Having happened at such an early age, it is absolutely putrid to even begin to think what I have missed out on. In fact, I don’t want to think about thinking because, well, that’s just ocd winning all over again. However, I’m not bitter. I am not even angry – the same thing still stands. One word. Balance, and I bloody well want it. No-one gets this thing. Gets what it managed to do to my brain for two-thirds of my life. Sure there is a book in it, sure it is intriguing. Blah, bloody, blah. Would you want to write a book about something that destroyed your intelligence, though?! But, what it certainly is not, is in any manner an intriguing subject for the actual sufferer. The things I have missed? All of it. Every feeling that should accompany how a night-out feels for a teenager, for instance; how it might feel to meet, like, even fall in-love with someone. The feeling of actually feeling feelings, get me? It was all lost and owing to this imbalance of brain. I don’t have to explain something which I have been diagnosed with having and to a chronic extent. What I do have to do, however, is to sit with the imbalance as I have been told to do all of my life. Doctors didn’t even know what ocd was when I was a kid. In fact, it hasn’t come to any sort of medical light til in the past few years. To let the imbalanced part of my brain search for irrational balance whilst, simultaneously, not entertaining it. That’s my job, full-time, and when it hits the skids, which it will do again – I’m not able to turn off something so very embedded in my brain – I’ve to start all over again. I also missed… look, I missed out on my whole life. School, college, etc? It’s more than that. It’s every single minute of every single day, and the mental agony cannot not be mentioned. I wonder if I will ever get there, if I will ever not have to worry about the ruminations pummelling my mind; it happens on autopilot. I have literally no option other than to, as I say, sit with it. It’s all good. Great, actually; but it does need balance. One word. Coming from a person who worships words, that’s definitely odd. But it did that, it made me odd. Anyone who is in my life is in it for a specific reason. My support system extraordinaire. Heroes, and I’d do anything for them because, well, they did it for me