Pandemonium.

How does one with contamination-focused OCD survive a viral pandemic without losing all the progress they spent a decade making?

I am typing this on a phone which feels electrically charged because I haven’t disinfected it today. I can feel that charge seeping into my fingers, hands, arms, and slowly turning into that familiar sensation of maggots crawling into my skin. I thought I’d left that feeling behind but here it is. My muscles are tightening and it may only be a matter of time until I am standing under a boiling hot shower with a scouring pad in one hand.

People have been joking that I’ve been preparing for this all my life. When I was “preparing” then it was an illness. It was something to hide, something to be ashamed of, something for which they gave me drugs that made me very, very ill. But now it’s a government-endorsed daily practice to not breathe next to people you don’t know and to hide as much as possible and to wash your hands a hundred times a day and to suspect and fear every other human.

And I am confused and hurting and scared. I am fighting permission to go back to my old ways. I am still typing on this phone with dirty fingers attached to shaky hands and arms saturated with invisible maggots. Because I cannot do that again. I’m not entirely sure I could survive that again.

It has come very close to home. It has come close enough to home that I’ve had to talk someone out of visiting their own child because it could kill them both, and I can’t lose both.

What if I was normal? What if everyone had been “preparing for this [their] entire life”? This wouldn’t be happening. It would never have got this far.

So tell me, is OCD still an illness? Is it still wrong?  How am I still the butt of a joke?