The more notes I took, the more anxious I got. The more my thoughts raced, the more I took notes. The more notes I had, the more anxiety I had, knowing that the important stuff was buried in there, just waiting to be forgotten.

Everything I learned in school suggested to me that I was setup for a successful adulthood and life. What it didn’t prepare me for was existential uncertainty that comes when you leave the scripted years where you’re spoon fed education in a systematic way to mold you into a contributing member of society.

I was accumulating more and more notes and spending more and more time working through them. I was spending less and less time on things I valued and facing more and more anxiety.

Today I don’t have to do much to actively manage residual OCD… but I still have moments of backslide.

After years of progressively worsening OCD manifesting in a deluge of interfering thoughts the storm has slowed to a drizzle. Today I manage the OCD in the background almost like a normal person, aware of my thought meta, but not consistently absorbed by it.

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Everything in life is subject to probability. Recognizing this should not be a source of fear, but a source of possibility.