When I was 20 years old, I was diagnosed with PMDD due to birth control. Not long after, my physician informed me that it was actually OCD and being as she had treated me from a relatively young age, she wondered how she didn't catch it earlier. I had already been diagnosed with anxiety and the two essentially go hand in hand.
For the most part, I deal with obsessive thoughts. They are seemingly irrational to everyone else, I bug my mother quite a bit, but to me they are completely justified. It's strange because when I go to lock the door for the 3rd time or get up multiple times to make sure all the doors are shut, I know these aren't normal things to do. I know that when I sit and worry about the future and the things that can happen to the point where I'm uncontrollably crying and pushing myself further into a panic attack, that I'm being irrational. For whatever reason, mostly a chemical imbalance, I can't control it. Although I know these thoughts and worries are for the most part, illogical and groundless, please don't state the obvious and comment on it, it will do the opposite of help.
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The anxiety attacks are by far the worst. It starts with the overwhelming abundance of thoughts that run on a film reel in my mind. My breathing gets heavier and more abrupt until I can feel a tingle in my nose that means any minute now, I'm going to completely lose it. At that point, it's like someone has dropped a cinder block on my chest and I'm under water. It's emotional waterboarding.
On the outside, I appear to be perfectly normal and for the most part, I am. There's just a lot of things going on inside my head. "Am I good enough, pretty enough, skinny enough, smart enough?" These are all things that run on a loop in the back of mind with an abundance of other perturbations. I will inadvertently ask you the same thing again, say I'm sorry and repeat myself in various forms to the point of unintentional redundancy. I don't mean to constantly second guess myself, or anyone else. By that I mean I'm prone to being insecure and unsure of how someone sees me or what they think about me in general. I've been rejected and abandoned too many times and I think a lot of my insecurities and worries stem from that.
I'm well aware of the abnormality of all of this, but don't ever tell me to "just calm down" or to simply "quit thinking like that." There is no way of telling me to stop, even if your intentions are to help me. Words like that are just going to tell me that you don't get it. You don't understand that I have virtually no control over my thought process. OCD is more than obsessive and intrusive thoughts, it is more than repetitively checking locks, it is more than making sure the piece of paper I'm writing on isn't bent or wrinkled. It is exceedingly more than any of that. It is questioning every thing you do or say, it is having a breakdown at 2 a.m. because you can't sleep when you're mind is on overdrive. It's having little to almost zero control of your own thoughts, which in itself seems like an oxymoron but it's real and it's there.
When this madness, that's what I call it, starts to creep in, I just need you to either listen or leave me alone. There's not much else you can do besides learn to understand what it is like for someone who suffers from OCD or anxiety. Only then do you truly have the power to help them cope.
