I feel like I’m 18 again…just not in all the ways that it would be awesome to be 18 again. I used to think that my OCD started when I was about 26 (I’m 31 now)…but with the most recent obsessions I’m having, I wonder if it wasn’t much sooner.

My obsessions are always moving on me…as soon as I have one pretty well beat into submission, something new pops up. I went through a rough stretch a couple of months ago, but started coming out on the good side of things. About that same time, I started to get very suspicious of my wife…like I thought she might be cheating on me. Then I started to worry if I wasn’t satisfying her sexually (things had been a little slow after the birth of our last child). So I started noticing more that I WASN’T as good in bed. Of course the more I thought about it…the worse I got…and the more likely it was that she was going to cheat on me…which of course made me more anxious. You know the drill.

Here’s the funny part…this all happened to me already, about 13 years ago. When I first started being regularly sexually active, all I could think about was how good I wasn’t. So I did what any obsessed kid would do…I became promiscuous…crossed over into sex addiction…and so on. But hey…I got better at it! But the fact of the matter is…I was in the same cycle then that I’m in now. I was so worried that I wasn’t good enough in some way…nevermind if it was sex or anything…that someone was going to abandon me for it.

So, many years and bouts of apparent confidence later…I find myself back in this place. The good thing is that I have a support system now that I didn’t have then in my wife. The bad thing is that I realize I probably went through a lot of things back then that were related to my OCD, and I did it without help, treatment, or even an awareness of what was going on. It led to some permanent emotional issues that have been a challenge to deal with. What blows me away is that an obsession that I thought I had defeated is back. I think I can handle this one pretty easily this time around, but I guess that remains to be seen.

As I read back through this, I kind of can’t believe that I’m posting it, but what the hell, right? Pretty personal, but I suppose those are the steps that I need to take to get over a few things.