Forgetting everything and everyone you ever knew in every way

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Social media is a lot like having OCD.

Rituals

When I was 2, I had a severe allergic reaction to yogurt that could have killed me. I became violently ill and had to be hospitalized for multiple days. I have no conscious memory of this event, but traumatic things that happen to you as a baby can shape your instincts for years to come. I suspect this to be the catalyst for my phobia of vomit that I still struggle with to this day.

Since I was raised Christian, I would often try to make “deals” with God as a child. I would walk down the sidewalk without stepping on any cracks, or jump over a creek, or organize my toys by color, or go five minutes without sneezing, or stare at a wall for a minute without getting distracted. If I did these things successfully, God would shield me from illness for the day. If I failed, I would be terrified that I would become ill. Sometimes the anxiety would make me feel ill, and it would become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Before bed each night, I would have to perform a four-step prayer ritual where I imagined certain scenes in my head that I believed would shield me from illness for the night, and if I messed up or got distracted, I would have to start over from the very beginning.

If I fail at any of these tasks, I will be susceptible to illness for the rest of the day and must beg for forgiveness. Even then, there’s no guarantee of my safety. Of course, none of this makes any sense. Magical thinking is a hell of a drug. As I aged, I’d contract stomach-borne illnesses approximately once every winter, including on days where I did complete my rituals successfully, and on these days I believed I was being punished for some unknown wrongdoing. As I aged into my teenage years, I grew out of this mindset and began to realize that illness was simply the result of catching a virus or that I ate something bad, and that it had nothing to do with God at all. Still, I would pray for protection regularly, hoping that God might lend a hand even if he was not the direct cause of my illness. Sometimes this would take an hour or two. As I grew out of Christianity, I started doing this less and less, and I began to think I had outgrown my OCD. Oh, how wrong I was.

OCD has three parts, obsessions, compulsions, and life-altering distress as a result of these. The type of OCD most people think of is related to health and/or cleanliness. The most stereotyped example is an obsession with germs resulting in the compulsion to clean your hands. This person experiences extremely distressing intrusive thoughts about germs, so they might avoid going out and interacting with other people, becoming depressed and paranoid from isolation. There are some aspects of health OCD that I still exhibit, such as an unhealthy anxiety about my health (I once had an EKG done because I had convinced myself that I had heart problems, and my doctor was kind enough to do it for me even though she knew there was nothing wrong with me), and taking extreme measures to avoid my vomit phobia (I used to drink grape juice daily because I read a fake article online claiming that grape juice kills stomach flu germs. I was devastated to find out this was misinformation). That being said, I’m not a compulsive hand-washer, and I love going out with people. I love being touched by my friends, and I’m not afraid to get dirty. It doesn't make sense, and it doesn't have to, because it's a mental illness.



Brain Cop

OCD comes in many other lesser known forms, one of which is the type I currently exhibit the most: moral scrupulosity OCD. If you have moral scrupulosity OCD, it might be religious-based, or it might be non-religious but still based in your own personal moral code. As a child, mine began with religion, especially my fear of the concept of hell. But I’m no longer a Christian. I believe in “God” and the supernatural as universal forces that have nothing to do with Christianity, and I don’t believe in hell at all.

Despite this, I have a very strong personal moral code. I have distressing intrusive thoughts about myself and others doing things that I find disgusting, violent, or immoral. It doesn’t matter that I know for a fact I would never do these things. My OCD makes me believe that I'm somehow an irredeemably bad and immoral person, no matter how hard I try to do good. I fear that there is something corrupt inside of me that is constantly trying to dig its way out, and if I can’t suppress it, I will bring emotional or even physical harm to the people I love. Moral failing is my obsession. The resulting compulsion is to replay (actual and imagined) scenarios over and over in my head, attempting to analyze the most morally correct possible response. I will spend hours thinking up the most correct response to situations that have literally never happened to me- just in case they do happen. If we have ever spoken, I have replayed our conversation(s) in my head, checking to make sure I said the right thing, didn’t accidentally somehow say something bigoted, didn’t make you feel bad, didn’t do something rude, didn’t come off as a bad person. Did I use the wrong word? Is there any way I can fix this mistake I made 5 years ago? Did I accidentally imply something offensive with my wording here?

