Drowning in shame

You should read my OCD post before this one.

Trigger warning

Lots of writing about shame and self-hate is to follow. Proceed mindfully.

Part of this post is me reliving the worst of my experiences and sharing them on the internet. I have healed since so don't worry about me, worry about how you might react to this writing.

Because we are bad

Because We Are Bad is a memoir by Lily Bailey about her experience of OCD.

Honestly give it a read, it's one of my favorite books.

It taught me a lot of what I know about OCD, and was what made me realize that I had OCD.

Her raw honestly in her writing about her experiences really drove home that, without a doubt, I have OCD.

Her obsessions and mine have a lot of overlap, while our compulsions differ I can still relate a lot to her experiences.

I want to focus on one of them, the title of the book.

Because We Are Bad.

It serves as the title as well as an explanation to Bailey about why she has to do the things that she does.

She must have killed someone with her thoughts, she must have been in the wrong, she must perfect her behavior.

Because she knew she was bad.

In that exact same vein, I thought for a very long time that I was also inherently evil and bad.

Lily is bad.

Lily is a liar.

Lily is a terrible person.

I lived in shame

This section refers to a younger version of myself, a version of me which I wish to share and process by writing.

I live like this.

I know that I'm a bad person and that everyone is just waiting for a reason to start hating me.

I know that I'm a liar, and that I lie compulsively without even thinking to everyone that I talk to.

I know that I'm a terrible person: a racist, a pedophile, a freak.

I'm a terrible person and I hate myself.

I hate myself. I hate myself. I hate myself.

I know these things for fact. And there's nothing I can do about them.

Everyone hates me.

I hate myself.

I should isolate myself so I don't hurt anyone.

I should just disappear.

My mom is right, I'm a liar and everything that I say is a lie.

My peers are right for isolating me and not talking to me, I would just hurt them.

Because I am bad.

I'm just a bad person, simple as that

Repairing myself, piece by piece

It's not like one day I just stopped believing that I was a bad person.

That I unlearned the idea that I was a liar overnight.

It took a lot of effort, thinking, and, most importantly, time.

Time experiencing joy, times when friends would encourage me, times when I knew I was speaking in truth.

Time passed, and eventually I started to get better.

I made friends and lovers and stopped believing that I was a horrible person that no one wanted to be around. This happened slowly over the course of a decade.

I connected with people and started to believe that I had words worth sharing, and that my words were worth something.

I was so brutally honest that I couldn't lie to myself anymore and tell myself that I was a liar. This happened over two decades.

Years and years passed before I slowly started to repair my self worth.

I started to believe that I wasn't a bad person. Slowly. Piece by piece by piece.

I was worth nothing, then worth something, then worth little by little more. Until one day I woke up and realized that I liked myself.

It was a revolutionary idea at the time, that I could like myself.

I liked myself. I was able to tell myself that I was a good person.

I am a good person.

I am a good person.

I am a good person.

I am worthy of love and care. I am worth it. From my loved ones, from strangers, from friends, and most importantly, from myself.

This was a huge change for me, but it happened slowly, over a long period of time.

I got there eventually.

To my younger self

If you're reading this, deep in a pit of self-hate, I want to encourage you with the fact that one day, you'll wake up and feel the same way that I do.

You won't hate yourself.

Not every day, some days will still be bad. I still have days when I wake up and hate myself and feel like I'm just an inherently bad person.

But I know that feeling will pass, that a few days later I'll wake up and everything will be okay.

I'll wake up and know that I'm a good person.

Someone worthy of love and care.

You'll get there one day, I believe in you.

I love you.

Good luck out there.

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