Myself am Hell

  When real life is totally unsettling and saturated with negativity and inflammatory rhetoric, what effect does this have on someone with OCD? There are days when I find it difficult to think of anything other than the livestreamed genocide being perpetrated by Israel and supported by western governments including my own. I think about how much suffering and horror one nation can be expected to endure while those of us fortunate enough to have been born in wealthy countries have the luxury of being able to turn away from the horror and go about our lives. I wrote in my last blog post about the strange nature of OCD and the way it's total grip on my mind made me feel almost nostalgic for news of the invasion of Iraq. To me, this is the difference between the private hell of OCD and our collective experience of world events.   I think if I've learned anything from my years of living with OCD, it's this: Reality can be terrible and it can feel hopeless and pointless and emp...

  I've been thinking a lot recently about how exposure to horrible events in real life might affect people with OCD. Not a day goes by at the moment when I'm not focused on the Israeli genocide of the Palestinian people. I don't want to take my eyes away from this. I don't want to be quiet about it on social media or just focus on the things in my life that I can control. A livestreamed genocide is something that affects every decent human being everywhere in the world. The fact that the government of my country has actively supported Israel's war crimes makes this feel even more urgent for me. Of course I wonder if thinking and reading and tweeting about the worst crimes imaginable, perpetrated by Israel on a daily basis, will make me more prone to OCD episodes. I don't know if there's a correlation between frequency of OCD obsessions and daily attention to troubling and awful world events. But it's certainly something that's been occupying my thoug...