The truth is this. To live with OCD truly is.. to live with a brain which is utterly, utterly taken to task. And almost all of the time. To explain it is to break our own hearts a thousand times over really. There is no explaining this mental illness and the outright outrageous mental disorder it engrains in the sufferer’s brain. It’s… definitely inexplicable and utterly impossible for anyone without it to ever truly comprehend what it does to the sufferer, let alone what the sufferer actually has to do to, yeah, merely stay upright and functioning somewhat inside of their mind. They will have pretty much layered their imbalanced thoughts in thousands of scenarios and ways to take themselves through that scenario again without falling apart, believing in the first place ALWAYS that it is ABSOLUTELY right to figure a way to calm this roaring imbalance with all its nuanced ways which seems to mentally guarantee… catastrophe. As for the life happening around them? It often feels like you have been, once more, thrown blind-folded inside of a million oncoming scenarios which will all need to be faced, however your mind is feeling and at any given time. What else can you do? Whatever the OCD onslaught has managed to freak your mind into automatically believing from the many times these exact same scenarios will have happened before is anyone’s guess. It’s rather pulverising. I think sometimes about the books written by people with OCD,  and I understand that to have even gotten to a place function-able enough to manage to write it really is a success story all of its own for these people. Just not a truly visible one. Not the part that lives inside of these writer’s minds anyhow. And certainly not the success story we will have wanted for ourselves. One such book’s title: The Man Who Couldn’t Stop. What I can only assume the writer meant by that title is that an OCD mind is pretty much never not on. Never not either automatically re-entertaining all of the falsified by illogic beliefs the OCD has over time saturated you in, or trying as best you can, or can’t, to just try and let it be there – the imbalance and all that it has engrained over time inside of your mind. Like… like nothing else. There will be many more books written about OCD, and the fact it is all happening in the sufferer’s head does pretty much next to nothing to convince the sufferer in any formidable or lock-tight manner that nothing is actually going wrong. What I mean by that is that nothing is going wrong in terms of what is happening around them. Where, really, all of the wrong actually gets to happening for itself in the first place. Right? In their surrounds. And on a physical level, of course. However, of course something IS absolutely going catastrophically wrong inside of their own brain. Simultaneously happening inside your brain as everything else continues to happen outside of yourself and in the, as I say, physical world. That is all extremely hard to stomach. Beyond hard. A million times beyond hard. Such is the strength of OCD. That’s a kind of mental dragon-breath, let’s call it, learning to somehow over time own all of your imagination. Seemingly all of it. Every next angle of thought. That’s thoughts atop thoughts atop thoughts – ALL OF THEM manipulated to their wit’s end. So, yeah, you back yourself even though your mind has been, is being, misinformed entirely and for a number of decades at that… and led to believe that DISASTER WILL HAPPEN if you do not figure-out how to stop that thing from happening. Try waking-up to that. Where might an OCD brain go to owing to all that onslaught of mental guff happening amidst the very same mind longing like hell to be able to learn to make normal decisions? Brand new thoughts coming to the fore, even. Does it go crazy? Yes. In an instance, for sure. Insane? I would have to say yes to that, too, in many ways. Let’s call it a dangled, ahem, sense of insanity. But living with all of that will mean a sufferer also needing to learn how to nurture that same mind, to make it think outside the box. Truth is, there’s no box. Never was, really. That just some people’s perceptions really. And to also learn along the way that we are actually allowed to have our own perceptions on a million different things! Wow!! That’s hard-hitting in its own right. But, then, it’s all hard-hitting, really. However, I would not change a thing. Promise. There are a billion reasons for that too. Reasons that I have also managed to somehow positively engrain in my mind amidst all of the imbalance happening. For it to truly hang in there and much more than just that. For my never feeling aggrieved whatsoever. Not for a minute, really. Although, when you need to mentally thrive whilst also trying to mentally survive you’ve really got to get… savvy as hell, even if all that that will ever really and visibly mean to anyone else is you seeing to be not entertaining even an inch of this illness and all that it entails. Days are scary as **** and utterly distorted. Soccer scores don’t go in a straight line. Same goes for tennis matches, or any other sport for that matter. Same can go for movies I want to watch. At this stage it’s way too difficult for me to sit and stay with watching these things for my mind’s sake. “If he doesn’t score does the world end? WHAT THE??!?! What does THAT even mean? And if, say, I am in a pub or at a restaurant having a meal. A million mental obstacles which have been embedded inside of my nervous system of thought will start to take hold. Questions associated with utter, utter mental fear. “Should I grab a pint? But what if I spend the amount of money that will inevitably leave me… homeless? I’ll have to therefore STOP that thing from occurring… in a wrong instance.” Yup. I think someone might call that scatter-crashed thinking, to say the least. Many things don’t get understood in a straight line for me, truth be said. Having been both torpedoed upside-down and shaken out of any real level of logical shape akin to a snow-globe at full pelt and over a number of decades at that. Hence the whole perversely distorted part of the OCD. Basically… your brain and mind are pretty much paralysed by a level of mental fear which never had an actual place of calm, ever. And, therefore, your brain and mind got itself utterly lost in a mental sense. UTTERLY. I wish so very much that people – mainly my nearest and dearest, really – were able to see more of what goes on in the brain for the sufferer with this particular imbalance. What we are TRULY up against with this thing taking the wheel. Maybe to also show them JUST how futile overthinking of any strenuous kind really is! Especially if you have a mental illness, of course. But, yeah, in general thinking’s minus a mental illness as well, same goes. But how on earth, even then, do you clearly explain something as abstract as a mind and brain that has been utterly hijacked and a person’s personality trying to figure itself out and happen all around it at the same time… and with all of the trivialities of life happening around it from day to day as well?? How do you clearly explain a strikingly… intelligent in many ways, actually, mental illness like OCD and certainly in so far as the OCD can guarantee catastrophe when absolutely NOTHING WRONG IS ACTUALLY HAPPENING? You live and you learn, or at least you try like damned crazy to do so, and you sure-as-shit… back yourself, and you sure-as-shit go deeper than deep may have ever even been imagined before quite possibly… and you make it your best damn place