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My most persistent, life-long intrusive thoughts have been about contamination. Some of my earliest anxieties were about germs/impurities getting inside of me, silently multiplying, then killing me and the people I love. It doesn’t sound that irrational but trust me, it is.
As a kid, I developed an obsession with plagues as a coping mechanism. I mean, knowledge is power, right? Or at least, knowledge feels like control. I consumed everything I could find about weird diseases even though it made me feel queasy.
I don’t talk about this a whole lot, so please bear with me. I’m still figuring out how to articulate this. Anywya, this obsession worked as a sort of stop-gap solution (even if it made me a total weirdo) until I was pregnant, and then it consumed me
I was so unwell at that time. I knew I wasn’t living in the real world (like, I had an hours-long meltdown over red wine being used in a soup i ate for dinner, even though rationally I knew almost all the alcohol had evaporated during cooking). It was a terrifying place to be.
People joke about OCD, but experiencing that while I was pregnant and was truly like being in a parallel universe where I believed I was a monster who was going to kill my baby by eating deli meats. It was so beyond the scope of every other mental health crisis I’d experienced
Anyway. Other than that I’ve mostly been able to work through convincing myself that the creeping horror of bodily contamination is irrational. I mean, we all get sick, but most of the time it’s fine. I’ve done CBT, I can talk myself through the intrusive thoughts.
That being said, it has truly been a trip suddenly having all my irrational fears validated as being rational. It’s a lot. I don’t even know if I have the words to talk about what it feels like to suddenly have your deepest horror become a shared reality with everyone else
I wanted to put this out there because I know there are other people out there who are also dealing with this on top of everything else. I see you. You’re not alone. It’s a lot. I worry that these fears will never be manageable again.
It’s hard to explain, because I don’t fit the stereotype of someone with contamination OCD. I wash my hands a lot, but not excessively. I’m almost the opposite of a hypochondriac because at this point I’ve convinced myself that any symptoms I have are just pretend.
I’m sorry, I feel like I’m not explaining this properly at all. But if you feel that very specific dread every time you hear someone say “assume you’re already infected” because you’ve spent your whole life assuming you’re already infected - well, I see you. It’s a fucking trip.
