u/saymastein

Im really struggling to find an atoms worth of joy or just being content with living. I am not S**idal but as days go by the more I struggle to cope with this deep hatred of living. Today I woke up in extreme anger, to the point of tears because I knew how many hours it will take me to do the compulsions all day. My hobby now is to clean and pray (contamination + scrupulosity) that is it. I dont feel joy or content doing anything. All my past hobbies are gone.

Even something so simple like going to the bathroom or going outside triggers me. Ive become dysfunctional.

What is worse is that no one around me understands, they get annoyed at me, call me dirty and crazy despite me trying so hard to not be, and make fun of the things I do. I hate everyone who doesnt have ocd as a result. I feel like no one can ever understand, they dont even try to. They dismiss it either by insulting or by saying 'im a little ocd too.' My family think ocd is not serious, and make cruel remarks about it. I also work full time, and dread so-so-so hard every single day going there.

Im trying to find some reason to like living but I really cant. I just feel condemned / damned in every way, especially religiously but also by life itself.

There is no one that cares, and no one to care for.

How do you guys find reasons to continue?

My parents, especially my mum has been really having a go at me because of the effects of ocd. I am not in any way comfortable with talking to her about it, she is really traditional / conservative and doesnt believe in mental health illnesses. She constantly yells at me about it and Im really having a hard time dealing with it all. Not even my siblings understand, they think I am just being extreme, or berate me, jokingly saying I have ocd, without picking up the seriousness of it all. No one in the house I live in understands at all. I dont have anyone to talk about this at all in my life, not even the ppl who seem like my 'friends', because I feel like I have already exhausted the conversation and the conversation is boring them. I'm also really embarassed by the actions brought about ocd, especially contamination ocd. Idk, I'm just so ashamed about everything and I feel like I have exhausted myself trying to talk about on reddit too. Although everyone is so nice here, I wish I can have proper support in real life. I'm in the process of restarting therapy, I just really hope it turns out okay. But with therapy, i feel like although you can learn to change your perception about something, the situation itself in terms of environment wont ever change through therapy. I cant afford to move out but I wish I could.

I just wanted advice on how to deal or how to ignore everyone's complaints, I am trying but their complaints is going so far now, and the yelling is really starting to effect me.

Also my parents come from a country where mental health illnesses is pretty much viewed as very shameful. I dont think educating them on the matter will do any good, they will never listen.

I really appreciate everyone here and your kind advice and words.

I am on my last leg with this. I have a mixture of contamination ocd with religious ocd. I'm a muslim and in Islam cleanliness is a big part of faith and we do specific washing actions before the daily prayers (5 times a day). Because of the focus on cleanliness and washing , and the fact that not doing them kind of renders the prayer I feel like I am just a sinful person. No matter how hard I try there is always something to doubt, something to clean and if I dont then my prayers are invalidated.

I'm at work right now and it's been hell. My mind keeps spiralling, i feel like I have to wash my clothes all the time and the fear of missing prayers make me question my existance, ocd makes it too hard to pray, what should take 5 mins takes me 30 minutes to an hour. Sometimes I feel so 'unclean' that I feel like I cant pray at all. I feel like i am constantly sinning because I feel unhygienic. Because we have to pray 5 times a day (in specific times) my mind is constantly consumed by the thought of it in the worst way. I hate it. I dont want to feel so trapped but that is all I am feeling. Im so tired and hopeless.

I know that practising Islam isnt supposed to be this hard, and a lot of leeway is given with God being all Merciful but I cant make myself think in this way. No matter what I do or how hard I try and make myself be better, there is always an event which pulls me away.

At home it was bad enough, but during work? Shared bathrooms, no place to wash, and yet I feel the urge to. I feel like crying so hard. I dont know what to do.

I really hate doing salah. It doesn't stop me from doing it but I barely have any khushoo because all I think about is what I am reciting (if it is correct or not) + how much I hate doing it. I talked about having ocd because of prayer, and that is a big reason why I hate doing it, it causes a lot of distress for me, but even when I didn't struggle with doubts, I still hated it.

It's like I can never do anything properly because I always have to think about the next prayer time. I have to quit what I'm doing and pray. I feel like prayer consumes my mind always, and it's stressful to think about it. During the winter it also stops me from going outside because the prayer times are so close together.

