I wish that I didn’t have to structure my life around this fear. I really don’t enjoy having to mentally prepare myself for any kind of social interaction. I don’t know what it’s like to drive a car without being afraid. People tell me that OCD will make your life smaller, it will shrink it down to just your house or your bedroom, unless you fight it. And it will happen so slowly that you won’t even notice, you’ll just give up on doing ‘normal’ things slowly, until one day you realise that you can’t actually do any of that stuff anymore. For too long I have drifted passively in this current of fear, and I’m at that point now where I can see that starting to happen to me. Fear has crept into my life and tainted almost everything that I hold dear.
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I think that’s excellent advice. This is exactly what I started to do during the worst, most fearful time in my life. I felt like I was drowning in so many nebulous, crushing fears that finally I decided I really had to figure out what I was most afraid of or I would go crazy. After taking a look at all my worst-case scenarios, I realised every one of them was just an extreme form of smaller, longstanding fears about isolation, helplessness and family disconnection that I had already been living with for decades but had never been fully aware of, and which had just been left to grow and grow. I won’t say those fears vanished, but I could at least start to address them. It’s the difference between being in a scary place, and being there blindfolded and without a map.
The very best way to overcome fear is to confront it, and make a habit of doing so. Take it on, and you will soon become it’s master.