No one will ever really get to see it. Just what it takes to live with a mental illness and, what’s more, a mental illness as disturbing of the mind as imaginable. Everything you do WILL BE dictated and directed by it until, well, such time as you’re actually able to live rather… happily with it?! It’s an horrendous skip-a-beat of the brain. Like, time and time, you, the sufferer, forgets even that you have OCD in the first place. That’s… as ever and always there are no real strength in words to describe the utter mental fallout. Physical, too, in certain cases. But isn’t your brain utterly physical, too, sure? Anyhow. No one gets to understand the upheaval to merely feel normal for a sufferer, to feel… alone with your thoughts and calm and collected and able to move onto the next thing. Next thing. Next thing. It’s only as hard as your mind let’s the world be for any one person. That’s a given, and it IS all in the mind, really. So… with said OCD. How on earth does a sufferer live… well and okay and maybe even, eventually, happily? They learn to overcome that PETRIFYING skip-a-beat of the brain. An automatic for many sufferers as they grow older having had the disorder since an extremely young age. It having seriously dug its nails in and all over the brain. I dunno how to describe it other than as if… you’re being held not only an entire prisoner inside of your own brain and mind but you’re also being relentlessly entrusted with trying to find ‘a way out’ while you go. There is no… way out, it is an imbalance of the brain in its truest sense. Just leave it be there. That’s been the same aim, and in my particular instance… for over 28-years. Also something which has proven to be an agonised impossibility for most sufferers to this day, ‘fraid to say. But you keep continuing on, you KEEP learning so very hard to understand your mind and personality deep down beneath all of the OCD guff. There’s no… spiritual awakening stuff here. There really is not. That’s a whole other each-to-your-own sort of thing altogether. Being in rooms with people, I’ve been so very mentally discombobulated and broken that my mind is screaming out, SCREAMING OUT for sudden silence! No one hears what’s happening inside of your brain. When it comes to anyone. Not unless you actually managed to narrate the whole thing for them. I’ve done that too. As if I’m holding my own hand and watching and narrating to myself the agonised storyline inside of my mind which is happening for me, minute-to-minute, blow-by-blow. People just see… either a smile or a frown, or whatever visual appearance any human is capable of bringing to the surface and at any given moment. That won’t represent the true state of mental paralysis and that’s why, for an OCD sufferer especially, they HAVE TO become the most important person in their own life and by an ABSOLUTE mile. Your potential can do its damnedest only once you are able to get to that mental place of… calm amidst utter imbalance 😊