I really dunno if I will ever truly be able to live with my ocd the way I need to live with it. Not just want to, but need to! Mine is at a point where it’s undeniably a chronic case. Undeniably engrained over the space of almost three decades, and… that’s it. The ocd rumination continues. Be it that I am bed-ridden bad by it, or… able to appear as though I am actually perfectly happy to other people but STILL STRUGGLING REALLY BAD, it is a part of my life that needs to be… dealt with and extremely well. I know its triggers. Its faults… its everything, really. I can’t explain the utter injustice of it, or maybe I can perfectly do such a thing time and again, only I am still too overcome with ocd overwhelm at any given time to see that a large part of my mind is still actually making perfectly coherent sense. To others at least. When I speak but certainly not when I think. That’s a strange thing in itself. But with the ocd, I have to do something I’ve never achieved with it before – the mental awareness to actually be able to stop… and to be able to… “turn the ocd off”. Sit with it. More than that. Let it do its damnedest but also feel mentally okay. Yet why must my particular personal mental imprisonment be so very both agonising and… nonstop relentless? This isn’t a place for a blow-by-blow account of the illness and how rarely I am actually NOT entangled up in it one way or another. That’s… ugh!!!!! It’s… I just cannot ignore the fact that THAT level of survival needs to be acknowledged. Maybe, then, I acknowledge it. I know what it did and does to me. I am happy enough to take it to my grave and also only have to really share it with the people who will want to know if I’m doing alright. Because I will need to realise, even for myself, if I am in fact doing alright, too. It really does feel like a sink or swim thing, and the whole aim really has to be to… not have a brain and mind that panders to the nearest rumination process so as to search for a small moment of calm. By doing that you’re strengthening it, every single time. So, yeah, you become a zombie quite a lot. You try and walk through it. I know people have all got their issues, maybe, but I really think I didn’t get the opportunity to grow any real personal issues in my life. This has been a 24/7 thing for me and quite literally in my instance. Not a few hours, but… all the time. It’s the first and last thing that enters my mind. It’s been silent. It’s even been… ‘gone’ for a few hours of a day. Those rare moments when you see JUST HOW FALSE THE WHOLE DISORDER REALLY IS. But then you fall back into line extremely easily. I won’t give up, like I always say. But I could do and still be phenomenally proud of my life, how I battle this thing, because it is bigger than most people’s greatest achievements – to study and be a pilot. A doctor, etc… trust me when I say that the level of mental focus needed to have survived my level of ocd would surely by now have lent itself to a very strong and successful career of one type or another. If it hadn’t been wasted on ocd, that is. And I still dream of that. But the thing is, until I actually can… I cannot even read a page of a book and take it in. Let alone learn new stuff all around me. Even if it might seem like I’ve devoured a dictionary a hundred times over 😂