Online, this manifests by rereading my DMs over and over again. I fear that I am an immoral person if I don't always share posts about current events and spend every waking moment thinking about extremely serious topics like climate change and social justice. It’s not that these are bad things to think about all the time- quite the opposite. You *should* spend time being uncomfortable and thinking about what you can do to make the world a better place, ensuring that you aren’t harmful to others, and educating yourself on current events. To some extent, this is normal and even necessary. I actually don't think that most people do it often enough. But for someone with scrupulosity OCD, this is all we think about, and it results in such extreme distress that we suffer anxiety attacks and self-loathing as a result. Day in and day out, we are coming up with theoretical rebuttals to nonexistent debates, altering ourselves to behave “correctly”, ensuring we haven’t hurt anyone with every single action we take, to such an anxiety-inducing degree that we end up doing nothing at all.

This is our pitfall: moral scrupulosity OCD does not make you a better person. It helps no one to live in fear about doing literally anything at all, and at its worst, it can actively prevent us from making meaningful change in our lives and improving as people. It can prevent us from helping others out of fear of doing it “wrong”.



Social Media and OCD

The way that social media functions creates compulsive, addictive behaviors. Scrolling and checking which posts warrant your attention and which don’t. Posting something and checking your notifications repeatedly to see who liked it, who commented, what the comments say. Checking your follower count and pushing for growth. You can see how this might end poorly for someone with OCD.


You see a callout post for somebody in your community (furry or other fandom). It doesn't matter whether the callout is legitimate or not, or what it's about at all. The only thing you feel is fear that you're next on the chopping block, even though you haven’t done anything to warrant it. You *haven’t* done anything to warrant it, have you? Are you sure? Check again, just in case. One more time. Again. Again. Again. This is why I cannot exist in most online furry/fandom spaces.

That might seem a bit ridiculous, but keep in mind that I was only fifteen or sixteen years old when this began, and I had a lot of trouble making real life friends, so I spent a significant amount of time online as a teenager. Other people can easily brush off shitty social media behavior and move on, but my scrupulosity OCD would latch onto that fear of social rejection and persecution.

Tumblr has a bigot problem. There are a lot of TERFs, reactionaries, and deeply bigoted people who run generic meme reposting blogs. It’s very easy to reblog a meme from one of your friends, only to find out that the original poster is some type of genuinely horrible bigoted person. But oftentimes, you will get a lot of very angry and accusatory messages asking “why didn’t you already know?” that the poster was a bad person. “You should have known.” “Why didn’t you just scroll down on their blog for a while? Then you would’ve known.” “There’s no excuse for not knowing.”

A lot of people believe it’s fair game to be mean and make fun of someone as long as the person you’re making fun of is a bad person- the catch here is that you can make anyone look like a bad person if you try hard enough. The other catch here is that you aren’t genuinely critiquing someone's violent or bigoted behavior, you’re just harassing them and then excusing it by saying, “It’s okay to call them ugly because they’re a bigot. Why are you defending them? Clearly if you want me to stop calling them ugly, you’re defending them”.



Consequence

I am constantly afraid that I will be interpreted as a bad person if I make any social blunders whatsoever (which is incredibly difficult to avoid when you’re autistic). I fidget, avoid prolonged eye contact, and speak bluntly. This can often be taken as rude and aloof, and I am terribly afraid that somebody might even interpret this behavior as a microaggression. That is an extremely niche situation, and odds are that people will just think you’re weird and stop talking to you. That’s usually what happens. But sometimes they’ll take you in good faith. Sometimes they’re even autistic too! But that worst case scenario is still a constant “what if?”

I often think all my friends are waiting for me to make a mistake so that they can attack me, and that my life will be ruined if I fuck up. It’s not that I don’t trust my friends to gently confront me and talk it out when I actually do make a mistake. That’s exactly what they do! They’re kind, forgiving when reasonable, and they put their foot down when necessary, and I try to be the same way. We snap at each other sometimes. We make mistakes. We don’t know everything. It happens. It's human.

