...if you don't experience OCD you may not understand what I mean by that. If you do, but not "Pure O"
[which sounds like some kind of new age health and fitness network geared toward women, a solid line up including shows about sexual health and being in touch with one's sexual being, of course...]
…then I don't actually know if you get what I mean, I only occasionally experience OCD manifested as physicals rituals or scrupulous behaviors- they are not core characteristics and there fore do not actually debilitated me. It's like they are the dish and the spoon at the very end, taking advantage of what is already a sort of ridiculous nursery rhyme. They tend to appear when things are already chaotic and make little sense.

I don't know about anyone else, but for me that seems fitting. I *do* rely on routine and familiarity quite a bit- predictability. Like the soothing rhythm of a nursery rhyme. That doesn't mean any of it actually makes sense.

Which tends to shock people.
You have OCD? Why does your room look like you've had the Visigoths for a rager?
...Because not everyone with a diagnosis is a carbon copy of Monk...

But I digress.
Part of my pure o mishmash actually involves, well... It's hard to explain.
But the twisted logic that seems to make sense at the time [wait, no it doesn't, but I still abide by it anyway- whaaa?]
is that I'm not actually supposed to talk about what is going on.

Everything I do is wrong.
Everything I say is wrong.
Everything I think.
Everything I feel.

I react? Wrong. Don't react? Wrong.
There is a right way for everything. And it is not simply that people are judging me, though that is somehow part of it.it is almost as though there is an exact, precise, absolute correct way of doing everything. Everything that a person does. Breathing to blinking to merging on the highway to heart surgery to where you place the pen after signing in at the doctors office.

To do these things any other way goes against the pulse of the universe.
I don't actually have this go through my head specifically, but when the ocd gets very bad, that is how I feel. I feel constantly trapped- maybe similar to someone who has discovered their own fate.

Do you get on that bus or take a cab?
Are things going to happen no matter what you do? You drive yourself mad second guessing the path to your ultimate future.

I imagine it may be similar.

Whatever I do when in this headspace, it is wrong. I try to fix it, but that was wrong too. MAybe more wrong. So I feel worse. But am I supposed to do nothing or try to compensate for all this "wrong" hanging over my head?
I start to have this cycle of embarrassment fueled by a feeling of failure, overlaid with growing fear... that I can't get out of this, people are getting angry with me... I can't tell them what is going on, though. To do so would be demanding of too much attention.
I kind of just start alienating myself out of reflex and eventually I quite literally start to panic and act sort of erratically, which obviously makes everything worse.

Trying to talk about this to someone who doesn't experience it is really difficult.
Describe the color red to a blind man.
The sound of your voice to someone who has never heard...

This is so long. And self indulgent.
I feel if I can start to talk about it, find some people to commiserate with... maybe it's a start.

I don't really no.

When it takes over, I don't know where I go.
I feel stripped of who I am and out of control.
Like a really sick mobius strip: I'm following the fear and its following me, but I can't see it somehow.

Anyway.
Melodrama.
Thanks so much.