Setbacks

Unfortuantely, the doctor has signed me off work again due to a renewed bout of my OCD flaring up. It is incredibly frustrating to feel like some really good progress is being made only to find myself locked into another cycle of pressure and reaction whilst the OCD fires up on all cylinders and catches me at my weakest.

It's not that I can't beat it, I know I can. No, scratch that, I know I will. It's not the fight at all, it is the knowledge that this impacts so much on all the other boxes that make up my life. I find myself wondering if the way to beat it longer term is not to feed it - take myself out of situations that might precipitate a decline. But why should I?! Am I really reaching a position where I write off types of career as inappropriate to my condition? Is that where it all leads - postponing or cancelling my aspirations for the good of the outcome of the fight? It seems wrong to be thinking this way, and yet... how to put it? And yet I cannot be someone I am not, anymore than the slowest can run the fastet or the youngest have the most memories. Perhaps winning the war long term means thinking laterally - make a strength of weakness, earn my crust a different way. Clearly I cannot go on the way I am.

Then there is the effect of this on my life goals and hopes. This gets in the way, forms a giant roadblock I can't detour around. Fighting this illness full time only serves to make everything else seem unimportant and bleak. There are times I feel terribly lonely, and I have realised (as I have said here before) that I want to share my little life with someone, but how can I possibly hope to do that when all my energies are focussed on this? More to the point, once I beat this outbreak, I meet someone and two weeks in the wheels come off again. I am already feeling guilty about letting someone down that I haven't even met yet. This is what it does to you, it yanks away the certainties you rely on, it weakens everything you are and forces you to spend your energy 'winning'.

I just wonder at the cost of victory. I don't want this being my everything, there are other fights I want to fight. I want to be giving of my energy to someone really special to me and I want my hopes to be for them, and not just my own medicine. I want my shoulder to be there for my family and friends, for everyone that I love. I want the decks cleared and the diary empty ready to be filled with someone who makes my jaw drop just by her smile. I want all these things, all these normal, credible, reasonable and laudable things. Yet they are on hiatus, once again, as I wearily go into battle one more time.

OCD is wicked. OCD stands no chance against me, but it is the price of my victory that makes me hate it the most. It is robbing me of time, and energy, and of someone's adorable smile.