Living in the west makes it so hard because when i am working, I have to find a place to pray where there isn't anyone there. I work in a school but I still had ppl stopping me from praying because they wanted to use that classroom / office. There is no wudu facilities and using their bathrooms isn't the best situation either. They find praying so foreign, praying culture doesn't even exist for them. I really have to try so hard to find a place to pray, and do wudu and with the ocd thing, it takes soo long to do it, and it's like I'm skipping my job hours to do it.

I see it as a hinderance when I know I shouldn't. I feel like that though because of how much it stops me from doing things. I don't know how to like doing it at all. I know the meaning of what I'm saying, and I agree that Salah should be a meditative, spiritual time but I don't feel that at all. I wanted to ask you all, how to like doing it despite these challenges?
Jazallah khair

Hi,

I talked about how I am really struggling with ocd. Before it was with only wudu, then with wudu and salah and now it has spread to normal life cleanliness.

I get really anxious whenever I walk outside, I have to always look down to see if I step on something bad. And it has reached to the extent that I have to buy bottles of water when I am outside since I feel compelled to wash my shoes too. I get nervous sitting down on public benches and public trains and buses and in the washroom. These days ive been constantly washing my clothes multiple times everyday and yesterday I must have done ghusl like 3-4 times because I feel dirty.

Right now I have my nephew staying over. He just turned 6 and sometimes rushes to go to the bathroom without an adult amd doesnt wash himself. If my life with ocd was bad before he arrived, you can imagine my reaction to this situation...Im having a serious mental breakdown over it. I dont know what to do. He will be staying for a week (my parents made him stay even without his parents) and I am deathly scared that everything in my house will just become impure because of him. I am frightened of where I sit in my own house.

I dont know what to do. I feel so unclean all the time and now this, I think it just damned me so badly. It is such a torture for me, i cant believe I have to live this way for the entire week. Idk how I will go about cleaning after he leaves too. I cant live like this. I wish I can live alone but it isnt possible for me to do that.

I cried so hard just now, multiple times. I feel so lost and so alone. My parents wont do anything, same with my siblings. Now my mental health is below rock bottom, I honestly wish I was ignorant of everything, or just didnt exist at all.

I would really appreciate some advice.

I talked about this a few times but im still struggling with it after all these months but now its a mixture of different problems. Before I would only get ocd during prayer, but now I am getting ocd due to cleanliness. At first it was because I was so afraid of breaking wudu and the annoyance remaking it made me repeat so many actions again and again.

Now its spread to cleanlimess and contamination as a whole. It is so hard because now not only do I think it breaks wudu but I also think I myself am impure /dirty / unclean. No matter what I do, I always have to doubt and that seed of doubt of being dirty gets to me so badly, it is the worst in bathrooms. I end up redoing everything, even washing clothes when I dont need to.

It's getting unmanageable and am worried how difficult it will be once I begin work again. I literally hate doing salah and I hate just doing normal things because of it.

Anyone else have this issue?

I've gotten to the point where I dislike and even hate some scholars. Lately Ive been actively wanting to seek knowledge regarding many issues I have but whenever I am given the knowledge from scholars (offline and online) they are very unreasonable and never understanding of the situation.

One major example is the rulings around menstruation. Many scholars Ive asked (and even female scholars) go to extreme lengths (in my opinion) to enact some rulings. They will consider 1 little dot of blood as mensturation (despite other things which suggested it wasnt). They always advise to rush to do ghusl 'as a precaution' in case you are finished and have to pray. I can't believe how controlled it is!

Another example is in salah. What breaks salah (and also menstuation rulings) is something that I literally developed religious ocd around and now have to seek counselling for it.

Many scholars online make fun of people who have genuine struggles (like another post here wrote about watching anime) and brush them off, not knowing what they are actually going through is a serious thing.

I remember joining events and courses so openmindedly thinking I can become a better muslim and relieve doubts and will finally learn but these everyday rulings they give are so restrictive, to manage it is so hard. I'm not talking about sinning, but literally doing the ritual actions we have to perform become almost impossible to maintain. Seeking knowledge is now such a burden. Every time I learn something new, my previous action was deemed wrong. I feel like im a baby, relearning again and again, now I dont know what is right or wrong. I feel like im constantly sinning because of it.

I can't name a single scholar who is genuinely understanding and kind.

