BY OUR MALICE COMBINED

Rumination is probably the most common type of OCD compulsion, but I rarely see anyone talking about it. I've talked to multiple people diagnosed with OCD who didn't even recognize it as a compulsion.

Basically, if you have OCD you have terrible intrusive thoughts. They can be about anything, but common themes are fear of being a bad person, fear of hurting someone, fear of contamination. etc.

Rumination is when you get stuck in a spiral. Rumination is when you spend hours catastrophizing, overthinking, analyzing, telling yourself it's going to be okay.

I'll say it again:

Rumination is a compulsion.

Rumination is a compulsion, and that means you have to stop doing it.

I did ERP (exposure response prevention) for my OCD with a therapist! For 9 months! And it did help, but the idea didn't really click until I found this website a couple years later.

And Oh My God. It made things make so much more sense, and I was able to pull myself out of an episode even though I wasn't in therapy or on meds at the time.

Genuinely if you have OCD, or even if you suspect you have OCD, I'm begging you to read some of these articles.

Like this was genuinely life changing for me.

Here are some of the ones that were most helpful to me:

Defining Rumination

How to Stop Ruminating

ERP Exercises for Compulsive Rumination

I love these texts

Sous La Glace, Georges Leonnec for La Vie Parisienne, 1926

a. it's a week dedicated to stairs! for 7 full days, 24 hours a day, my blog will be posting a picture of stairs every 15 minutes.

q. how do I participate?

a. the hashtag for this year's festivities is #st8irsweek! starting on Sunday, June 14th,you can post pictures of stairs and tag them with #TOBEDETERMINED and I will reblog them, adding them to the queue, and enshrining them forever in the stairsweek collection for future years!

i do not accept submissions for stairposts! you must claim your part in stairsweek yourself. if you do not want your stairs featured in future years celebrations, simply delete the post and it will not be reblogged the next year.

you are also free to reblog, share, and interact with the photos, and are in fact invited/encouraged to. i really like seeing people's tags for the stairs about their opinions/favorites!

q. i don't like stairs ):

a. then block the tag and control your own online experience :)

q. why?

a. I think it's important to remind myself and everyone else that I run my tumblr to collect and post about things I want to. im not on tumblr for clout or success. if i was, I would not post 600+ photos of stairs over the course of a week. i feel like there are are probably much better, more convenient, and efficient ways to get followers on websites that make significantly more money.

also, i just think they're beautiful, interesting, and make you curious about the rest of the larger structure they're part of. they have always been a bit mysterious in that way to me!

q. how many stairsweeks have you had?

a. karkat stairsweek would be entering third grade today :)

q. when is stairsweek?