Just how lost on a mental level can an ocd sufferer become? It’s… impossible to explain that particular answer. But, for instance? It can be… actual years at a time wherein the sufferer will not even get to realise that they’ve fallen away from themselves and their own way of thinking and to a most outlandish and remarkably disgusting and freakish (and pain-filled) extent. Of course people cannot see this particular landslide of the mind and brain occurring. How can they? Sure isn’t it all happening up inside of the brain in the first place? But it’s a truly dumbfounding level of loss. To the life trying to happen around you AND a loss of personality, too. Others might see it still, but for the sufferer the anarchy inside of their mind can be.. both brutal and brutish. So, for an ocd sufferer to even so much as make it out to a party of a night-out, for example, can often be one of the most difficult things for their brains to handle. It will all have been checked in advance – to know that nothing can go absurdly wrong for them. And a party is supposed to be a knees-up, right? A time to relax and take heed, etc. etc. Because, with an ocd sufferer.. the main FALSE belief swimming around in their addled head is that something WILL go absurdly and unfixably wrong if they DO NOT try and find a place of… find… an answer to something, somewhere inside of said head. You cannot find the answer to a false firing of emotion. Why? Because it isn’t actually happening, only except of course inside of the sufferer’s brain. That’s ocd. A secretive foghorn happening inside!! Something so profoundly debilitating that you really can only hope to eventually get to ride it out. But my God is the ride one mothereffing… tragedy. Don’t get me wrong, way I see it, on the utter flip-side I’m the happiest, most carefree, hardworking(if I could just actually bloody work!! Not that ocd isn’t a full-time job: that is utterly the truth and then some piled atop) and practical man I know. But, then, I also have OCD, and steeped since the age of eleven. Like giving a kid a brain exactly set-out like a mixed-up Rubex Cube and telling them to fix it: “IMMEDIATELY, or else.” The comparisons really might even make a reader prefer to be… I got nothing. I truly cannot explain. At least the scribbles came from that messed-up place, too, and now it’s like a battle between them and OCD🤷‍♂️ 🖊 😴 And as for the rest of it? Well, that’s a me that should never, ever, EVER… have been lost this long. So, yeah, you can maybe begin to try and imagine how heartbreaking it is to have to handle it as well as you can’t, actually, and for that long a time. “Weather’s good these days, huh, Brian?” Mundane and perfectly normal and nice questions on regular repeat like this and all whilst your brain has been… on “GO(!)”, “GO(!!)”, “GO(!!!)” since the very moment you woke-up that morning. Any morning. I try, though. God, do I try so hard to hold these conversations together without losing my shit. Truth is, I kinda have already lost my shit, in a mentally exhausted instance. Not ‘mad’, I mean, but utterly taken away from things happening around me by the imbalance. And it’s just unbelievable that people, especially those closest to me, can never seem to detect it in me – the ocd, I mean. How hurtful it is. Many of them will have been with me even, say, twenty-years back when I was still trying to NOT HAVE OCD(!!) Trying to… understand that ignoring it(the UTTER imbalanced bombardment…) IS the only way out. That’s… wow!!! Fuck… .