Thoughts on Finding Purpose in My Harm OCD Journey

It’s times like these where you look back from what has all happened over the last few years, and you breathe a sigh of like what the fuckety fuck was all that. It’s a time to be grateful and a time to just live in the moment. Days like these are what make the days that I fight with the demons in my brain, worth it. Don’t get me wrong, my brain still likes to point out knives whenever I see them and tempt me with the thought of plunging it into my flesh or slicing through my skin, but I’ve been able to not be tempted by it. If you start arguing with it, usually you lose, and it just keeps egging you on harder and harder. So, I try to not let those quick intrusive horrific images bother me, I try to say to myself to not give them any power by spending more than a second of time to brush them off. I think self-hate thoughts are the same, if they come at you, brush them off, don’t let them crawl under your skin, that’s what they want. It’s almost as if these beasts are super intelligent, they know when you might be a bit low or just thinking of them for a second and they come to takeover. Perfect time to strike.

Wood ticks are similar. In the spring we can sometimes have hundreds of them coming in the house on each of us, all over the dog and if you don’t find them right away they blow up into looking like big grapes and they eventually fall off because they actually have sucked your blood so much that they essentially kill themselves.  Wood ticks can find spots on you to bury in that are perfect hiding spots. They go behind ears, in coarse hair, on your back that you can’t see, on your side, even down there where they shouldn’t go.  This morning, I was going to put my hair up in a ponytail and I felt a lump, at first I thought maybe something scabbed and without even thinking twice I plucked it out of my skin and then before I even seen it, I knew exactly what it was.  You can’t kill wood ticks easily either, you can’t swat them like a fly or a mosquito, nope you have to use pliers, burn them, or drown them. Yikes the more I write about the wood tick the more it sounds exactly like my Harm OCD thoughts. If you don’t pay attention and catch them right away, they can also put bacteria into your blood and make you very sick. The ones around here don’t carry Lyme disease for the most part but I have definitely seen the kid’s lymph nodes swell up to the size of a baseball under their ear or on their neck, when the bite was on the top of the head. Proving that even if they bite you in one spot, you can have damage throughout your body.

So, is there anything purposeful or useful about a wood tick? I talked about bees previously and they pretty much help feed the world but what does a piece of crappy blood sucking wood tick do? So apparently, they are a source of food for chickens, turkeys, birds, and are an important part of the food chain.

 I can’t think of anything purposeful or useful about Harm OCD thoughts, is there some kind of wider purpose it serves, something that helps the chain of humanity? So if a wood tick didn’t exist it is possible that chickens or birds wouldn’t, then it would affect the next group like coyotes, mountain lions, etc., after that larger mammals and then it would affect the whole ecosystem so our surroundings would change due to the deaths of all the other animals in the wild.  What would I effect if the Harm OCD thoughts never sucked my blood, never put poison into my system, what role do I play in the chain? I can think of a couple things. First, maybe if I didn’t have this then I would never be able to help those around me who also have it. Two, maybe I don’t get to be me without it. It could be the part of my brain that makes me creative, silly, empathetic, wouldn’t exist without the OCD part of the brain because I am a package deal. To be Michelle Temple, I have to have Depression and OCD, or my other qualities may also not be there. Without the chain, my ecosystem in my own brain would not exist.

Well, I hate wood ticks, and I hate Harm OCD and Depression, but I never actually thought of them serving any kind of purpose except to be total assholes. I still will hate them, but I can appreciate that maybe they do actually hold a higher purpose.

Chat again soon,

Michelle