Progress update — engaged, a puppy, and all the fear that comes with it
Hey everyone. I don’t post often, but when I do it’s because I feel like I owe it to this community. You were here during my worst stretch — early 2024 — and I want to keep showing up with the honest version of how things are going, not just the highlight reel. This may be a bit more negative than my previous posts, but I just want to document that healing is not linear. And I’m still happy.
So here’s where I’m at: I’m engaged (mentioned in my last post). We’re living together. We just got a puppy.
From the outside, that probably looks like a life going beautifully. And in many ways it is. But ROCD doesn’t really care about that. If anything, it sees all those things and goes oh good, more material.
The puppy has been a surprise trigger in ways I didn’t fully anticipate. We were genuinely excited — still are — but extra responsibility creates real strain sometimes. And my brain has latched onto that strain and done what it does. Is this right? What if this doesn’t work out? What if I’m making a mistake I can’t undo? The permanency thoughts. The ones that also show up when I think about kids someday, about building a life with someone, about any decision that feels like it closes other doors.
That’s the theme for me right now: permanency. And learning to sit with it instead of solve it.
Therapy is still going, still necessary. Having someone who understands OCD and can call out my compulsions — including the subtle mental ones — has been irreplaceable. ERP is still hard every single time and does not get comfortable, but I’ve gotten better at trusting that I can tolerate it. Letting the scary thoughts be there without neutralizing them, without reassurance-seeking, without replaying conversations looking for proof. Just letting the discomfort exist and doing life anyway.
ACT has helped too — defusion especially. Learning to see a thought as just a thought. Not a verdict. Not a signal I need to act on. My brain is telling me I might be making a mistake. Okay. Noted. Moving on.
And then there’s sitting with uncertainty, which is the hardest to explain but the most important. It means genuinely accepting — not as a mantra but as a real practice — that it might not work out. That I cannot know. That no amount of mental checking will produce certainty. And slowly, slowly, learning to be okay with that. To love someone and choose them anyway, without a guarantee. Mindfulness pulls me back to right now when the spiral starts — not the hypothetical future where everything goes wrong, but right now, where there is a puppy doing something ridiculous and a person I love next to me.
I’m not “better” in the way I used to hope I’d be — like ROCD just disappears and you feel normal. It’s more that I’m different. I understand what’s happening when it hits. I don’t believe it as automatically. I have tools. I have a therapist. I have a partner who doesn’t know every detail of this war in my head but who is here.
Early 2024 me would not believe this is my life now.
If you’re in the thick of it right now — the worst of it — I just want you to know that things can change. Not perfectly. Not permanently. But they can genuinely change.
Hang in there.❤️