Retaking control of my life
I have incredibly bad OCD that results in intense agoraphobia. This has compounded with an increasingly hostile living situation and the fact that I work from home to mean that there have been stretches of several days where I have not left my room at all.
Basically my entire life was lived in this room. I'd only leave when I was confident my roommates weren't home, and even then it was just to buy food. As you can clearly see from the photo my preference was McDonald's since it was right down the street and took like ten minutes to get and bring back so I could minimize the time my roommates might get back and force me into an interaction with them. If I was out and realized they'd come home in the meantime, sometimes I'd stay outside until past midnight to hope that they'd gone to bed when I got back.
The censored parts are, and it disgusts me to say this, containers of urine. I would get too terrified to even walk the distance from my room to the bathroom and risk them seeing me. I didn't keep track but there were probably 200+, some of which aren't caught in the photo.
Anyway - this all culminated in the horrible mess you see here. A month or two ago it got too bad to even use my desk and I was living off of my mattress. I wouldn't do anything at all.
My roommates were both out of town for two days and at the tail end of a breakdown I decided I simply had to take back control of my life. I know marathon cleaning is discouraged for a variety of very valid reasons, but the images shown were the culmination of about 16 hours of work across 2 days, with the assistance of 44 trash bags and more pairs of disposable gloves than I could keep track of (I'd thought buying a pack of 100 was gonna be overkill. It was not.)
Obviously there is still more to do but I cannot overstate how much of a relief this has been. I walked around my room and cried earlier today. It's been years since I've even seen the floor. I've arranged to move out on Saturday. It's really short notice but I think I can do it and I will do literally anything to not live in this fucking room anymore. I just have too many awful associations with it now. It feels like being trapped.
Thanks for reading this far if you got here. It really feels like I've remembered that life is worth living. I've felt so long that my OCD controlled me, and in many ways it still does, but this is a step at least. Hoping I can make it last. I've looked at a lot of posts on this subreddit and my situation seems like one of the absolute worst to be posted here so I hope this can be an inspiration for anyone who feels like their home is unfixable. It's not. Just takes a lot of work and a willingness to do it scared