😃

So, yeah, a lovely meal at Pilgrim’s for Ann-Marie’s beeday today. She’s just turned 40 like myself and I really think she’d a lovely time. I do love getting to go to places like these with my family, and for a fair while in the end it was actually rather… clear-minded for me. A rarity with the OCD, but I’m happy to report such a thing back. Onwards, right? Way I see it, this whole mental illness is a complete waste of the sufferer’s time, but the feeling of knife-edge catastrophe happening all the time feels much too real for us to suddenly be expected to deal with calmness as our minds get better, be it through ERP, medication, fitness, meditation, whichever. Does a soldier come back from war totally calm and collected if he has experienced an inordinate amount of mental pain? Nope, didn’t think so, not one bit. But it’s even deeper that that – engrained-wise. See, this isn’t a life experience which has been shaped by what is happening, or has happened, around us and at any given time. This is a mental illness of the brain, an extremely frustrating and imprisoning one that will only ‘let go’ if you do that very same thing. But, even then, you are still dealing with a brain which is very much so imbalanced at its core. OCD might be better off renamed as ‘False Anxiety Overload’. I mean, I really dunno what it might need to be renamed at this stage, but I do know that it’s an extremely taxing and unforgiving mental illness. We are ill, so to speak, but we are also utterly able. With OCD, your mind is looking to, well, not think about anything other than what a mind minus OCD should and would perhaps be thinking of. So, if for example, someone has to go to work in the morning, they do that. Come home, they do that. Eat dinner, they do that, take care of any bills which might need taking care of atop the dinner table, they do that, too. They might watch telly, a film even, to unwind after a day’s work. They might take a little nap. They might even suddenly come upon a problem, even so much as a serious one – a sick child who needs to go to the hospital immediately; a neighbourhood house-fire 😱; a relative taken sick, or even a relative dying. With a non-OCD brain the person will take to these problems as well as they can whenever they may crop up, and however their minds and personalities are formed from said experiences and how they handle them, well, that’s just how it goes, I guess, for anyone, and we cannot know. However, with an OCD brain, before the opportunity for any of the above scenarios might unfortunately arise, the sufferer is more than likely already embedded inside of their own mind and left debilitated by a million what-ifs(?) that need to be answered ASAP. But it’s not even the answer sought, it’s that the theme of thought they have come up with in the first instance is utterly down to one thing: their brain being imbalanced. So, a) something is utterly wrong. b) I need to calm whatever this feeling is, where it is coming from all the damn time! c) as the alarm in as real as any thought any human being can have inside of their head, the sufferer will then end up feeding the disorder and keeping the imbalance alive by trying to calm that false alarm. They do that by trying to seek the problem, answer, whichever, really. It’s irreparable as far as illnesses go, but I personally think that it is also a disorder of the brain which can be utilised by the sufferer as best they can and in a most… caring way. You just want to think straight, really. To see what it is like to wake up and suddenly have a worry about something going on in your life that’s actually a real thing. But here’s the part that can be really hard to take for an OCD sufferer, too. That, yeah, people have a right to worry, and will have worries, that just perhaps how the mind is made to work, to survive. But with non OCD brains the brain at least knows that there is another side to it all, to the worry. That they will inevitably come out of it is what I mean to say. Whereas with OCD that ‘worry’ is on all the time and building harder and heavier and harsher with each and every time the sufferer of the condition tries to allay that false anxiety by entertaining it. In other words, with OCD the only real way for an inevitable sense of calm is actually in fact by not being stuck in that loop-cycle of constant rumination. Of CONSTANT: “Just one more teensy, tiny think-through on all of this crap and that should finally sort this whole effing disorder out in my head, and then I can just live like myself… finally.” It’s THAT… mind-bending. It’s that… cruelly captivating. It’s that… nightmarish