I can try helping you shape yourself, but I only have the smallest of advice.

Certain nonharmful rituals are the key to life. What's "ocd" is simply diagnosis/societal worry - unease, or disease, if you will. Without that unease it's culture and structure. To a society of hyper-empathic supra-geniuses Incan knot-counting might have seemed quaint. To the Inca it got the job done.

I'm disorganized and idiotic, but hopefully not too intensely so, because in general I can take care of the basics. Or I used to, before I came down with a case of "doesn't give a fuck/anxiety overoad". Whenever I left my apartment I'd always make sure to check my keys in my pocket, and I just touch them occasionally when out and about. Having good pockets helps - not the easiest to pick or have something fall out of. And I generally try to keep the necessities in my backpack, and my pack on me.

One great help throughout life has been 'checksums' - quick-glance-verification, little marks on things that keep the deck marked, as it were, instead of playing with blank backs. They don't always work, and when they don't I try to find new ones, but my system was never developed enough. In retrospect there were many more obvious things I could have done... well, I am not the brightest. At all. But in all honesty: I've never had a complete thought in my life. I mean, _ever_. I literally just get by on stacking checksums. This might be a sign I'm psychopathic and just pretending to be sane... or that I've just got so much anxiety and issues from relatively small abuse and relatively great neglect that I never formed a core personality, and just pick through the fragments of thoughts that sound like they place a nice tune, or appeal to whatever sense I use to navigate.

TBH your problems sound much worse than mine. But try the checksums thing, starting small. Maybe start by playing tic-tac-toe against yourself - it'd be ideal if you could consistently see the whole game map, right? But maybe you don't have to, and can just trust your subconscious to provide.

But things like, writing a list of the assignments due in pencil on your binder, and then checking them off when you put them in. Or little colorful post-it notes. Or a smartphone app, or an old PDA if you can find one on sale, all other things being equivalent. Or just get a bunch of colorful strings, and tie them (loosely!) around your fingers. (Later merge with the spirit of a radioactive God-dog and learn to manipulate the very fabric of space for your own benefit! ... if only, right?)

Or just go all-out, and get a pack of broad rainbow rubber bands and a fine-tipped black marker and a decent stick you can keep in your pocket, or a lanyard or something, and go full Inca - new task? Rubber band, appropriate text on it. Task finished? Same color, blank rubber band next to it, so you know it's ready to turn in/be checked.

Make it a totem pole of win. If anyone gives you shit, they're a shitwizard, and you're learning to manage your life, and will eventually internalize the state of this primitive daily planner. But you know what? No matter how confident you are in your hard drive's state, you back your important shit up. In multiple locations. If they make fun of you for keeping a simple organizer, ask them if they e-mail themselves important documents.

If you don't like rubber bands, pick a method that works for you. I believe in you, internet stranger!

Oh, also get a worry stone. Hold the worry stone, look at the planner. Breathe until the plan simplifies, and the checksums get easier to chain.

>>3046
Thanks for that. What if defining myself as having OCD and accepting that is what allows it to permit?



…modern man no longer communicates with the madman […] There is no common language: or rather, it no longer exists; the constitution of madness as mental illness, at the end of the eighteenth century, bears witness to a rupture in a dialogue, gives the separation as already enacted, and expels from the memory all those imperfect words, of no fixed syntax, spoken falteringly, in which the exchange between madness and reason was carried out. The language of psychiatry, which is a monologue by reason about madness, could only have come into existence in such a silence.

—Foucault, Preface to the 1961 edition[6]

>>3052

:) It sounds like you understood what I said imprecisely, and more, exactly! Thank you, friend.

A lot of people have odd stuff living in their brainparts. Very rarely does contradicting it allow them to build a proper support structure. I like to think that everyone has some strengths they can use for everyone's benefit inside of them, and some mutual language can always be found. Probably just setting myself up for life to kick me inna fork, but not trying generally also yields poor results, so.

Many mental illnesses come with upsides. Autism often leads to people having good technical skills, ADHD can be people-people or occasionally hyperfocused and hyperproductive, people with depression are detached and logical, so forth.

Using your OCD to an advantage could be a good idea. I hear people like that make for, not to be cliché but, amazing cleaners. With the right connections you could likely get into some fancy hotel and get paid a handsome sum, assuming you can handle the pressure. I don't doubt you'd do a great job.