For my strength and resilience of mind to outweigh the utter atrocity of mind and brain that is OCD and to have remained in survival-mode as well as it has, let’s say, is truly remarkable. No two ways. The OCD. With it there is no real modern-day choice other than to live with it as best a sufferer can. It’s petrifying and agonising on a mental level and also extremely lonesome, even if you know you are with good, good people around you, just that you cannot ever really feel it anywhere near enough. This has been a slog like no other, surely, on my part. And now I have to perhaps learn to… just live with being as okay as I can from time to time with the disorder. To move the goalposts to a new, more comfortable way of survival. It’s frightening, and it distorts any given day for me and in a very real way that really can take the sufferer to the very edge of their nerves… and then some! Really, we are always, always at our wits’ end. And certainly in-so-far as a person minus OCD would consider themselves and their mind as being at its wits’ end. Just that, really, their worst wits’ end might be akin to our… let’s say, lightest level of OCD. Minus the whole disordered and distorted part, of course. If that makes enough sense. This is a fight to feel somewhat okay in oneself. To actually… get to one day even meet the real version of you! It is literally a fight with another part of you – the imbalanced brain part, that you shouldn’t even have to be worried about entertaining in the first place, really. I accept it if I drop dead in the morning, really I do, which can actually be another utter ******* OCD belief/certainty that that actual outcome could/can happen… and at ANY GIVEN SECOND… and therefore why doesn’t it happen? Why isn’t it happening?! What. The. ****. It is endless is the OCD. What I mean is, of course I don’t want it to happen to me, the whole death thing, you understand, but what I do want is to feel like having some semblance of a brain that can fend for itself of a day. Even just to be able to fend a little better than usual. This isn’t fending, not really. What it is is surviving. Surviving on a knife-edge like few others I could imagine. Sure I try and be as kind and good-natured to myself and humorous and caring, etc. with the people around me as I can, people who do try and help me an unbelievably great deal, and maybe, please god, they do get to see and feel that surefire attempt on my part enough of the time to take something from this. From the actual person living all the way behind it. Because I ALWAYS put in the yards. Always! But, really, it isn’t good enough for myself. Of course not. I’ve taken EVERYTHING onboard in a mental instance. EVERY THING and absolutely, only to find myself… stepping into the rabbit-hole of OCD again and again and again… especially when in many ways I have, let’s say, proven momentarily to myself that all of the bloody morphing from-one-thing-to-the-next ******* compulsions automatically used to calm the automatic by now, really, obsessions are UTTERLY UNFOUNDED. Like having to start all over again AND AGAIN at an impossible puzzle that will not ever get solved in the first place. But rather it was made to be unsolved. And all of it only ever happening up inside of your damn-blasted head! And, at that, made by total error. A glitch. A fluke of error-ridden mental fucking chemistry. Just to perhaps be left alone. Every. Single. Time. Often every minute, even, be it that I might be walking Joey, calling over to Phil and Aoife and Ruzer, meeting with mates, cooking dinner for Mom and Dad, etc. etc. the disorder is always on my ass and lurking like the most meticulous **** and even seemingly minus my imbalanced input at all really. What I mean is, I have no real choice as to what the imbalance does with itself next. Like it has in fact taken full hold of the reins of my brain and my mind, too, almost, and all by itself. That is beyond comprehension, way beyond disgusting, and I still accept it, try and grab at those real and awfully rare-by-now moments of peace and calm, the very thing my brain, and personality at this stage now, too, surely have no real and comfortably consistent experience of, let alone they getting to actually habitually understanding what that means for its whole-wide-worth in the world. Where does a brain broken, petrified, engrained with many, many years, decades even, of trained and utterly fucked-up and counter-intuitive ‘coping-mechanisms’ go TIME AGAIN when it’s gone to all angle-of-thought over a thirty-year-plus period of a forty-two-year life lived!!? Well, I suppose it will inevitably repeat and fall back on itself a million times over, try as it might (NOT!!) to solve that same fucking puzzle that was not made to be solved. Not even for a second. However, what does in fact need to he solved is the illness itself – cured, or intricately aided at best, maybe. Really, whichever of those things works out best for the sufferer at any given time period, obviously. Do not get me wrong, it may be hard on the mind, but I do also live well enough with it. I would not change it in terms of how it has made me, not a chance, not at this stage in proceedings, and I one-hundred-percent understand the respect this disorder needs to be given for its ******-up mental nature. Day-to-day. It is, after all, a brain in pain that needs utter nurturing and not any kind of a monster, etc. Those just highfalutin comparisons as such and for utter, let’s say, visual effect? And often, also, just for the sufferer to try and portray even so little as a mere glimpse of the disorder to someone else. So, yeah, of course you’re really gonna wanna try and create something seriously substantial with your time, and for me that became the scribbles. Literally a thousand times over ❤️ And each and every one of them is something of a brand-new start, a brand new shot at creating something that I can eventually get to maybe even see as beautiful. Maybe the whole restarting aspect that comes with the scribbles might also fall into line with the whole part of OCD, wherein often every morning, even, I am really, well and surely starting all over again, in a way. As if my brain has forgotten all of the learned over and over again coping-mechanisms that have to come with living with this particular disorder. I dunno. Again, these are just suppositions on my part.