OCD is like the Moon (hear me out)

I think the common understanding of OCD is like what I had thought about the Moon.

Until recently, I thought the Moon was purely round like a golf ball. This is based on my viewing of Apollo 11 footage. I never thought twice.

I very recently learned that the Moon's terrain is HUGELY different, thanks to a sci-fi novel. There are mountains and cliffs hundreds of metres high, craters that stretch for hundreds of kilometres, canyons and so on.

OCD is regarded as a cleaning/orderliness disease in common parlance, but it can look SO diverse and SO MUCH NOTHING like how you'd think OCD can look.

It can look like anxiety, depression, psychosis, paranoia, personality traits, trying to be a moral person, caring for others, trying to be good at living. OCD is such a chameleon. It can trick patients and even psychiatrists and psychologists.

OCD always follows the obsession and compulsion structure, and the need for certainty, but those pieces can be SO subtle to notice, in our behaviours. You would think that we can always see where the obsession is, and the compulsion is. NOPE! Not always.

In some odd way, I find it an honour to belong to the cohort of something so misunderstood, so trivialised, yet so vast and mysterious.

If OCD could be described with an image, I would pick silhouette, like a locked character in a video game, because it can look like ANYTHING!!

Good luck with your OCD journey!