One of the things my OCD does is it makes me afraid of the future. Obsessing over what might be, what might happen. Most of the time I end up picking on the negative and magnifying it so that in the end my future looks like doomsday. Instead of being content with whatever I have, I obsess about what I don’t have, what I could have gotten and in the end I feel like a loser. So in the end I have all this fear of the future, like there’s nothing I can do to change it. That is apparently known as neophobia, fear of novelty. Fear of the future. For most people, the future is something to look forward to. Something to be all excited and happy about. At least they have something to look forward to. I’m not one of those people. I shrink at the hint of me tomorrow. I see failure, and in this I’m afraid to do anything that would improve my future. I go, “after all, it’s not like I have something to look forward to”. Obsession is unhealthy. Something that’s 100% destructive. Damaging both to the body and the mind. But it happens so often and so regularly that it’s considered normal. We see it on TV that often, and sooner or later we become desensitized, so much so that we regularly obsess over trivial things. Like clothes, looks and what other people think about us. Things that we otherwise wouldn’t care about given a choice. Like I don’t care what clothes I’m wearing or what the make of my phone is until I see something I perceive as better. That’s when the mind goes into overdrive and questions like why I’m not like that person, why I don’t have what he has and what I should do to become like that person become the focus of your thoughts, your actions. TV just makes it worse. With advertising and induced peer pressure. The sad thing is that’s what happens to non-OCD people. With OCD it’s worse. Way worse. So bad that it at one time involved thoughts of death and destruction for my will to be done. I wanted to be like other people. I hated me. I didn’t want to be me. I hated me. I’d imagine me dead and the world just moving on over my dead body. I felt inconsequential. And this would get me angry and depressed. Hating the world and blaming it for what I thought it had made me. Turns out that that was one of the many things I had become obsessed with. Making the world “feel” me and who I was. But one thing I realized was that that was what my OCD wanted me to believe. That the world was so bad that the only escape was to build an internal world. A place where I would be safe from other people. Then came the voices. I made up an entire collection of people in my head. With personalities that I could become whenever I wanted. Switching when the circumstances changed. In effect I became a me person. With the burden of all this I slowly cracked and obsessed about a future after a complete meltdown. With the world having deserted me, all that was left was for me to desert myself and whatever I decided would be the eventual outcome of my life. But I didn’t. I left the world to its devices and set to fixing myself. Becoming a person. Becoming real. All this time I was just toying with myself, moaning at failures, not realizing that eventually I had to come out of all that nonsense and define who I would be. So I set out to become who I wanted to be. No illusions, no ideas, no voices. Just me. And I set out to make my life something I would be proud of, not regret. I cut out all that thinking and set to getting things to do. That’s why I listen to so much music nowadays. And good music at it, none of that sick suicide-inducing garbage. And reading. I do read loads of books now. Gives me things to think about. Western philosophy especially. So I have a future. And I’m proud of it.