There will have been moments, and many, many at that, where the mental anguish owing to my OCD will have been so very inexplicably inescapable. That’s just what it can do to you. For me, as I do fight it and hope to eventually feel like myself and mentally OKAY enough with it as I go forward, I cannot but explain the fallout. The fallout is… it isn’t even the fallout. The loss of experiences at life. What it is, really, is the out and out mental anguish, that inescapable mental imprisonment which a sufferer finds themselves in. You cannot ever get to truly describe or even so much as have other people experience just how much of a rabbit hole OCD as a mental disorder particularly is. And that is hard because… your people really might need to know how it truly feels and to get it. Just how difficult it has become for your mind as it has been shocked into utter… relentless rumination. Let’s take another explanation of it, though. For the sufferer, it is as mentally painful as any person may have ever experienced in their life. That’s another truth. This is a fact, though. That people who suffer with chronic OCD might just turn out to be some of the most heroic people on earth. Perhaps even some of the smartest, but the latter only by accident, really. Okay, not some of the smartest but definitely outrageously street smart at the least. When your brain is lost and you try to get back to yourself and against all the odds in the world, you do kinda end up learning way too much about every angle of damn thought. I kid you not one bit. Forget who the sufferer is beneath it, that’s just each to their own, really – our personalities being sabotaged, I mean by that. I’m talking here about that whole scattering of the sufferer’s brain that will make it have to experience dealing with one debilitating level or another of mental capitulation. Honestly, I can rarely manage to find a word that describes it accurately enough. But the actual false picture of pain it feeds all that surrounds you, too. That’s another story altogether. On a quiet day. On a rainy day. On any day, really. Be it the loudest and busiest or the quietest, it doesn’t let the sufferer get to the point wherein they can actually, lets say, fall into a ‘problem’ they have to deal with in the first place, the catastrophe button having already been pressed in their brain a long time ago. So, really, when something unfortunate does actually happen, trust me when I say that the OCD sufferer will most probably either handle that very well, or as well as anyone else can even if under severe mental duress. Only in their case they’ll be in a state of mental brain lock and penetration of what feels like a billion thoughts, one heaped atop another and that NEED to be answered or else, so much so, that they won’t really be able to take in the actual initial unfortunate event. So, yeah you’re usually only doing two things with your time as a sufferer, and at the exact same time on a yo-yoing loop: A) You are watching it all from the outside, begging to get in and experience it firsthand, and B) You are trying to fix your brain in the first place, by only ever antagonising the imbalance more and more. But how else do you calm an anguished mind without trying to think it through its pain. To grab its hand and save it. It’s… a remarkable disorder. A remarkable… game of utter perseverance on a sufferer’s part. And when they fall, and I mean REALLY, REALLY fall back into it? That’s…. gonna have to be described for comparable feelings for the suffer as the mental version of a climber climbing Mount Everest…. And in this version of the climb (inside of the sufferer’s head), right at the top, just as you’re about to place down your flag in the ground (recuperate your brain’s calmness), your mate suddenly decides to push you off the other side, or just decides this particular time to only go as far as to tell the world that you didn’t actually even begin the climb in the first place. It’s that unforgiving and in an instance. Your mind will feel like it’s going at the pace of a humming-bird most of the time. Comparisons are really…. only ever helpful for the people who are utterly intrigued at the sufferer’s ability to explain their disorder perfectly clearly while also… not actually being able to take themselves away from it enough to live well. That’s… perverted injustice, but I’ll keep on going. Thick and thin and try and come out the other side like Andy Dufresne through an avalanche of shit. Yeah, it’s a shit-storm, but it’s my shit-storm of strange and utterly illogical sorts, and I could not be a prouder and happier man, really, all in all. That’s down to an amazing support system of amazing family and amazing friends 😊