the human heart is no small thing

So, caveat that there are so many different subtypes of OCD and pretty much as many different sources of obsession/compulsions as there are people to exhibit them, which means it's really better to learn how the disorder itself actually works and what type of thinking is likely to trap people in obsessive-compulsive cycles.

But for an example, since this one is currently driving me up the wall: Telling people to do research on topics that they've outright admitted they have compulsions about is a huge one. This can include things like telling someone with health anxiety to research a specific condition you think they might have (even if you think you're right, it's not appropriate to offer it unsolicited on a post about their mental health challenges), suggesting that someone with moral scrupulosity about a particular topic read something on it to better educate themselves (if they ask you for recs that's one thing, but at the end of the day it needs to be their choice or they're not going to get what you want them to out if it, even if it's an important topic), or implying that someone with a phobia of a particular thing read up on it in order to convince themselves it's irrational (it won't convince them it's irrational, but it will give their phobia new information to latch onto).

The thing about OCD is that it's going to take all those thing as fodder for the obsessive-compulsive cycle. OCD brains are constantly looking for new things to latch onto, and without challenging the cycle, you're just going to create new fears or compulsions for them. Actual treatment for OCD involves sitting very intentionally with uncertainty about your obsessions and attempting to not do compulsions about them, but caving to the desire for certainty and trying to do panicked research on something that frightens you is actually itself often a compulsion.

Think about it this way. Obviously one of the really stereotypical OCD expressions is a person who is scared of their house burning down having to constantly check the stove to make sure they turned it off. For someone with more mental compulsions though, it might not be the stove -- it might be a Mayo Clinic article on a condition they think they might have, because it "reassures" them that most of the time it isn't fatal, or a piece of writing by a scholar of color about how to be an antiracist that they constantly check their behavior against because they're terrified of accidentally committing a microaggression, or a set of statistics about how rare human-bear encounters are that they've memorized and repeat to themselves every time they go hiking. That's also "checking" behavior, and is also a cycle people can get trapped in.

You might be going "Wait, those seem like things that should help with anxiety, though!" and tbh the hard thing is that you're not wrong. They can help.... with anxiety. Which is a totally different disorder. And one that a lot of people with OCD get misdiagnosed with, and taught the wrong coping mechanisms, which we then have to unlearn when we realize we have OCD. It also may seem counterintuitive that this kind of thing could be actively harmful for someone, but reassurance-seeking behavior is a really common compulsion, and the thing about OCD is that you can't let your compulsions be the ones in control.

That's not to say people with OCD that are nervous about their health have to avoid talking to doctors about their concerns, or that people with moral scrupulosity can't engage intentionally with conversations around important social justice topics, or that someone with a bear phobia can't ever go hiking again. But the person with OCD has to be choosing to do those things on their own terms, with a list of their common compulsions in mind so they can attempt to prevent them when they crop up.

Hi friends!

As many of you know, Scribe and I are going to be relocating to Providence, RI in just a few months, so that I can start a PhD program in History. The hard part is getting there. We haven't had much money ever since Scribe got sick, and cross-country moves are very expensive, so we're fundraising a bit to try to ease the burden.

I'm not even opposed to being included in the former category, to be clear -- by society's standards, as an aro/ace person in a queerplatonic marriage, I am one of those weird perverted queers. But I would like if the other weird perverted queers actually acted like I belonged in their spaces, and not just when it's, like, a funny comeback.