busy and I feel guilty for asking to take up their time. I feel like a burden and I am in the way and always doing something wrong. It feels almost impossible to ask for help even in for the smallest things and I can’t stop worrying. At this point I’m so exhausted from my mind racing and worrying about every possible thing that could go wrong or shit I feel guilty about (drinking a bottle of water from the pantry because it’s one less and what if someone else was going to drink it and fucking everything costs money nothing is free) that I can’t fully explain what’s wrong and how to fix it. I would love to break it all down and be able to know exactly where things are incorrect or could be fixed in every aspect of my life but I don’t have the energy. And now everything in my life is starting to fall apart (something’s fucked in the front end of my car, havent had an alignment in over a year and a half, no sticker, need to get it registered in a month, gas is so fucking expensive, my check engine light is on / my job is so fucking stressful I’m salary getting paid 40 hours but I’m the manager and have 3 other employees at my shop open 8-8 every day so im always covering and staying late and I’m so fucking burnt out from doing everything myself / I live with my parents, my brother/girlfriend and my nephew and my other brother, and whenever I’m not working I can’t ever take a shower or get laundry done. And forget about fucking eating here. I also just lost my health insurance and am dealing with that and hoping my medicstion doesnt run out, because this is how fucked I’m feeling now- I cant imagine cold turkeying 5 of my meds?? But yeah 🙃

So I'm a heavy believer in Jesus Christ and God. I do believe that he is real and I practice and spread the word of God every single day in my personal life. I have also recently shared going to church with a friend every week. There are moments where I watch shows that depict God in it and I get very defensive or straight up will not allow myself to watch or hear it. Whether it'd be saying something against God, using his name in vein repeatedly, or anything straight up mocking him. Especially that. There's a game called Animation Throwdown I'm playing and I've enjoyed it a lot. It's a nice time killer and I eventually got up to a point where Jesus himself appears as an enemy and I just said to myself "Oh." Really was not looking forward to that because I know how the shows in it depict God and it's for "comedic" effect and not in a positive light most of the time. It makes me not want to continue playing the game to be honest because I don't want God or Jesus to think that I'm ok with others making fun of them. I would think that the Lord would be angry at me for letting something like that happen or going through with playing the game, so I just haven't. I don't know what to do. I'm trying to get others opinions on this. It's either that or I just uninstall the game.