OCD: My Journey So Far

A photo I took, wearing my glasses, just after shaving.

---

CW: This post discusses mental health, specifically OCD and depression.
This post took a lot of courage to write and, honestly? I'm still not sure if I've worded it properly. But... here goes :)

I have OCD, and I'm massively proud of the progress I've made so far. The image at the top of this post may seem like a normal selfie, but it's not. I took that photo after shaving, whilst wearing my glasses. Now, to anyone else, that would be completely trivial; to me, it's massive progress.
To give you an insight into my brain: the kind of OCD I have is the 'compulsion' side. It makes me believe that something I do, even if it's the tiniest thing, will make everything go wrong or make people upset. For example, when I was doing my GCSEs, my brain would tell me "if you write this essay using this certain pen, you'll get a low grade"; I believed this and often I'd only believe the grade I'd get was good because of the pen I wrote it in. I also feel compelled to say: a lot of this will sound ridiculous, but in my mind these were platitudes I had to follow religiously.

Connecting the dots to find out this was OCD took an incredibly long path. I've had this sort of mindset for a very long time, but I never stopped to think there was something causing it; my brain took the things I'd think about as actual causes-to-effects. There would be little things, and then there would be big things. Some of these included whether the bus I get comes before the same bus going the other way, whether I went through the left door into work or the right door, even the TV show I fall asleep to: it has to be Parks & Recreation otherwise tomorrow will be terrible. Again, as I type these, I'm telling myself "they all sound completely ridiculous to anyone else, but they make sense to me".

A lot of the time I've heard people say they, like Arlene Philips jokingly did last year, that they "have OCD because they like things to be clean and tidy". OCD is far more than that, and it's not much of a laughing matter. I debated with myself whether to include this or not, but I feel this illustrates why I don't find those sorts of remarks funny. Because of my OCD, I'd often avoid doing incredibly necessary things such as washing my bed sheets or wearing clean clothes. Why? My fear was that wearing something different or sleeping in a bed with different sheets would make things worse, all whilst feeling depressed because I can't bring myself to do something as simple as putting things in a washing machine.

It's only recently that I started to look into what it could be, and the reason is because my compulsions started to affect things I have to do to function on a daily basis. When I started thinking "taking my anti-depression medication is making things worse around me", it felt like a trap I couldn't get out of: either take my antidepressant and fear that it's making things worse around me, or don't take it and risk the side effects of not keeping up to date with my medication. I can honestly describe that situation as hell. When it also came to wearing my glasses my brain would think even touching them would cause bad things around me, so instead of wearing them and being able to see clearer I'd just have to put up with it... at least it's not anything that would obviously be worse, right?
​
So when I say that photo is massive progress, it's because two months ago I'd have been massively anxious to shave or wear my glasses because, combined, they'd make everything spiral out of control around me. I feel really embarrassed saying that because of how ridiculous it sounds, but I'm glad to now be on the right track.