It is October of 2018 as I write this. My life fell into an abyss in 2014… scratch that… I’d allowed an abyss to form beginning around 2003 that culminated in everything (and I truly, absolutely mean everything) going away in October of 2014. After a year of initial foundation rebuilding, I began to take my very poor mental health seriously for the first time in my life. I no longer had a partner in love, a partner in a business, or any of the trappings of money and the like to blame for my extreme—there are many words, but we’ll stick with “discontent.”

So that began in October of 2015.

I need to make note of one thing, though we’re not really going to focus on OCD in general here. My OCD forces me into magical thinking. I can usually stop it, but I can’t help but notice trends. I am obsessed with them. It has been a trend in my life that major events happen every three years, usually around October. Always at the end of the year, for sure. I began noticing this in 1991, and you can pull out a calculator and see that 2015 and 2018 align with this.

That right there could be its own article, but I try to stay away from my magical thinking issues.

I’m also not going to recount every step on the journey to where I am at today—because I find the past to be fairly useless, as well the journey in general. I value the destination, and no matter what people say, it is how I’m going to think. I can’t not.

I was alone in October 2015 with nothing but anxiety to live with. By nothing, I really mean nothing. I was just anxious, full-time, twenty-four hours a day, every day. But I’d just gave up an entire life, and I knew this was not acceptable. I was going to tackle it no matter what.

This led me to work with a psychiatrist that worked with me to attempt the utilization of pretty much every psychotropic medication out there to treat “what I had.”

“What I had” was not well defined. Yes, the Generalized Anxiety Disorder was obvious. I have been called—by a professional therapist—the most anxious person he had ever treated. This new psychiatrist went far beyond the levels of anxiety medication he was comfortable with to attempt to treat me.

Then, OCD. It came out of nowhere. Well, seemingly. I used words to paint a picture of who I was entirely and it became obvious to the professional and me that I had some form of OCD. This is where I learned of Pure-O, and how one can have OCD without the typical compulsions.

I was put on a medication for that, and within a week or so I was feeling like I was 50% there. 50% better, 50% fixed. I’m not going to turn this into an infomercial. I’m not representing the medication, and I was not at all 100% anything. But the leap I made was tremendous. That was medication. That’s easy (especially when it is affordable!)

The next part was the hard part. I’d gotten myself into a situation where I seemed to be on track to rebuilding a lot of what I lost, but didn’t realize I was completely losing myself to it. I have a tendency to do this. To take things on fully that have a glimmer of a promise of fixing things, when in reality that glimmer is a 2% chance. Oh, and it was an abusive situation to boot. The abuse I’ll talk about another time.

I’d come 50% of the way to being content, and I was using up the energy that could be spent on the other 50% on an abusive lie of a promise of a better life. I can’t leave things easily.

But I did. I just did. Like literally two weeks ago. I stopped being abused. Did it hurt at first? Miraculously, no! It instantly felt right. Oh, thinking about the abuse still hurts… but the months of worry about making the decision or not? Useless. The decision was already made. I was to not be abused anymore.

Hey, so I know I am light on details here. That is why I write continuously. What is important is that I am content beyond a 50% level. I don’t know what percent. I may never know, and everything is a work in progress in general. But I am, for the first time in decades, content.

Content.

It took three years of work because of course it did. I didn’t use any self-help techniques. I just used thinking. Real hard thinking. And a lot of brainwork.

It is possible that I’m not the same person I was when I wrote everything that’s come before this.

Oh, I still have massive OCD. I have OCD episodes just as frequently. But my foundation and—most importantly—structure is one of content.

I can attack the evil things in life from a base of content.

For now.

We will see what is next. Maybe it won’t take three years to get to the next level.