there's a saying floating around that gets invoked a lot nowadays in online circles, especially kink positive ones; "kill the cop in your head". it's kind of ridiculous and a little dramatic, invoking feelings of oppressvie authority and criminalizing thought... but there's a lot of truth to it. i had a cop in my head for years. learning to excise that judgemental self from my psyche was probably the best thing i could've done for myself at a time when my self-hate was at an all time high, but it took a long time for me to sit down and interrogate what exactly i was worried about.

without going into too much detail, i learned a while ago i have ocd. not the stereotypical germophobe or perfectionist ocd, but the kind that makes me worry endlessly about the moral consequences of almost everything i do. i have this under control now for the most part but go back as recently as 2022 and i was a neurotic mess. i was constantly stressing about people online taking issue with how i present myself, how i lived my life, how i behaved in the past, etc.

to illustrate what this is like...

one day i got in a near miss in my car, the kind that was mostly my fault but something that fortunately everyone was able to walk away from. someone was pretty rightfully pissed off at me and i felt like an idiot. importantly, nobody got hit. for the remainder of the day and following day, i felt like i was being tortured. i combed over my memories repeatedly to make absolutely sure everything was ok and when those memories eventually began tarnishing from being recalled so much, i became very slightly convinced that maybe i did hit someone, misremembered, and drove off in a hit and run that would carry criminal charges and i'd be taken to prison. every knock on the door became a moment of panic as i waited to hear an officer's voice through the wall asking if i was home.

obviously this is an insane overreaction. you don't hit something with your car then cluelessly drive off, especially when you drive a beat up little car like i do. hitting something is painfully obvious. i can barely hit a dip in the road and without hearing some clunk or click. you have to shut down these things early otherwise a spiral like that is likely to happen.

for various reasons, this ocd began targeting some of my coping mechanisms and the way i like to present myself. i think the reasons why should be relatively obvious, even if it's an extreme reach. i was worried of people jumping to conclusions about me, calling me problematic, calling my ideal image gross and making me a target of online harassment. i have a lot of hurt around being made a target online, having been doxxed as a teenager and cyberstalked for a long period of my life, the idea of that machine starting back up again in a far more public fashion terrifies me. so i shut myself down. i didn't let myself be me. may can't be "small", that's wrong. may can't want care and love and affection in her moments of vulnerability from someone bigger, that's problematic. these things are immutable but i wanted so desperately to get rid of them, so i pretended that i did and that nothing was wrong with doing so. obviously, repressing this huge part of my psyche was torture and absolutely not what i should have done. it's insane and illogical, but the thing with ocd is that these insane illogical thoughts become the norm.

therapy helped, but it was a slow process. my friends knew that i needed to get out of this mindset but i was hard to convince. i became a shell of my former self for years. then, a breakthrough. through total social media happenstance, i stumbled across a visual novel called coquette dragoon. anyone whose known me since i read it knows that i am insane for this vn. in the interest of not spoiling too much of it, i leave it as an exercise to the reader to go support the author and give it a read. however, i do want to share a passage here.

it's a little bit pathetic to admit but reading this made me feel understood in a way that i never really had until then. there was a surreality of reading someone else's work and feeling like it was written about me, as if it had aped thoughts straight out of my own head and presented them to me as someone else's despite no prior connection to the work. this was one of the passages that bookended the chapters that were finished up to that point and leaving off on such a powerful, compassionate piece of writing definitely made me a bit insane for the work as a whole. when i recommend visual novels to people, coquette is right at the top of the list. it's probably not for everyone but if you ever want to understand how may thinks, i'd encourage you to read it and pay close attention to xio. may is like that!

when i realized that i wasn't uniquely flawed in a way nobody else was, but was in fact a hurt person trying to be loved in a way that was comfortable to me, that's when my ocd began to crumble. immediately, everyone could tell i was happier. i lit up in a way i hadn't in years and i let myself be fussed over, cared for. may was allowed to be small and no internet weirdos could tell her not to be. over time, i've reconciled this and cranked it to 11. being loudly myself is vital to my well being now i think. i keep talking about "lowering the rent" but every time i post that, more people follow me on bsky. people adore may for being relentlessly herself.

i don't really have a good conclusion here other than if any of this resonates, try to remember you are never alone in your struggles. you're allowed to be yourself. it is imperative to be yourself. don't let anyone take that away, especially not the cop in your head...