It’s hard to express the kind of skin crawling feeling that arises when I need to wash something. It’s like a physical thing and ignoring it is extreamly uncomfortable. It’d be like someone scrapping a chalk board near your head and folk tell you to ignore it but it won’t stop until you do something to stop it. And then sometimes you’re in a car or at work and you’re stuck waiting and it doesn’t just go away. Waiting doesn’t make it better. I sit in that feeling until I do the compulsion and that’s it. I can try my best to distract myself or do something else but it’ll still be there. That’s why anyone coming at me and telling me I should find the gift in it, or make it work for me or whatever, it makes no sense at all. How is being physically repulsed by my skin until I can scrub it off some gift or magical artistic source material? Sometimes pain is just pain. I’d say most of the time pain is just pain. No one who hasn’t been here has a right to tell me how to get back, or worse how to get somewhere better because of it.