- Date posted
- 13h
Feeling like an awful person
I’ve struggled with OCD for around five years now and I had it under control to an extent with the help of medication. I recently upped my dose and for the past week I have been struggling with one of my themes big time. For context, i’m a white female. When I was 14 years old (10 years ago) we had been learning at school about a specific racist hate group who wore white cloaks (who I don’t even like to name now). My friend is dyslexic and when she had to read the name of the group she pronounced it completely wrong and it came out sounding silly. I remember not so long after I was sitting watching TV and a show about said same group came on. I took a photo on Snapchat of myself and on top, I drew a white scribbled version of the outfit and captioned it with the way my friend pronounced the name wrong. I sent this to her - and thinking it was funny, she screenshotted it. At the time it was common for people my age to post photo dumps on Facebook, especially with photos their friends had sent them on Snapchat. She included this photo. Not long after my parents said to me you need to ask her to delete that photo. I couldn’t understand why and told them it was just a joke between us and they explained to me how it could be perceived the wrong way and how it could be highly offensive. I deleted it and went on to learn more about said group through school. It wasn’t until I began to suffer with OCD around four years later that this resurfaced in my mind. I also think about when I was around the same age I would use the N word in Snapchats or when singing along to songs just trying to be funny and dark humour, shock humour. My friends were the same so I didn’t think much of it. This brings me to present time it’s been 10 years and I’m in a slump right now obsessively thinking about this. I am in no way of racist or hateful person and never has been nor has that been my intention. My current problem is that my career is going quite well and there is a chance that I may become somewhat more public and I have this horrible fear in my mind that this image is going to resurface and ruined my life. I’m in the mindset right now that I think I can’t enjoy anything because of what a horrible disgusting person I am and people are gonna find out and that everybody knows and is going to out me. I find myself comparing events and dates to when it happened and counting back to try and put into perspective how long it’s been for reassurance. I can’t help but feel like I don’t deserve anything because I’ve been such a horrible person in my life. Even though I know that I never meant anything in a hateful way as a grown-up I now understand how disgusting my so-called jokes were. My personality and lifestyle now are quite hippie and I am so disgusted by certain language, including this and i’m big on morals. So it just feels like im faking it. I just really wanted to get that off my chest, but also ask if anyone else has a similar OCD pattern or something like this that they also can relate to if so, what do you do?