I makes me feel like I have a grudge with Islam because of them, now I have to remind myself its not Islam and Allah, but them. But honestly it's not even one scholar, it's every single scholar who some way or another act like this.

I consider myself sleep deprived (average is 3hours for over 2 years...). These days I feel so deprived of sleep that I feel like I'm spinning when I walk and find myself often jolting awake. I now somehow find myself sleeping on the bus on my way back home from work.

I think I have 'revenge sleep' where I want to utilise every second of my free time with things I want to do, because I feel like sleep is a time waster, and when I sleep, time goes so fast that I get disappointed when I wake up and see it's a new day and I have to go back to work.

I also think my lack of sleep is due to the want to mdd, my mdd sessions are the strongest and vivid when I'm in bed, it's when the mdd is the most emotional too. The pleasure of mdd reaches an apex during the night. Sleeping is like cutting myself from it, and I tend to feel anguish or hatred when I wake up on the days when I realise I've slept without mdding.

This has been going on for a long, long time, to an extreme level I think. It's extremely bad for my body physically and mentally, but the urge to not want to fall a sleep is so strong. Mdd is the only pleasure I have in the world and sleep just cuts it right off. I really do desperately need sleep and I want to sleep too.

Does anyone else have this problem?

I've been maladaptive daydreaming ever since I was 11 and I'm almost 27 now. I basically have an entire separate world in my head, everything is made up from my imagination, even the people in that world.

Since I've been doing it for so long I have a deep attachment for this world and everything in real life now seems dull. Even the people irl. I no longer feel personal connections with anyone, and I think emotionally I am completely unable to love someone romantically. I'm south asian and people keep telling me look into getting married, and I've been holding it off for as long as I can but I can't do it forever. In an ideal world, I would like to never get married ever in my life (that's how into the mdd world i am) but it's not possible in desi culture to do that.

I just feel emotionally closed off to the world irl and I really hate it.

Does anyone else feel the same way or do this?

Long story short, I worked on a project for so long and spent hours of my time on it. Every day after soul crushing hours of work from my job I would go to the library and work on this project. Every weekend, I would spend my mornings, afternoons and evenings on this project.

I would say the quality of it in my eyes was good too. Also, it was about something that was really close to my heart.

But today I got an email today saying it was rejected...well I only had to read the email intro on gmail 'thanks for submitting...unfortunately' I can't even make myself read the full email. It hasn't even been opened yet.

Getting that rejection feels like a stab to the heart when I think about the hours I devoted to work on that project, how much it all meant to me. It took so much effort only for it to be a failure. Makes me think if I am actually skilled enough to continue, now I feel ashamed to do it.

Everyone I know (parents, siblings etc) sees me dedicate so much time to do it but they always look down on me for dedicating so much time to something that I can't make money from. My dad says 'you do all these things but succeed in none of them.' I wanted this to be successful so bad to prove everyone I can do something but now I can't.

After reading that email I was questioning so much why I'm even pursuing this, if even my genuine best effort gets rejected.

What's the first thing I do after receiving the rejection? Mdd. Honestly I feel like I'm just better off mdding what I want rather than manifesting it into reality now. This world requires too much effort for very little reward.

I relate to him a lot, for majority of the things he says. I'm a muslim so I don't drink or take drugs or have relationships that are romantic. I think that is one reason why I tap into daydreaming a lot, like him too I try to do better irl but that 'wait' of potential succeeding is very painful and I don't know if I will ever succeed.

I work as an IT Technician in a school, and the work isn't so bad but because of wanting to be in an mdd state, I am really resenting working now to the max, to the point where today I felt I was driving myself mentally insane internally. I can't speak to anyone about how I feel either and it's so exhausting.

I don't know how I can survive working life now. I can't take my mind off mdd, and no matter what I am doing irl, I miss mdding, I yearn to be in that world so bad it is tearing me apart when I am separated from it. Living day to day is becoming harder and harder to do, even breathing feels painful if I'm not mdding. Every day it feels like my soul is being tugged further and further away from my body. I don't know what I can do to stop this feeling.

With work it's become so bad because I am forced to not mdd, but as a replacement of it I am filled with an emptiness in my heart, a deep void. I feel like a soulless being enslaved to my job. I tried to ignore it before and it worked for a while but I can no longer do it. The older I get the more the yearning is so painful because I feel like I will just be trapped in the dullness of reality forever.