u/Quiet-Revolution-144

I feel like the love I receive as a woman in my family is completely conditional. I've always had this feeling that nobody is genuinely happy to see me. Nobody really talks to me or seems to enjoy having me around.

It always feels like I'm valued for what I do for them: the food I prepare, the times I visit to bathe their dogs when they haven't been washed in days, the times I do their hair, bring cakes, organize birthday parties, and plan family holidays. I'm always doing something for someone.

But it never feels like they're interested in me as a person, the way they seem to be with my male cousins. They can simply show up and exist, and that's enough. Meanwhile, I feel like I have to earn my place in the family by being useful.

I genuinely believe this might be related to my gender, and I think this is a common experience for women in many families. But whenever I try to talk about it, nobody listens. They make me feel like I'm crazy for even suggesting it.

I'm not asking for special treatment. I just want to feel loved for who I am, not for what I can do for other people. I want to feel like my presence is enough.

I'm tired of feeling like I have to earn love through acts of service, and I just want to hear some reassuring words from another woman who understands what I'm talking about.

It is very tiring to constantly feel like I need to solve everything in my life. I want my house to be perfectly clean. I want my style to be beautiful and spotless. I want my hair to always look nice and my skin to be perfect. I want to overcome my eating disorder and fix my habits. I want to be the best at work. I want to be the best wife I can possibly be. I want to be the best cat owner I can possibly be. And it’s a lot to deal with.

Whenever we start a new month, I promise myself that this time I’m going to do everything right. This time I’m going to be better. My OCD is going to get better, my eating disorder is going to get better, and I’m going to finally solve all the things I’ve been wanting to solve in my life.

And then I end up feeling like I failed. By the end of the month, I’m back at the bottom because it’s simply too much pressure to be perfect at everything. I’m constantly overwhelmed and constantly trying to overcompensate for everything.

I don’t know if anyone else with OCD feels the same way.

I realized that I seem to have been angry all the time lately. I get mad at everything. People on the street smoking, and I have to smell their smoke. People chatting on the bus, people talking loudly on the phone on the bus. I get mad at people who make noises when I'm working. At my job, there's a guy who constantly talks to himself, and he's super loud, and every single movement he makes is so loud. And he says the most inconvenient and disrespectful things to all the women in the workplace. I just get really mad every time I see his face.

I get mad at people in my house. I get mad when I'm on public transportation. I get mad about literally everything. I don't know if I've ever been like this before. I get mad at my husband when he does the smallest little thing, when he's, like, so distracted. I get mad at myself. I get mad at everything and everyone, and I don't like being like this.

There are a few people that I can tell about my anger, and today my coworker said that I'm super angry about everything and that there’s probably something going on. And yeah, I'm going through a lot. My granny died a couple of months ago. I'm going through a lot of financial stress, and I'm working a lot. I'm doing a lot of stuff, but I'm just tired of dealing with this constant anger because it doesn't let me have any peace. It doesn't let me have peace.

So I'm just very tired, and I just want it to stop. I really don't know how you guys manage.

Minha mãe tinha uma doença neurológica que não tinha cura, e isso acabou matando ela cerca de um ano depois do diagnóstico. Então, quando vejo o que está acontecendo com o Lito Souza, que está morrendo de uma doença semelhante e que recebeu uma expectativa de vida de apenas cinco ou seis meses, isso me atinge de uma forma muito pessoal.

O país inteiro está acompanhando o que ele e a família estão passando. Dá para ver o desespero e a tristeza, principalmente porque ele tem um filho pequeno. E eu sei o que é assistir alguém que você ama se deteriorar por causa de uma doença assim, sabendo que não existe cura e que a pessoa não vai melhorar. É de partir o coração.

Mas uma coisa que realmente me incomoda é ver os mesmos comentários repetidamente: “Jesus vai te curar.” “Jesus vai te salvar.” “Eu acredito no poder de Deus.” Em praticamente toda publicação aparecem dois ou três comentários iguais.

E, sinceramente, eu acho isso desrespeitoso.

Não porque as pessoas acreditam em Deus, mas porque elas estão dizendo isso embaixo de vídeos em que a esposa dele literalmente fala sobre ter que perder o marido e sobre ele eventualmente ter que contar para o filho que vai morrer. Eles estão falando abertamente sobre a realidade da morte dele, e aí aparecem pessoas desconhecidas nos comentários essencialmente negando essa realidade ao dizerem: “Jesus vai curar você.”

Não vai. Ele vai morrer. A doença não tem cura. E eu sei que isso parece extremamente cruel de dizer, mas às vezes aceitar a realidade é a coisa mais compassiva que podemos fazer.

