u/Brilliant-Throat1408

I want to start by saying I haven’t been formally diagnosed with ocd yet but I’ve spoken to my therapist about it and we will dive further into it next session.
Anyway when I was younger I had extremely bad social anxiety. So much that for all of kindergarten I remember refusing to say a word to anyone. Then as I moved on to first grade I wouldn’t shut up. However I still think I experienced some social anxiety and would often find solace when I got to go to the bathroom and be hidden in one of the stalls. Then around second or third grade I remember I started having obsessive thoughts. I thought these were social anxiety for the longest time because the thoughts would be basically only thinking about myself. Whenever I would do anything I would be thinking about how I was reacting to it and when I would be doing a school assignment I would be thinking about how smart I was while doing it instead of fully focusing on the task. Then I started trying to figure out random things instead of paying attention in school as well as daydreaming because I thought it made me smart. Then when I would actually try to do my schoolwork again I would question everything about it until I no longer understood but was too scared to ask for help so I basically bullshitted my way through it.
All of this has led me to having an underdeveloped brain. Since I was scared of socializing I never had tot think about how to respond because I simply wouldn’t do it so now when people talk to me I can never think of what to say. Also when I try to think about things in depth I will get stuck thinking about myself, thinking about thinking, or picking it apart but having no answers to actually understand. Concepts are also hard for me because I can’t put it into simple black and white sentences. I will also find myself hyper focusing on what certain words mean. However, I can never come to any type of conclusions because I’ve spent my whole life not figuring anything out. So as much as I believe I have ocd I think me just being stupid in general and refusing to actually think anything through contributes heavily to my anxiety.
Im 18 now and just graduated high school. I have no idea what I want to do with my life because my ocd has also made me change everything about myself and now I don’t know who I am. And on top of that I’m very stupid. I’ve been trying to read(mainly fiction books that I actually like reading) but when I try to internalize plots I feel like my brain is blank and I’m thinking about thinking. But also I know I’m not trying hard enough either because sometimes if I try really hard for 10 minutes I can get myself to understand one sentence. But doing that is exhausting.
Sorry if this is a lot of rambling. I also never taught myself how to be precise with words but on the other hand I don’t really know my full brain either because I’ve also convinced myself I’ve had other things wrong with me so now I don’t know what is entirely true or not.

I’ve been on lexapro for almost three weeks. Two weeks on 5mg and I just bumped up to 10mg on thursday. I felt positive effects the first couple days after bumping up to 10mg though I was a bit groggy the first day and the second and third days I had caffeine which spiked my anxiety. Also on the third day I had one hit of a hybrid cart which was enough to get me high. It had me thinking about all the things I don’t like about myself and made me feel pretty sad. I spent the next day self loathing and thinking that I am dumb. Ever since then the lexapro hasn’t been hitting me as clearly as it did the first few days and I’ve been anxious all morning. I don’t know if it’s because of the weed or if it’s normal for it to shock my system and then take more time to build up. I’ve heard that sometimes it gets worse before it gets better? Should I try indica to see if it smooths me out since I tried it on 5mg and it was fine? Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

