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6/27/2025, 2:23:48 PM
Everyone on my 4 person work team has gotten engaged in the last 2 weeks... I'm not even dating...
6/27/2025, 1:06:30 AM
I want to start by telling you honestly and openly that I am mentally ill, and the very act of expressing why I became that way—and how I plan to cure myself—is impossible for a person with my special illness to do. But, swimming against the current, I am going to try to do it anyway.
The most difficult part of articulating what it’s like to have your reasoning poisoned is doing so without sounding like you’re mentally ill—which is exactly what you are. The second most difficult part is that, if you really manage to articulate it all, you must explain why exactly your cogent and lucid grasp on its inner workings does not in any way alter your behavior.
What I mean by having your ‘reasoning poisoned’ is roughly what it sounds like. It means that you are irrational in your conclusions, but completely convinced that the rationale which got you there is sound. The end result is that you can never actually determine whether your reasoning is poisoned when your reasoning is poisoned.
That all seems pretty circular, and it is. It should come as no surprise when I tell you, then, that my special illness is an obsessive compulsive aversion to lying, combined with the delusion that I am always, always doing it anyway.
There are cute snapshots one conceives when ‘OCD’ is brought up. One imagines Dixon Ticonderoga pencils in very neat rows with millimeter sharpnesses. One imagines pristine calligraphy on notebook paper that never crosses the blue line. One imagines white marble countertops and the disembodied caucasian hand that cleans them with a disinfectant wipe.
What these images belie is that OCD is, in fact, a state of total psychic chaos. In spite of appearances, the obsessive compulsive sees even impeccable states of order as complete bedlam. Tragically, no state of order is ever sturdy enough that it can withstand all possible future calamity, and it is just this state which would finally, finally, give the sufferer restitution.
The most difficult part of articulating what it’s like to have your reasoning poisoned is doing so without sounding like you’re mentally ill—which is exactly what you are. The second most difficult part is that, if you really manage to articulate it all, you must explain why exactly your cogent and lucid grasp on its inner workings does not in any way alter your behavior.
What I mean by having your ‘reasoning poisoned’ is roughly what it sounds like. It means that you are irrational in your conclusions, but completely convinced that the rationale which got you there is sound. The end result is that you can never actually determine whether your reasoning is poisoned when your reasoning is poisoned.
That all seems pretty circular, and it is. It should come as no surprise when I tell you, then, that my special illness is an obsessive compulsive aversion to lying, combined with the delusion that I am always, always doing it anyway.
There are cute snapshots one conceives when ‘OCD’ is brought up. One imagines Dixon Ticonderoga pencils in very neat rows with millimeter sharpnesses. One imagines pristine calligraphy on notebook paper that never crosses the blue line. One imagines white marble countertops and the disembodied caucasian hand that cleans them with a disinfectant wipe.
What these images belie is that OCD is, in fact, a state of total psychic chaos. In spite of appearances, the obsessive compulsive sees even impeccable states of order as complete bedlam. Tragically, no state of order is ever sturdy enough that it can withstand all possible future calamity, and it is just this state which would finally, finally, give the sufferer restitution.
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