I can’t tell if I have anxiety or OCD. I tend to think I’m anxious loops aboht a very specific topic and it gets worse and worse until it’s unbearable. There are a lot of things I need to do “just right”, like the timing of my music when I’m on walks, or the color mixing and fit of my outfit. I am never satisfied in my relationships (romantic and platonic) because I always question whether I’m in it with the right person. I’ve developed a set of rules someone must meet for me to like them, except these rules are all just manifestations of my own personality traits, no one ever meets them, and I am always dissatisfied with all my friends. I had to break up with my last (almost) boyfriend because I couldn’t decide if I liked him or not because he didn’t have the “right” traits. I have never known if I liked any of my friends and this even extends to my mother who may be difficult but who loves and cares for me very much. It makes me feel like a bad person and relationship partner, but I get over this by telling myself it’s okay to treat these people poorly because they are not my “true” friends, partners, etc. I always need people to think I’m “good” - there are parts of my life I HAVE to portray properly to different people so they like me and I HAVE to share it with them so I can control the image of me they have in their heads and so they can like this manifestation of myself I’ve created. I have trouble making decisions because I always consider every possible outcome, and if I do it for too long, I just lose the ability to make the decision because I can’t choose the right option and I freeze. This has happened to me while driving and I’ve almost crashed my car because of it. I often get flashbacks to times I have humiliated myself, and I sometimes tense up my body and close my eyes to get rid of them, sometimes ruminate. I go in and out of phases of lining up all my things in certain ways and I have very rigid moral principles that when I stray from them, I get immense guilt. I have also developed a recent problem where I worry I have a certain mental illnesses (I’ve had a BPD phase, and NPD, OCPD, and autism). I NEED to know immediately if I have the mental illness so I can use it as a scapegoat for all my problems, so I google everything about the illness and obsessively read multiple studies to prove if I have the illness or not. This usually makes my mental illness speculation cycles worse. I also go in and out of phases of having a rigid daily routine, but this is usually only if I have something to “accomplish” (often weight loss, social activity, or homework related). I also have a problem where I HAVE to do things in the most time-efficient, cost efficient, or resource-efficient way possible or I will feel guilty or bothered by the waste. Whag complicates this is a couple things. I have had specific rumination cycles for quite a while, but I don’t always do compulsions to get rid of them. Sometimes I just sit with them till they drive me crazy. This makes me worry I don’t have OCD and I actually have anxiety - in fact I have a GAD diagnosis from an ex therapist (I dumped her because I kept worrying she was “wrong” for me and wouldn’t understand my problems and give me an improper diagnosis. This to me is reminiscent of ROCD but maybe I am also just picky). I also have ADHD - pure ocd is often comorbid with ADHD as I have read, but I fear my problems may just be a manifestation of people pleasing + RSD (adhd symptom) + other ADHD tendencies. I have also read about overfocused ADHD (a newly researched ADHD subtype that is not yet in any diagnostic manual) and worry this may be my issue. I also think I may “forget” whag compuslions help me due to ADHD working memory issues - but this is just a personal theory backed in no research. I also worry that all these issues could be a manifestation of autism (rigidness and social difficulties) but maybe the problem is my worry about this and not an actual presence of ASD, who knows. And maybe my worries are just a result of my upbringing - I did have an extremely strict, rigid, and rules and image-oriented mother, who also claims she has OCD but takes it lightly because she doesn’t like mental health diagnoses. She definitely seems like she is always in distress but it doesn’t seem to bother her. So is my problem genetic from her (OCD or some sort of anxiety) or is it just an imprint from the rules and things she put on me as i grew up? I have also been anorexic for a few years now. These symptoms i describes have always been there, but never were intolerable really until the onset of my anorexia. That made them pretty bad, and then I gained a bunch of weight when I went to college which made these thought processes I described go completely out of control. I don’t know if this is a problem of having an eating disorder that would go away if I recovered, or if I just worsened a prexisting problem by developing an eating disorder. That is another concern. By the third month of being in college, my thought cycles would get so bad that I would sometimes lose the ability to properly communicate and make a fool out of myself in front of everyone. To combat this, when I felt my thought cycles coming along, I would lock myself in the nearest family bathroom or lactation room for a few hours of guaranteed and unadulterated privacy. I have genuinely spent multiple hours sitting on the same bathroom floor, it makes me hate myself and it is horrendously disgusting. I am genuinely an extroverted, fun-loving, and funny person, but whatever is going on with me has robbed me of my personality and made it near-impossible to make any friends in college. I often worry that I will end up alone forever because of whatever has started happening in my head. Out of all these differential hypotheses I have provided to OCD, my strongest doubt about myself is that a therapist diagnosed me with GAD and told me I didn’t have any other issues - I just had anxiety about having other issues. I’m not sure if that’s true, but I’m also not sure I can have confidence in my opinion over a trained professional. If anyone had the energy to read all of this… thank you, you’re an angel, I appreciate you so very deeply, and PLEASE give me an opinion on what you think is wrong with me. There’s got to be something diagnosable and I think it goes a little deeper than simple GAD.