You walk and talk and drive with it like only you know how. You remember the pain, the utter anguish from an alarmingly young age, and you use this, let’s say, as a rather perverted and twisted-up in irrational lies by your very own brain badge of honour. All of the pain and fear felt. All of the decades of catastrophic brain-lock, the being entirely frozen-out of proceedings by your very own brain. The brain that causes the disorder in the first place. That’s OCD, and however effed-up it is going to be… you walk and talk and drive harder than ever before with it. Your support-system have your back all of the time, and that’s an incredible thing to have, in fairness, and even would be such a thing for someone to have who is not suffering with OCD. You try and let that same disordered by illogical doubt brain find its… clearest, cleanest feelings and you stay with that as well as you can. You will slip, often-times at the drop of a hat at that, which is fucking atrociously heartbreaking each and every time, truth said. That’s OCD, and you could write a book about it, sure, and you could then, I suppose, have something that has gone about explaining the utter agony and anguish of it all, for the sufferer and from start to right now. So, in many ways, with or without the OCD, I am even ‘safer’ than most people could ever wish to be. Always have been. I worked for that too, though, by trying to keep the right and decent people in my life. Not easy either, of course, and certainly not a given by any stretch of the imagination. You can be happy and it may well often be a fairly, let’s say… interrupted and confused kind of… petrified happiness, contentment, whichever. Moment-to-moment experiences will remind you of the fear that you have lived through and will automatically pick-up on this. That’s… utter trauma atop trauma… atop trauma happening, I’m thinking. Anyhow, I won’t write a book however telling it may be for myself and others. Why? Because I have a life to lead as best as I can and, besides, I’ve jaded all of the explaining at this stage really. It’s.. a kind of club, is OCD, a club which you’ve literally no wish whatsoever in having been included in but you also need to respect it to the utmost extent. Respect the initial and driving-force behind it all that is the complex to-the-last imbalance and to… well, let the rest attempt to fall into place. I will never not try and be okay with this thing. But people need to know that I am a smart and caring and highly logical person minus all of this shake-up of the brain. Not that I particularly need to even for a moment be those things but there you go. And what I do to be okay takes an outlandish level of mental courage and strength, time and again. OCD, like any other sort of mental illness of course, isn’t easy. But OCD is also… its own kind of horrendously misrepresentative mental illness. It’s a level above and beyond and that is what makes a sufferer back themselves to the hilt even amidst all of this and so, so very much, because it IS in fact all happening inside of a brain, the very same frightened and confused AND all-too-often paralysed brain which does literally nothing in its right mind, and wrong mind too even, not to be okay, not to try and grasp at this thing we are even taught to call happiness. We don’t think happiness is a given, but what we do do is understand things in an extremely empathetic manner given where our brains and minds have been taken to – the very deepest depth of mental depth, really. We are superheroes in a way that just cannot be truly explained to anyone else. Not perfect people, of course not. But what we do do anyhow and whatever the terms of what is happening to our brains and at any given time is we attempt to both survive AND thrive against all the odds, really, because we need to, have to… damn-well want to.