It’s like… your brain has been tricked into following an entirely wrong algorithm happening inside of your head and based solely on total catastrophe happening. And how the hell does it do that in the first place? An imbalance of ungodly proportions in the brain is what that thing is. And the mind will very soon automatically become… nothing much more than an about-to-be entire bystander in the sufferer’s life. Day to day, week to week, month to month… etc. etc… . With OCD no level of entertaining the thing will help with anything on up inside of a person’s mind. That’s the cold, harsh, outlandishly frustrating truth of the matter. Add an inevitable level of manic mental distortion to the mix and what have you got? A mind and brain stuck in a loop of seemingly never-ending anxiety AND fear… and… pure-as-pure-can-be petrification. What the sufferer has to try and do is to recall all of the exposures they have taken their mind through over the years, even if, more-often-than-not, they will still fairly soon find themselves right back at square-one with the whole thing. This next part is important for the sufferer to try and take onboard and understand as much as anything else, really. That they really should have absolutely no interest in enthusing, let alone entertaining the imbalance in the first place. All of what follows being just a looped cycle of unstoppable and highly inhospitable mental… mishap and incompetent torture. Why, then, does the sufferer still eventually, and pretty damn much inevitably as well, end-up failing to reckon with the fact that they are actually, in the first instance, always going to be dealing with a chronic mental illness? Because it is THAT chaotic, THAT chronic. That very real in its mentally… misinformed intelligence of makeup, is the mental imbalance that’s occurring for them. So the bystander that the sufferer has tragically become is tasked with what will feel like a thousand different things in just one day so as to calm that bombarded with utterly compelling doubt brain, and mind too. So, yeah, once again chasing/enthusing the mental imbalance that is engrained and also propelled into outlandish levels of illogical beliefs, even to an extent where the sufferer will still, at that, believe one million percent that… something IS in fact wrong and catastrophically so. All in the head, and all of it encroaching to an incredibly powerful extent on the person’s mind. Where does that allow time for brand new thoughts, one after the other, let alone building even certain creative thoughts into hugely influential and, perhaps, even successful endeavours? Lost or choked to death, let’s say, by the OCD/bombardment of imbalance. “Maybe I can try again in a minute with that thought… about that thing.”  Even words become distorted from their real meaning. The brain trapped in finding itself both functioning in parts at an extremely high level, as well as at a much lower level of thought and all at the same time. Catch-22 like not many others, perhaps? So, of course potential is then lost. A job? How can a person come to terms with something like this? Something as pressure-filled and… spontaneous in its reckoning as that? They can’t. Unless of course they are somehow able to not enthuse this imbalance of the brain in the first place. Which can become akin to something like asking a non-swimmer to get the hell away from that shark they can see on the horizon and pointed right in their direction in so far as its hellish chance of succeeding counts. Impossible, really. It’s a fight like no other, and the sufferer often-than-not feels entirely sabotaged by their very own mind. Even at its lightest level of bombardment, perhaps. Still engrained with epic distortions of the mind and brain. They’ll have done literally almost everything, covered every angle of thought, even, so as to try and come to terms with this profoundly complex mental illness/distortion. But they do it because the get-out from it all is rather beautiful. No two ways. And they WILL know this so, so very much and much of the time, too. When they say that a broken person has nothing left to lose that is surely never more truer a statement than with someone living with chronic OCD. Even then, though, it will drag attempts at clearcut thoughts right on through and land them slap-bang in the centre of the distortion that is OCD. It’s a catastrophic narrative and much, much, MUCH more than just that thing. That’s a rather… one-dimensional explanation for what really is… a multi-dimensional thing happening to the sufferer in, of course, a mentally-ill instance. You’ll be mentally hanging-on for dear life, perhaps even at best with this disorder, like I said. You’ll still try, of course… and not enthuse the imbalance. Making what will undoubtedly sound entirely illogical to anyone else, on the surface level of a sufferer’s explanation of it, even feel to the sufferer themselves as if it is in fact entirely logical to be having these ‘thoughts’ and believing these highly inappropriate and layered complexity of things whizzing about your mind to be entirely true. Last time I checked you cannot actually die from having OCD, and I sure-as-shit don’t wanna die! Not. For. A. *******. Split-second. I love this life, truly, I do, and in ways that I cannot begin to explain. Not really anyway. So, yeah, of course then do we keep going and for a number of reasons at that. And, no, we aren’t built like most people. That is just a given. A God-given thing, or whatever needs to be said to explain that thing for itself. We are, by default, made to have to resign our minds, really, to persisting like literally crazy against this mental disorder/illness. It’s… yeah, words will only let an outsider maybe get to understand a little bit more for theirs and the sufferer’s sake, but this is beyond unfathomable… for the sufferer. Beyond repair… maybe even. They will have watched their brain make the unfathomable happen, in fact, and, what is more, a thousand times over, no less. So, yeah, I suppose what you are then doing is you are covering over the cracks. Or rather cementing in between the bricks. Or even placing your whole damn body in the dike… … for its whole colossal and highly inescapable worth. And there are literally what will feel like a million of those damn things and lurking around every single corner you come into contention with. So that’s why I call it a game… for the sufferer. To try and get to the next damn level as best we can for ourselves on a mental note, let’s say. I will fight for that next level time again and utterly obligingly, but how about also atop that very thing… also wanting to maybe get to do many a brilliant thing with my life as well? Takes a helluva lot more to do just that thing, that’s for sure, but ****-it, here’s to doing it anyway