So yeah. The ocd on holiday with family in Nerja? How does it affect things? Well, in this instance in a very surreal – as per usual, mentally speaking – and paralysing manner. Now. I understand that people go on holidays to catch a break, a breather, whatever that might mean for each of them individually. It’s one week – flights, holiday, tasty meals, fun chats with my sister and mom and dad and auntie Mary, and then… a flight home again. Right?! However, that’s just not how it worked out, not how it seems to work out for ocd sufferers at all. On the contrary. It’s filled with that usual dread of head that something is gonna go CATASTROPHICALLY wrong the entire time. Why doesn’t it… ever go wrong the way you anticipate it to, then? Because… it IS ocd – a wildly malfunctioning of the brain. Again, I can’t ever explain how it takes my mind away to a paralysing place, and just how hard it can actually be to stay upright, let alone utilise your mind. LET ALONE BE HAPPY AT THAT. I really don’t often get to utilise it beyond trying to stay afloat with a fear, a rumination, etc. It’s… eerie. It’s.. lonesome, and it’s certainly… as if the whole world is heaped upon your very own shoulders. It’s all false and illogical but it is also happening at the parts of your brain where real, unperturbed thoughts SHOULD be taking place. A holiday, then, can so very unfairly and definitely undeservedly be turned into a mental uphill struggle so very alarming that… it wasn’t really a holiday at all for the sufferer. And as for the memories you’ve been making with others? Or at least trying to make with others. I‘m still waiting for a day when I can actually just sit and recall a lovely moment like that. An EXTREMELY difficult task to ask of oneself when your mind is not in fact letting you have that lovely moment in the first place really. Nowhere near clearly enough anyhow. Not really. As ever, I’ve pushed this as far as I can go. It’s all of the things that I’ve tried, all of the times I’ve attempted to out-figure it, and in out-figuring it I don’t mean that I have chosen, not even one bit, to be trying to do such a thing as that. No sufferer does and ever will. Thoughts ARE just thoughts, but that doesn’t make a difference in our instance. It’s still the brain and mind which we DO NEED and so very instrumentally well to be able to make our own decisions. Our minds and brains ARE utterly malfunctioning and, really, there has to be a madness therein because, well, all my loved-ones will ever get to reply to me and say time and again is: “just relax. Meditate. We know you are trying.” And they do know. Oh, how they do know and exactly, probably. It isn’t their fault, of course not, but I do know it can become their problem. Utterly. But… no-one wants an ocd sufferer to be better in the long-run more-so than the ocd sufferer. From start to finish. Ross will want me to go to Spain again at Xmas. I want to stay home. That’s the truth. We can go again, but my mind, and my money-amount actually, cannot really handle it. I don’t want her to feel that I dodge things. But I am still the same fella that she met in the beginning who is doing everything in their will of mind… to not get caught in this endless cycle of mental rumination. Of course it has affected things, most things in fact. But I really can’t mind that part. I can only work at trying to make it NOT AFFECT MY MIND the most that it can. I just can’t care about what I missed with it. I know there is so much more to me and my mind than that. I have to keep being calm as can be. Keep trusting the process, and my mind. How to trust the very same mind that is, though, lit-up like a Xmas tree and telling you CONSTANTLY(!!) that you’re utterly NOT CORRECT(!!!) to just sit with the nervousness. Even if the medication IS working to a huge extent. It just feels what it surely feels like for a person minus ocd to be told to sit with real beliefs and real happenings… ie. it is just as real in our minds, if not WAY MORE actually, as if you told a normal-minded person to stop, for example, worrying about the million dollars they owe in debt, about their dying mother, their… sickness which will perhaps kill them if the don’t figure a cure out. “Don’t do that!!!” It’s a falseness of mind and living at the exact same place perhaps wherein a person’s real day-to-day thoughts should be happening. A Malfunctioning of mind, and the sufferer is the least interested person in having to entertain it and, yet, their brain seeks to time and time again… time-out and forget that it actually is ill. The only answer we seem to actually need to be able to find is… an answer as to how to feel perfectly okay whilst living with the illness😊