Eu não entendo o que essas pessoas acham que estão fazendo com esses comentários. Estão tentando confortar a família? Porque, se eu estivesse no lugar deles, não acho que gostaria de centenas de desconhecidos me dizendo que meu ente querido com certeza vai ser curado quando eu já sei qual é a realidade médica. Pode parecer que vocês estão se recusando a reconhecer a dor que aquela família está realmente vivendo.

E, honestamente, até pela lógica cristã, eu não consigo entender. Se Deus é responsável por tudo, então Deus permitiu que essa doença acontecesse em primeiro lugar. Por que Deus daria a alguém uma doença incurável para depois simplesmente tirá-la? E, se ele não tirar, as pessoas sempre podem dizer: “Era o plano de Deus.” Não existe como questionar, porque a crença é construída de uma maneira em que qualquer resultado acaba confirmando a própria crença.

Eu não acredito em Deus, então talvez eu não tenha a mesma estrutura de pensamento para entender isso. Mas uma coisa em que eu acredito é que a morte é real, a doença é real e o luto é real. Às vezes não existe um milagre vindo. Às vezes alguém vai morrer, e a coisa mais humana que podemos fazer é reconhecer o quanto isso é doloroso, em vez de tentar encobrir tudo com uma fantasia de que uma cura vai acontecer.

A família dele não precisa que a gente finja que tudo vai ficar bem. Eles precisam de compaixão, apoio e espaço para viver o luto por aquilo que já estão começando a perder.

E talvez seja justamente isso que faça essa situação me afetar tanto. Eu já estive do outro lado dessa realidade. Eu sei o que é amar alguém com uma doença neurológica incurável e saber que você vai perder essa pessoa. Então, ver pessoas simplesmente negando essa realidade nos comentários realmente parte meu coração.

I have no religion. I don't believe in any god, and I don't pray. I haven't for many years.

My family has been going through a really difficult time with health issues. My mom died from an incurable disease a couple of years ago. My granny died from a stroke last month, and now my uncle is very ill. There isn't really a cure for what he has either, so my family has gotten very involved in religion.

When my mom was sick, they went to every church and tried every religion and spiritual practice they could think of. Christianity, spiritualism, Asian religions—you name it. They tried everything because there was no medical cure. I never criticized them. I took my mom to church, supported her, and tried to make her feel comfortable when my family brought religion into everything. I don't say anything because I know it gives them comfort, so I just keep it to myself.

But something that's been really annoying me since my granny died is that they constantly talk about heaven. They keep saying things like, "It's good that she died because now she's at peace," or "She's with your mom now." People tell me they've had visions of my mom and granny together or that they've seen my mom spiritually. They even made some kind of spiritual ladder at my mom's grave, like a ladder to heaven.

I've even been told more than once that my mom got this incurable disease because God needed to teach her something, or that it was part of God's plan, or that God wanted to teach her some kind of lesson. Like, dude, I don't give a fuck. If God did that—if God gave her this horrible disease—then, to me, that would make God a horrible being.

So please, shut up. Get lost. Don't tell me this kind of stuff. It's not comforting to me. It makes me fucking angry.

And I feel like I can't even express that anger because being upset about religion isn't socially acceptable. People expect you to respect their beliefs, but somehow they don't always realize that I deserve the same respect for not believing in them.

And dude, I just... I don't care about any of that. I understand that it brings you guys comfort, but please stop telling me about it. It doesn't make me feel better. Honestly, I find it disrespectful when people say that someone's death is "good" because now they're at peace. No. You're trying to cope with the loss, and that's okay, but death is still a terrible thing that happened. They're gone.

I've never criticized them for praying or practicing their religion, but I'm tired of constantly being told spiritual things that I don't believe in. I don't know how to say that respectfully, especially because they're older, but dude, it fucking annoys me.

I am Brazilian and my husband is American. I want our son/daughter's name to work for both cultures.

My main names at the moment are

Joana

Samuel (I love how it sounds in English, not so much in Portuguese. )

William (I think it's such beautiful, but it still seems a bit out of place in Portuguese haha.)

Anna

I think that's all I can think of that I like enough to mention.

Before I started medication this year, I had a crisis. My mom had ALS and died from it three years ago, and since then, I’ve been terrified that I might develop the same disease.

This year, I had a horrible crisis where I would constantly feel symptoms in my body. I would feel my body twitching all over, and of course, that would give me horrible anxiety. I couldn’t even sleep properly, I would cry constantly, and it was just a horrible sensation.

