Tw: death, dying

For some time now I’ve been preoccupied with our human understanding of life or death. My thoughts consist of why am I here? Why are we all here? Where did we come from? Where do we go when we die? Is this all a simulation? I don’t want to die. I don’t know what happens when I die. I don’t know when I will die. I don’t want to die! These types of thoughts would fill my mind all day. I thought it was just some sort of existential crisis that would go away. But I was wrong. These thoughts have plagued my mind for almost a whole year now. I now know that what I’m suffering from is existential OCD. I have already been diagnosed with OCD and generalized anxiety disorder. So I have a lot of uncomfortable and disturbing intrusive thoughts. But they were never this focused on my existence in this world.

I started to realize this isn’t healthy and is honestly kind of scary. I would think about life and death until I would feel sick to my stomach. Sometimes I feel like the world around me isn’t real or like I am not real. I start to derealize. Sometimes I would go over the possible dying process until I was sobbing in tears trying to figure it out. And in the midst of this I would obsessively look for the answers to questions that could never be truly answered by anyone. This is what people with existential OCD do. To try and fix these obsessions we have, we compulsively look for solutions to make us feel better about life and death. I would search the internet, reading near death experiences thinking it would help. But its impossible to feel better. Because there are no answers.

But recently I learned that these are just thoughts. A misfiring in my head. And maybe I don’t have to fight them anymore. Maybe they can exist in my head while I continue to exist in the world I know. And maybe, just maybe, I won’t be so scared anymore because I’m allowing the thoughts to stay without giving them so much power. Letting them flow in and then flow right out without reacting. What I do know is, I would like to become more comfortable with the unknowns of this world.