Because I haven't really forgotten you all...

Well… shall I just apologise for that little hiatus or carry on as if nothing has happened ?

The answer is that a lot has happened and there are not enough words to express how different things are, a full spectrum of emotions have been played through and I find myself in a very different place to where I was a year ago.

So, I should stop being obtuse and come out with it – I am so, so, so (note that there are three there) much better. It hasn’t been simple, it hasn’t been an easy ride, but it has been worth it.

It didn’t happen overnight, it happened slowly but surely, bit by bit until one day I went to bed and realised that my day had not been ruled by OCD, that the horrible thoughts had not bothered me and that I know longer lived from ritual to ritual.

When I look back a year, to when I first started really addressing the OCD it all seemed entirely impossible. I screamed and I shouted my way through exposures, I cried and cried and thought that there was no way out, but with the encouragement of my family, of my friends and of my doctor, I carried on. Bit by bit, slowly but surely, the compulsions melted away and the intrusive thoughts bothered me less and less. You see (and I didn’t back then) I now understand OCD, I now get what everyone was telling me again and again – these thoughts are normal, everybody has them, it’s how you react to them that counts. It isn’t the thoughts that are the problem, it’s the meaning that you attach to them, it’s how hard you try to push them away, to stop them becoming real.

I’m human, I still have bad days, but I know that they are just that, a little blip and not a long, snaking slide down to the bottom of the playing board. I still have times where I worry obsessively, where I catch myself slipping into comforting rituals, but I feel as though I now have the tools to erect that ladder to clamber back up before it is too late.

I know there is a chance that I will relapse, that I also have to put the success down to the medication that I am on (and I’ll talk about them in different posts, this is my jubilant post, the one I’ve been waiting for) but hey, I still got here. I am back at University with a head full of ambitions and projects, no longer afraid of the shadows in my head and able to look forwards rather than back. And hey, I know I shouldn’t say this, but I’m proud.

Still yours, if a little less obsessively compulsively,

Bellsie