But as soon as I started taking medication and recovered from my crisis, those symptoms completely stopped. There have been months when I haven’t felt anything at all. My OCD was so strong that it actually caused all these sensations in my body.

And it wasn’t just that. I would feel like I was having heart attacks, I would think I was having an aneurysm—it was crazy. OCD can actually be so powerful that it makes you feel things physically in your own body.

Do you guys experience the same kind of sensations? Has your OCD ever caused physical symptoms that felt completely real to you?

I was in the elevator with my husband and a couple got in, and the first thing the guy said was, "How tall are you?" What happened to saying good morning or how are you?

I work with the public and there's always someone treating me like an alien. And it's always a weird guy. Why??? 🫪

Eu sei que falamos muito sobre como o TOC afeta negativamente nossas vidas, mas ele trouxe alguma coisa boa pra você? Por exemplo, eu acho que me ajuda muito a antecipar problemas potenciais antes que eles apareçam. Mesmo que... Isso pode ser uma faca de dois gumes. Acho que pode me ajudar em algumas situações. Também sou muito bom em me planejar. E como trabalho em uma função de atendimento ao cliente, consigo sempre antecipar todas as maneiras que um cliente pode reclamar antes mesmo de chegarem, rs.

What about you?

Bem, no meu caso, eu luto com isso desde a pré-adolescência. Foi quando meus sintomas começaram. Minha mãe era psicóloga, mas eu sempre pensei que era apenas uma pessoa ansiosa. Passei por vários terapeutas, mas nunca realmente compartilhei meus pensamentos intrusivos com eles. Nem sei por que. Acho que parte de mim nunca reconheceu completamente. Eles estavam sempre na minha mente, mas eu nunca os disse em voz alta porque sabia que soavam tão loucos, sabe?

De qualquer forma, passei por diversos psicólogos, e nenhum deles nunca sugeriu que eu pudesse ter TOC. A palavra nunca foi nem mencionada. Para mim, TOC sempre estava associado a rituais compulsivos, que eu nunca realmente tive. Meu TOC é muito mental—é principalmente pensamentos que nunca param, junto com muito pensamento mágico.

Eu tinha crises debilitantes por pequenas coisas, e às vezes até meus próprios pensamentos me deixavam completamente incapaz de funcionar ou de me sentir como eu mesma. Eventualmente, decidi ver um psiquiatra pela primeira vez na minha vida, e ela simplesmente disse: “TOC. Isso é TOC.” Depois disso, comecei a pesquisar sobre isso, e nunca me senti tão ouvida ou compreendida. Finalmente, eu tinha uma maneira de entender e dar nome a coisas que sempre pensei serem apenas parte da minha personalidade, mas que na verdade eram sintomas de um transtorno.

Agora que comecei o tratamento, estou me sentindo muito melhor. Também comecei a terapia depois, mas minha psicóloga nunca realmente considerou meu TOC. Ela é mais uma terapeuta do tipo freudiana, psicanalítica, eu acho. Fiquei um pouco frustrada e honestamente me senti meio envergonhada porque, sempre que compartilhei meus pensamentos e sentimentos, não senti que estava sendo ouvida ou compreendida. Eventualmente, eu desisti, e infelizmente, não tenho a estabilidade financeira para continuar a terapia agora.

Mas, de qualquer forma, eu desejo a vocês tudo de bom. Eu realmente adoraria ouvir suas histórias—como vocês experienciam o TOC, como foram diagnosticados e como receber esse diagnóstico ajudou vocês a entender e lidar com isso.

Do you guys also struggle financially because of binge eating? I’m struggling financially because it feels like every bit of money I have left ends up going toward food. It can be groceries, junk food, takeout—anything. I feel like I can’t get through a single day without spending money on food.

Even when I’m out of money, I’ll use my credit card or let my account go into the negative. I hide it from my husband because he knows I struggle with this and has offered to help me, but I feel like I just can’t stop. I’ve tried deleting food apps from my phone, but it never seems to be enough, and eventually I end up right back here.

It’s so fucking exhausting. I just spent a significant amount of money on food that I didn’t even want and that wasn’t even good, and I still couldn’t stop myself. I’ve also been eating huge amounts, and I feel like I’m getting worse.

My grandmother recently died, and everything has gotten even harder. Honestly, I think the happiest I’ve ever been was when I was dieting because I felt like I had control over my eating, was living a more disciplined life, and was actually saving money.

I really want to start dieting again because I felt so much better back then, but I’m scared I can’t. Every day, I feel like I’m getting deeper into this problem, and I’m so tired of it.