#slowly eroding my confidence and motivation and sense of self and values and life direction while i dropped out of three separate attempts

[clashconcept]

Ooh okay but you said it's mild?

Okay ❤️

Yay ❤️

*proceeds to waste hours at a time at least once a week handwriting different iterations of the same to-do list in a panicked effort to get everything into the Right Order with the Right Timing to have Everything Done Perfectly before some semi-arbitrary and usually self-imposed deadline and having to start over and over and over until my wrist is cramping so badly I can barely hold my Very Specific Pencil while my kitchen sink overflows with dishes and the laundry load with the wet towels I meant to do last week is mildewing on my bedroom floor and my three overdue course project assignments plead for Mercy through my laptop speakers*

*definitely didn't look up the okay yay meme more than twice while making this addition just to make sure I didn't use the wrong hearts even though I know they're the most basic ones and also it doesn't fucking matter to the recognizability of the meme*

Mental health vent under the cut. Possibly mildly triggering but mostly just Long and I don't want to forcibly subject y'all to scrolling past All That

Realizing OCD may play a much more significant role in my psyche than previously believed has really been fucking with me. Like, I've spent the last week and a half identifying behaviors that I failed to recognize as compulsions over almost a decade and a half of therapy featuring the varied perspectives of at least twenty practitioners and a wide range of methodologies and intensity levels. Ten years ago, I lived in an intensive residential treatment facility for seven months, and when they let me out they threw me into a halfway house for kids transitioning out of juvie because they didn't know where else to put me, for fuck's sake. How did no one catch this?

It almost feels humiliating. It's like I spent three quarters of my life looking at my own brain under a microscope in my free time, and I finally thought I had a decent understanding of the minutia of its operations, perhaps a little nebulous and spotty in places still, but relatively thorough. And then all of a sudden somebody put a different lens on the fuckin microscope or added a pigment and changed the florescence settings or whatever and now everything looks totally new-- there's a whole network of entities and mechanisms and interactions taking place that I had been totally unaware of as I blindly searched for explanations for observed phenomena caused by its interaction with the other elements I had been studying (REALLY geeky metaphor I know)!

And most of me is outraged because like, NO ONE THOUGHT OF THIS?! There have been so many of you on this project with me I've lost track, and you're supposed to be EXPERTS, and we KNEW that ocd was a factor!!! Y'all gave me a diagnosis a full DECADE ago, called it MILD, and NEVER GLANCED IN THAT DIRECTION AGAIN. I didn't think of it either?? I may have less information and experience in the field, but I had the diagnosis, and it's MY FUCKING BRAIN. After less than two weeks of casual observation with this new perspective in mind I have found intrusive thoughts and compulsive self-soothing patterns which pervade EVERY ASPECT OF MY LIFE. Its cumulative effects have been more detrimental to my decision making and functionality than my bpd and depression COMBINED, and that's just with the connections I've noticed so far. I've had 10+ years to figure out all the little ways the other two have fucked me up. If this had been caught and treated sooner, who knows where I'd be by now. Maybe employed with a degree. Maybe still happily with my wife and stronger for having stood my ground, held my boundaries, encouraged her growth, and grown alongside her. I can't think about it or I might explode. Mild.

The OTHER little part of me is TERRIFIED because... ...no one fucking thought of this?? I thought I finally had a pretty clear and complete image of my Self and the reasons behind my behavior. I thought some of these headshrink motherfuckers might've been smarter than me, certainly more informed, educated and objective, and maybe saw me more clearly than I saw myself. If every single one of us including me missed something like this as it was sitting in plain sight causing huge obvious destructive effects on my fucking life... What else are we still missing? Was this the Last Big Puzzle Piece? Will such an animal ever exist, or is the effort to get an accurate overall picture of my mental health in order to attempt effective treatment actually just a pipe dream keeping me on an endless escalator ride through hell? How much of myself do I know, really?

Am I sure?