However, my OCD is not entirely irrational. My worst fears have literally happened to me before. It’s incredibly common for neurodivergent people to end up in friend groups who simply tolerate them rather than actively enjoy their presence. Then, when the neurodivergent person acts out or makes a mistake, they’re left in the dust with no chance at redemption. I’ve been the person ousted from the pack, and I have also been the person doing the ousting. My obsession with moral perfection manifests both as a genuine desire to be a good person in a world full of hatred and bigotry, but also as a fear of rejection, of being alone again. This is the fear that drives perfectionist, hypervigilant social justice circles, especially in niche online communities such as Tumblr or Twitter. As often as Tumblr users declare their superiority over the lowly Twitter user, very similar behaviors can be seen in both groups, and the very same fear of imperfection clouds my judgment when I use either website.

People often come away from this discussion thinking "social justice warriors" are to blame, but of course that isn’t true. Social justice is the way forward. In reality, what Tumblr and Twitter are doing isn’t social justice at all. Actual justice involves antifascism, rehabilitation, protesting, mutual aid, and going out of your way to forge safe community for marginalized populations.



Chasing my Tail

I used to constantly scan my interests for the tiniest imperfections, far beyond healthy amounts of criticism in your interests, out of fear that liking anything or anyone might make me out to be a bad person. Being a fan of anything can end horribly if it turns out the author is a bad person, or even if the Internet simply decides your interest is cringy enough to make fun of without good reason. If an author says vaguely homophobic things, can you still enjoy his work? Can you always separate the art from the artist? I don’t always think so, and I don’t even think that belief is a result of my OCD; artwork inherently carries the mindset of the person who created it within it. Peer through the cracks, and you will see what’s inside.

Can you engage with an actively bigoted homophobic author’s work? Can you engage with the vaguely homophobic author’s work? Can you engage with work by a gay author who believes internalized homophobic things? Can you engage with work by an author who becomes homophobic years after the publishing date? Can you engage with work by an author who was a homophobic bigot but eventually changed their mind and is now aggressively supportive of gay people? Can you engage with any of these authors, as long as you do so with their bigotry in mind? Are there certain ones that you feel you can’t engage with at all, but others you can? Where is the line drawn? Is there a certain mindset you must have in order to avoid being tainted by art that was made by a bad person, or should we just avoid art by bad people altogether? Is there even such a thing as a truly good person? Don’t we all have internal biases that even the best of us are actively working to unlearn? These questions can spark great philosophical discussion among friends, but also great anxiety if you're someone with such deep fears about moral ambiguity.

Is there a measurable difference between people who cause harm by accident, versus people who cause harm intentionally and maliciously? I’ve met many people whose answer to this question is a hard “no”. It doesn’t matter whether you cause harm accidentally or purposefully, because you’ve caused the same harm either way. This is the perfect trigger for my OCD to latch onto for hours, days, weeks, months, years of internal torment. If an accidental mistake is just as severe as an intentional one, then that makes you equally the antagonist in either scenario. Accidents can cause just as much pain as intentional mistakes, and you’re under no obligation to educate or forgive the other person, but I personally believe that an accident is still an accident. I myself have been the butt of many accidentally offensive comments and microaggressions. In these situations, the aggressed person has every right to their anger, their discomfort, their pain. *I* have every right to my anger. I’ve snapped at people for their vaguely bigoted comments many times, and I don’t regret it.. At the same time, hypervigilance about accidental slip-ups is neither helpful nor useful to actually becoming a better human being. You’re not a bad person because you don’t know everything. So I try to be patient with people who have maybe never met a trans person before and aren't sure what language to use. It's a difficult balance.

I finally accepted a few years ago that intrusive thoughts don’t define who a person is. If someone experiences intrusive thoughts about self-harm, harming others, or other violent abusive acts, these are not subconscious desires. It wouldn’t distress and disgust us so much if we enjoyed thinking about it. A lot of people with OCD get stuck on this part, and there’s no shame in that. They believe very deeply that they must be bad people because of their intrusive thoughts. In fact, research shows that almost everyone experiences intrusive thoughts. The only difference between people with and without OCD is that people with OCD are unable to let go of their intrusive thoughts.



Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

The problem is, talking about a fear of being seen as a bad person inevitably attracts people who believe: if you’re so worried about being bad, then you must have something to hide. You must actually be a bad person, or else you wouldn’t think about it so much.
Here’s an example for all the cis allies out there: if you are terrified of being transphobic and constantly replay conversations in your mind to figure out if you said something transphobic, then you must be transphobic. “You’re way too obsessed with trans people, just be normal about trans people!” They make your obsession a reality by accusing you of the exact thing you fear most. Why else would you worry about it so much? If you do accidentally say something transphobic (which you might do, as we live in a transphobic society), then suddenly your intrusive thoughts have become real, and that’s proof that you really are a bad person. They’re no longer an irrational fear inside your head. You are faced with the reality that you live in a transphobic world that has influenced your mindset, causing you to believe something transphobic. Especially when you are a marginalized person or if you have social trauma, this is a terrifying reality to live in. This hits the hardest for trans women and non-white people online, who are often the target of the most horrific and baseless accusations.



Good Faith

A lot of people in online social circles expect an apology to be more like groveling. If you make a mistake, you aren’t allowed to say why you did it, or else you’re “making excuses.” You’re not allowed to mention your mental health at all during an apology either. If you do, you’re making excuses and deflecting. You’re also not allowed to say that your slip-up was an accident, because as I said before, it doesn’t matter whether it was an accident or not. Either way, you caused the very same harm. In the end, these are people who don’t want to understand the circumstances of your life that led up to you making a mistake, they just want you to grovel and beg for forgiveness.

There’s a huge piece missing in this mindset: good faith. I actually find it incredibly helpful if I tell my friend they’re being mean, and they tell me they were just having a panic attack and snapped because of it. Maybe they were just overwhelmed. Maybe they're going through a lot of stress at work. It actually *does* make the behavior more excusable to me, because now I know they aren’t mad at me, they were just having a bad day. Sometimes I snap at people because of sensory overload- it happens. I’d rather know that there was a believable reason for someone’s mistake than continue to have no idea why it happened. Plus, it can help us decide how to move forward; if you know you tend to become emotionally volatile during a certain mental state, we can make arrangements to accommodate that. You can distance yourself from me when you know it might happen, and I will be more forgiving if it happens again, because I understand that there’s a valid reason for it. At the same time, if it keeps happening again and again and again, I will put my foot down at a certain point and set stricter boundaries. At a certain point, you do have to work on bettering yourself. I believe in rehabilitative justice, and that means you have to handle uncomfortable conflicts with direct communication and boundary setting. It does not mean you should tolerate abuse.

If I hurt someone by being too blunt, if I use outdated terminology, or if I say something with negative implications I hadn’t considered, I stay level-headed, apologize, acknowledge what I did wrong, and change my behavior. At least, I do my very best to follow these steps and be an altruistic human being whenever I can. But there is a large part of me that does not want to heal from my OCD, because I believe constant self-monitoring and self-critique is the only thing preventing me from becoming a horrible person, and this is a mindset that many online spaces actively encourage. Christians who teach people to repent and be free from sin or else be punished come to mind. I’m certain that this is where my OCD originated in childhood, as my very first obsessions and compulsions were religious in nature.



Recovery is a Risk

Anti-recovery culture is another huge part of this. It’s a little easier to talk about anti-recovery culture online when it comes to depression, personality disorders, eating disorders, and self-harm. Go on Tumblr, and you will find hundreds of blogs where people list goal weights of under 100lbs, post graphic images of their self-harm injuries, encourage co-dependence and toxic relationships as an aesthetic, and spread nihilistic beliefs. They discourage other people from getting better, lest they lose the comfort of their pain. It’s easy to stay at rock bottom when you’re used to being there. Recovery is change, and change is fucking terrifying.

But for moral scrupulosity OCD, anti-recovery culture can look more like, “If you don’t reshare this post, you’re a bad person.” Please stop making vague posts about groups of “freaks and weirdos”. Are you a freak or a weirdo? What is the poster’s definition of a freak or a weirdo? Some people in online blogging communities use the term “freak” to refer to dangerous predators. Others use it to refer to people who watch a badly written TV show. The fear here is that ambiguity- if you use the same terminology to refer to really small and really massive offenses, then anyone has the potential of being lumped in with something absolutely awful.

I would love to touch grass more. I wish I had always touched grass so that I never would have learned about any of this online bullshit. Still, there are a lot of positives here. I learned a lot about how people behave online, and I’ve also learned a lot about the specific neuroses that arise when somebody spends too much time on Twitter.



