You’re dealing with something entirely different to anything else, really, with OCD. You’re dealing with a layered level of mental dread and rumination – all of it illogical but all of it as powerful in your head as if it were actually fully happening right in front of your face and on a physical level. It’s basically a shit-show albeit a shit-show that is pretty much tempting the sufferer in from the minute they will try and think of something, anything. So, yeah, the level of mental resolve really does need to be second to none other whatsoever. The sufferer will have taken their mind in a million different directions and a million different times… just to calm it all down in the first place. And that might all be happening over the course of, say, just one whole year, maybe. That is a helluva lot of wasted time-of-mind on thinking in a highly distorted and abstract manner, for sure. A futile attempt, as ever, as we are always – and utterly unknowingly to the sufferer, really – poking the bear any which way we go at it. That’s just the strength of it, the strikingly perverse strength of the OCD imbalance alone. So, yeah, there are literally zero answers to what the mind of a sufferer goes through but a lot of credit has to also be given to them for the world their disorder causes them to create, both entirely with and entirely without their mental input, and just how much work they have to do just so as not to mentally fall away. It is, of course, not the sort of ‘successful’ undertaking which any person will want to associate themselves with ‘achieving’ because, well, you are only ever, and from the outside looking in, being forced utterly against your will, again and again, to poke the bloody bear and zero all else. So, yeah, the sufferer will have made themselves believe at one point or the other that they might have a plethora of mental disorders given the wide-open nature of the mental imbalance in the first place. It’s like expecting, let’s say, someone to… sit inside of a hurricane and expect nothing to go wrong. What I mean is that shit happens and that’s just the way it is, however with the OCD the sufferer truly thinks and believes it is all on them… somehow. If a brain is always on and in a seriously hazardous and profound, not to mention dumbfounding manner then that’s pretty much gonna open it up to utterly everything in terms of what it interprets for itself as ‘real’ or the ‘right way’ to think. I write about it so much because the fact of the matter is that I have to do that for some kid who’ll be going through having to somehow grapple with this particular thing and at such a young age. Like I myself have had to. And that turned out to be mentally pained and mentally impossible in a manner which, above all else, I never, EVER want to go back to. Or anywhere near it, even. And a small part of me might wanna say sometimes that I really don’t mind having it in some instances and that it’s given me so damn much, too, but that’s probably utter bullshit because, truth is, I have had to work for every single normal and unprovoked feeling off of my own bat since the age of around eleven. So the OCD does nothing all that positive for the sufferer, really, and that’s truer than true, even if we think it must be helping us if in the first place it is convincing us all of the time just to damn-well ‘figure out’ what’s the matter… in the first place… … AND TO FINALLY CALM IT RIGHT THE WAY DOWN! In other words, our pained brain IS actually trying to do the right thing from the onset, given the strength of its provoked imbalance. What I will say, though, is that I accept it, have done so a billion times over and that’s just par for the course. But accepting it doesn’t make it go away, it just tries to make it a little easier to live with for the sufferer. Weird is definitely one word for it. Does it make a sufferer appear, let’s say, somewhat quirky or strange in their actions when around other people? Absolutely it does, seeing as quite often their every movement and moment is being analysed… by themselves… as they search for the possibility of error, which is just automatically there and looking to be wound-up and riled owing to the profound level of mental fear it evokes. Searching for this problem that they are unceremoniously being forced by their OCD brain to try and understand. Of course that will bring strange actions to the table. Tics? Absolutely. Random disappearing acts? Yup, yup. And many more things too, of course. Which their friends might often only fully realise for themselves in hindsight exactly “why they acted THAT particular way?” Sometimes it can even be… way down the years, decades. But it will also, please God, have made us appear to others as tremendously hardworking people in our daily endeavours as well as remaining relentlessly invested in just trying to be and feel as normal as we possibly can