So I have a simple cold, which really shouldn’t be much of an issue. Mentally, however, it is much tougher with OCD. I’m not even going to get into the worry that this simple cold is going to turn into something worse. We’re going to just stick with my state as-is. Just sick.

My reaction to my OCD is directly tied to the mental energy I need to expend to satisfy it. It is a hungry demon that requires my brain to do things. And it does not take sick days, and thus neither can I to a full extent. I need to be always on, thinking of every possibility to everything that is moving forward around me. That is much more difficult when my brain is in a state where just writing this paragraph is a lot more work than it should be for me.

I have a list of things to do, and with it, I obsess over how my life will go to complete hell if I don’t do these things in the right way. I’m already obsessed with both the problems I need to attack growing if I don’t attack them, as well as any opportunities missed if I don’t do things in time. Each of these items, while sick, take much longer to complete to the point where I need to choose just the most important ones.

However, with OCD, “important” is a very compressed scale. Everything is very important because my brain can see the slightest mistake made with any underlying to-do item turning my life upside down. But I am sick, I am going to make more mistakes. That is a given.

Being sick is supposed to be an excuse to relax. Actually, “excuse” isn’t the right word. One is forced to relax more because the body and brain have taken energy to fight being sick.

We can use this here writing as an example. It is crap. I’m writing like crap and I know it. This is not the normal quality I feel I can achieve with my writing. Heck, I’d probably throw out these paragraphs if I wasn’t convincing myself that their lesser quality was an example for the actual subject matter at hand. And there you have it, my brain spinning around into itself from all sorts of directions, relating so many disparate thoughts together in a negative fashion. Yeah, that is my OCD.

So this writing is crap, and I am now obsessed that when it is read, I will begin to lose the interest of people who read my work and they will not come back. I write for a reason, and beyond the personal motives, I want others to relate. That requires good writing.

I take things like this as far as seeing negative events occur far into the future that I could stop now if I put more energy into applying myself better. I see this work being read by someone of great import as an example of how I write and having them laugh me off.

But I was sick! Tough.

This is one example, and I suppose a good one because I don’t need to spend much energy explaining it. The example is literally what you are reading.

However, this playing out of bad things happening is attached to everything on my list of things to do. But I don’t have the energy to apply myself perfectly, so I now have at least ten to twenty times the negative possible things that will happen to me because of my sick brain’s poor performance.

My obsessions are not relaxed, they don’t get sick. That part of my brain doesn’t get sick. I imagine if I were in a coma, doctors would see the part of my brain with OCD still lit up firing off madly.

“What is he thinking?”

“Apparently how much this coma is going to ruin everything around him when he wakes.”