I’ve been living a fake life

I grew up extremely privileged in a nice neighborhood with loving and supportive parents who never fought. I’ve never had any struggle in life except for social anxiety for as long as I can remember. My earliest memory is me on the first day of preschool when I refused to talk to anyone for the whole day and I kept up with that through kindergarten and never talked at school until first grade. I feel my personality was very obnoxious and I made a lot of unfunny jokes and struggled to feel like I fit in so I kind of floated and copied other peoples personalities especially that of my best friends who was very well liked. She was smart and funny and beautiful and she was very insightful too especially from a young age since she grew up not as privileged as me and struggled with money issues and family issues. She would often tease me about being “rich” (I can admit I’m privileged but my family was definitely never rich) and for some reason it really bothered me and made me feel left out and also dweeby from coming from a good household. I’ve always seen myself as very bland and prudish, privileged in a way that made me lack depth and character, always going along with what I was told. I’m literally so embarrassed that I’ve never had struggle and equally shameful that I am embarrassed because others who have an actually personality and passions in life long to have what I have. I wanted to stand out and almost be an outcast but a cool outcast not a weird dweeby one so I took up liking horror in 4th grade to seem edgy and interesting. I also feel that I up-played my anxiety to get sympathy or further make myself an outcast (makes absolutely no sense I know). My best friend also liked horror but prior to fourth grade it freaked me out (seeing people in pain even if fictionally made me feel deep discomfort stressed me out). Now that I am freshly graduated from high school my whole identity is that I like horror and a distinguishable from others who don’t like it because it’s not as conventional. I act annoyed when others look at me weird in public even though I like it because it makes me feel special. I also want to be mentally ill. I want to be oppressed in some way and it’s so stupid and I hate being like this but I feel shame for having no problems. Now I feel like an empty shell of a person. Nothing I’ve ever “liked” or any feelings that I’ve “had” have ever been genuine. It’s like I watch how others live and try to mirror them. Now I’m at a point where I’ve been living so passively I don’t have any critical thinking skills either. Everything bit of information I take in goes in one ear and out the other and my opinion of things can easily be swayed by one simple argument even if it doesn’t make any sense. All I do is scroll on TikTok and I have no hobbies. All of my friends are stereotypical “weird” kids who have had to come to terms with who they are even if I think they are the cool kind of weird but I don’t fit in fully with them either. However, I chose to go through this I could have been like everyone else and lived my privileged sheltered life but I chose to build this edgy insightful caricature of myself that doesnt exist. I feel detached from life and want desperately to be myself whoever that may be but I am also scared of who that is. It’s pathetic I know but I need to see if others relate to me before I start therapy next week. Thank you

Ok im gonna start this off by mentioning how pathetic this is and how ashamed i am of myself that this is my life.
I’m 18 years old and have just recently realized that I have never really formed thoughts the way that other people do in the sense that I don’t really think at all. I think my whole life I’ve just been expected thoughts to come to me on their own and not me having to think them up myself. For example I never really put the pieces of cause and effect together properly but still managed to get good grades in school (mainly by memorizing big picture ideas without fully understanding fundamentals). I think this is a mixture of both adhd and possibly phone addiction. I just was wondering if I started trying to form together thoughts now if I could eventually catch up intellectually to my peers eventually or if I’m screwed forever. Any advice on how to change thinking patterns? I genuinely don’t fully understand anything and the idea that I may be an idiot is debilitating to my self confidence and identity so please, any advice helps.

I feel like I can’t form complete thoughts and my brain is just overall blank and lifeless. I am surrounded by an array of incredibly witty coworkers and everyday I try to follow their banter but just end up getting left behind while trying to process the last thing they said and how it fits into the overall joke etc. I also feel like I have to manually think every thought I have and often find myself trying to fit ideas into what I think they could mean rather than processing the information for what it is and drawing my own conclusions. I’ve been trying to read more to improve literacy both media and literacy in general but I often forget what I have read and have to scramble to fit the pieces back together. How can I start to feel more alert and process information fully instead of rushing to find a superficial explanation.

I feel like my brain has never worked the same way that other people’s have. I have a hard time connecting information logically and when I try my brain often goes blank. When I try to learn new concepts I often end up spiraling because I can’t wrap my head around the basic mechanics or logic of it that a normal person would be able to draw conclusions from. I feel like I can understand big chunks of information but just have trouble piecing them together. I’m also having trouble articulating how my brain spirals right now but I may not even understand how it is spiraling in the first place. I feel like I’ve always thought how I thought I was supposed to rather than what makes sense. For example, when learning about anatomy I can’t understand how blood pressure works because I don’t understand/visualize the exact mechanics of it. When I try, my brain spirals until all logic is lost and I’m scrambling to come up with some sort of explanation that may not even make sense. I think it may stem from me wanting to understand everything from my own brain, like how a person discovering something would figure it out rather than taking in information at face value but I feel like I can’t understand either way. It also may be a result of laziness because when people talk to me I zone out without thinking about what they are actually saying. Please help me figure out how to fix my brain because all I desperately want is to understand concepts, draw my own logical conclusions, and be quick witted in social situations. I don’t think I can fix this on my own because I’ve been trying for far too long.

Also I thought I might add that my dad has adhd (I have never been diagnosed) but he and I seem to both drift off in conversation and find ourselves both asking stupid questions and constantly backtracking in conversation. However, I do not want to pin anything completely on the possibility of adhd.