At Least we Care, I Guess

Leftists fight so much because your average leftist actually cares about making the world a better place, unlike your average conservative. Conflict is a part of every community, and naturally, more conflict is going to arise among people with strong senses of justice.

The LGBTQ community online is chock full of people with extremely strong opinions on how the community should function. People still argue about whether kink and sexuality should be allowed at pride parades and furry conventions, and a lot of people take extremely Republican homophobic stances against any display of gay sexuality, via “think of the children” messaging. This scares me a lot as a kinky gay trans furry artist. People also argue about xenogenders, neopronouns, and microlabels to hell and back. People argue over whether you’re “allowed” to be both bisexual and strictly gay (something that I am, because I am both genders and also bisexual, so it is gay no matter who I am attracted to. I don’t need your permission to be this way, I just am! IDGAF what you think about it!). People argue over whether certain genders and sexualities can reclaim certain LGBT slurs. People argue over who is “allowed” to identify as butch or femme. Some of my friends were the ones involved in these arguments, arguing against *my* existence. As a neopronoun-using bi-gay butch, I often felt as though I was next in line for firing. When I came out as those identities, I had friends borderline arguing with me, and sharing posts about how I can’t be that way. I feel like that schism is still present sometimes. People started treating me different, like i was kicked out of an exclusive club that I didnt know existed.

Most of the discourse around these subjects happens because there is very little general education on queer history taught in schools, and the people involved feel the need to vent their frustrations through arguments with strangers on the internet. They aren’t actually interested in having a nuanced discussion on gender and sexuality. It’s only natural for marginalized people to want to take some of the power back in any way they feel it’s possible, and getting mad at other queer people online is… certainly one of the worst ways to do that, I guess? My takeaway from this era of Tumblr is a resounding, “Wow, that sucked,” and also, “Someone else’s sexual identity is none of your fucking business.” At least I came away from all this knowing what types of online communities to avoid, but I still I didn't know about any of this. Sometimes I'll pass by some very average person on the street and think to myself, "I bet that person doesn't know about niche online community infighting, and they're probably happier than me because of it."

Ultimately, niche online LGBTQ discourse feeds into a particular mindset that people with moral scrupulosity OCD are especially vulnerable to. There is an absolutely massive moral incentive to get involved with niche issues and arguments online, because being uninvolved is viewed as the same as being neutral or uncaring.



You Sure Do Talk a Lot About Yourself!

People love to claim that moral scrupulosity OCD is inherently selfish. Why am I so worried about being good? Why do I care what other people think of me? Why don’t I actually just go out and do good for other people? Can’t I just cure myself by checking in on other people to make sure they’re okay? Am I actually worried about being good, or am I just worried about being seen as good? Is there a difference at all? I check and check and re-check my sent emails to make sure I didn’t somehow accidentally attach pornography or 76 different slurs. I can't figure out how to heal.

This was a final, desperate attempt at writing down my own thought cycles, in hopes that putting them out into the world might help them subside, if only a little bit. Was there a point to writing any of this down when I could’ve spent the time doing something kind for another person? How much of our time do we owe to others, and how much to ourselves? I would like to think we all owe our time and our kindness to other people, but there’s no way to do that when you’re too caught up in your own head trying to avoid making mistakes in the first place.

Because here’s the kicker: it’s going to happen. You’re going to cry yourself to sleep with embarrassment someday, because you accidentally said something so ungodly stupid and hurtful that you’re left flushing with embarrassment over it for weeks on end. It’s probably already happened to you, but it will happen again, and probably again after that. You will mess up until the day you die. Someone you hurt will think you’re a bad person and never talk to you again, no matter how many times you attempt an apology. It’s okay. It happens. Wanting to be good is human, regardless of why you want to be good. You will find people who will love you so much that you don’t feel like you need to walk on eggshells. You will find people who have bigger problems than what’s going on online. You will find people involved in activism and mutual aid, and hopefully they’ll invite you to join them. If you can find any way, even the tiniest way, to channel your anxiety into something constructive, do it. It’s worthwhile.

And yeah, as it turns out, going out and doing something tangibly good does actually help with this feeling a lot. So if you can do it, go do it.