#e ocd

[glitcheddeath]

anyone else absolutely clueless as to what this is all about?

so many people are hasty to reproduce as much as possible and when i try to look at it from a distance and see the entire timeline i'm just like, what are we rushing for? what is at the end of all of this that we are so eager to reproduce? what are we reproducing for? our successors will inevitably face the death of the sun if not the heat death of the universe so what's the fucking point

[agirldying]

just wanted to like, highlight the reality of living with existential ocd because i'm currently fucking crying after having a panic attack about mortality and i'm just. ugh, details under the cut

I can't imagine a point in my life where I'd be ready to leave any of this behind. I'm gonna miss this shit so bad. But I don't want my death to be a scary thing for me. I don't want to run away from it when it's time but I don't know how to accept such a complicated deal - losing everything, good and bad.

The thing about the way existential ocd manifests for me is that it's like I have constant intrusive thoughts about dying and being dead. It's like a little needle poking at my arm little by little every day, and sometimes it manages to get deep enough to strike bone. Usually when it gets to that point - going down the rabbit hole my intrusive thoughts are pointing towards until I reach a void that causes me panic - I, for a split second, feel like I'm staring death in the face and I recoil. Something washes over me that just makes me feel so fleeting and insignificant, and it just makes me want to shout I AM HERE, I EXIST AND I WANT TO EXIST, PLEASE DON'T TAKE LIFE'S PRIVILEGES AWAY FROM ME, I CLING TO THEM TOO MUCH but I'm screaming all of it into a vacuum because death doesn't listen to pleas. Death takes indiscriminately. It just makes me feel like life is a delusion I will forget when I am reduced to singularity, an infinite state of non-existence. I can't cope with that. I love life despite how much it's hurt me and I think that says something.

My brain is just like "everyone dies, including you. yes you. you will die. you personally. you won't be able to breathe, feel, hear, speak, taste, smell, walk, even think. you won't be anyone. you will not exist and it will stay that way for the rest of time. you don't get to come back. you will be screaming and crying on your deathbed as death swallows you whole. you will be pleading with everyone around you to help but there's nothing they can do to save you. your ears will ring, your vision will go blurry, you will hallucinate all the things you remember and everything that will be lost to time, including yourself. you will fight and resist to the end until you are reduced to dust. and then you'll be dead. the end. nothing else. the world will go on without you."

When it came on today it was the first time I ever felt hyper-aware of my physiological symptoms - hyperventilating, shaking, heart pounding, running and screaming.

Anyways. I just wanted to shed awareness on this because like, even though I literally got good news yesterday, that doesn't mean that I'm not struggling or that I'm not still mentally ill.

[agirldying]

Day 26: How have your symptoms changed over time?

Thankfully my PTSD symptoms have dramatically reduced. I used to have 10 anxiety attacks a month and now it's nowhere near that. I also used to have telogen effluvium (stress-induced alopecia) which has since gone away, along with severe dermatillomania (aka skin-picking. I still have this, but not nearly as bad). I have significantly less flashbacks, hypervigilance episodes, and PTSD nightmares.

Some things that have surprisingly gotten worse include my OCD (I now struggle with multiple BFRBs as well as Existential-OCD, which also means more panic attacks), dissociation has strangely also gotten worse, which is also tied into the fact that my sense of self is... I genuinely don't know how to describe it except perhaps just... different? I'm now a questioning system.

I think overall my life has gotten better, and I think it's easy to say for multiple reasons, but especially because I am safe now.