I HAVE DECLARED WAR ON MY OWN MIND! – PART 1

DEREK’S DISCLAIMER:  I am not a medical professional, neither am I giving any medical or legal advice. If you are seeking help from a doctor or an attorney, please consult said professionals.  These are my personal thoughts and feelings on the subjects discussed, and my blog is my own personal experiences and journey with mental imbalance.  Thanking you in advance!

Hello there, all my dear friends following this blog!!

Things are going to get a bit strange. So, hang on. Today, I am declaring war on my own mind. That’s right. You read it here. It’s a showdown. Derek v. Derek’s Mind!

By now, you all know I suffer from intrusive and/or recurring thoughts. These thoughts are like a scratchy and broken record that just won’t turn off!!

And I have had enough of this shit! I realize that I have been tolerating this long enough. I have been putting up with it and suffering in silence. I have allowed my mind to just go off the rails for far too long. I have already spoken at length about my intrusive thoughts, thoughts that have plagued me for YEARS. Hell, for DECADES! Since childhood.

However, they have gotten worse. I personally believe it is because of the past four years. And we all know what happened the last four years. So, it is of no surprise that that would be such a major trigger.

I am going to take a deeper dive into these thoughts. So, here is a timeline of the horrors that have gone on in my mind. I am hoping that this will help someone else who may be suffering from this rather strange disorder.

Before we start, I revealed some of these recurring thoughts in my last post. Please see below.

Possession Obsession

Anyway, the time has come to finally once and for all stand up to this crap and face ALL my fears from the past, and now in the present. This means WAR!!!

A Dresser Drawer, Derek???

My earliest scare and subsequent thought(s) that got stuck in my mind was wayyyyyy back when I was living in Washington, D.C., as a child, and I was dreaming that the dresser drawer in the living room would come to life in my nightmares. And it would tickle my back. Strange, I know. But I lived in fear of going to sleep at night. And this was one of the things I obsessed about, referring back to some of my obsessions from last week’s post. I would even talk to this chest of drawers during the day to try and understand why it was attacking me at night. I was so frightened and talked about it so much that my mother even considered taking me to see a psychiatrist!!! Sometimes I wish she had …

Of Course I would obsess over DEATH!

My next memory of vivid intrusive thoughts was when I was living in North Carolina, and I began obsessing over death for some strange reason. I was in about the 1st grade, I think, when this started. I always thought I would not make it to the next grade, and I don’t know why. I don’t remember ever telling my family about this one. I just suffered in silence. And every movie about death and dying that I saw on TV made the thoughts worse. One such movie was Dark Victory with Elizabeth Montgomery, not the Bette Davis one. I feared that everything that happened to Elizabeth Montgomery in this movie, would happen to me. So, when Elizabeth’s character developed a brain tumor, so did I. She lost her memory and so did I. She had blurry vision and so did I. And so on, if you catch my drift. It was a nightmare. (But Elizabeth turned in a bravura performance, though – LOLOLOLOL)!

And this is where the fear of memory loss came in during this time. I remember constantly saying to myself over and over my name, my address, my birthdate, the names of my parents, grandparents and aunt to make sure. I did these little check-ins. So, in hindsight, I guess this was my compulsion, going back to the previous post from above – “Possession Obsession.”

At the Height of Things

Next up was the height thing starting in about 7th or 8th grade where I thought I would NEVER grow taller. All my other classmates suddenly were GIANTS compared to me, including the girls. But my growth spurt hadn’t happened yet. So, what did I do? I stuffed my sneakers with socks so I would appear taller. I thought I was taller because of doing it, but I probably didn’t appear that way to everyone else LOL!

And for the record, I did get over this one, because suddenly later in life I was taller than everyone else. And to me, suddenly other people were short!! LOL

WAR!!!!

Let’s skip to the 80s and high school and the Cold War between the U.S. and Russia. Oh. My. God. This was the time I thought we were all going to get nuked off the face of the map!!! Those of you alive back then know exactly what I am talking about. And everytime I would visit my parents and brother in D.C., I lived in constant fear that a nuclear war would break out, and we would all be dead. And of course, the movie The Day After didn’t help ease my fears or quell my intrusive thoughts over the matter. And there were other such movies of that theme back then, such as Threads and Testament, but The Day After was the WORST!! It was so graphic!!

Around this time, Culture Club released one of my absolute favorite songs by them, with one of THE BEST videos EVER! (Sorry Michael Jackson’s Thriller). I think the song and video depict this horrible topic quite well. Check it out.

Losing my RELIGION!!

Ugh! This storyline picks up when I started college.

Quick backstory: When I entered UNC-Chapel Hill’s hallowed halls back in August of ’85, my grandmother was immediately on my back to go to church. After all, I had been forced – yeah. I said it. – FORCED to go to church every Sunday from the time I started living there in 1972 to go to school. And my grandmother wanted to make sure that I continued to do so. So, I ended up going with my then friend whom I referred to as “Big Daddy.” His sister, who was a year ahead of us, was attending this church known as United Christian Fellowship. So, I went with them. Oh my God that turned out to be a HUGE mistake. Let’s just say it turned out to be a cult. True, we could come and go anytime we wanted, but the rules were so strict. We couldn’t have anything to do with the “world” at all. No secular music or TV programs, which meant no more Culture Club or Hall & Oates, et al or soap operas!!!! I was in pure HELL – so to speak.

So, it didn’t take long for my mind to begin to spiral out of control. And at the very center of this was actually another Culture Club song entitled Dangerous Man. There is a line in there that goes – “Martin had the Devil just like any man can,” and I began to suspect that I had blasphemed the Holy Ghost. I just knew that by singing that particular line in that song that I was going to burn in hell for eternity, because according to the Bible, that is the one sin you can never be forgiven for.

So, I went to the pastor of the church at the time and told him my fears. He actually convinced me that I was not going to burn in hell because of that. But I needed that validation. Eventually (and thankfully), I left that church! And later, organized religion all together!

Hey, but the song that started this is HOT! Needless to say, I am well past that nonsense, and I have continued to enjoy this song and sing that lyric ever since. LOLOL Check it out!

Insanity and Sexuality

Skipping ahead to 1999 when on a road trip with some friends back to North Carolina, I saw an astrologer whom I had seen previously before I moved to Atlanta. Well, I decided it would be fun to see him again. Big. Mistake. To cut to the chase, he told me two things that frightened the hell out of me: That Atlanta and several other American cities, especially New York, would be destroyed in a nuclear war. Yeah, so THAT old fear came flooding back. But actually the most troubling one was when he told me that I was bisexual. BISEXUAL??? WTH???

Needless to say my mind went into yet another tailspin. I hadn’t declared myself as bisexual since I was 13, and even then I felt more homosexual. I guess I just wasn’t ready to acknowledge my true homosexuality at that age. But by 1999, I was 32 years old and VERY homosexual!!! I had had several lovers and many, many, MANY tricks and same-sex encounters. And I never once had been with a woman nor had I desire to be with one. I never even masturbated thinking of a woman. It had ALWAYS been men.

But then after the session with my astrologer, I began questioning myself. What if I really was? And that is when the intrusive thoughts began. Every time I would see women from that point on, it would pop into my head something sexual about her. It got to a point where I didn’t even want to be around women for a period of time. Fortunately, that first bout didn’t last very long, and I was able to move forward and continue to have sex with men and not even think about any women. I was also able to maintain my friendships with women with no problem of the thoughts.

However, many years later it crept up again. And it was worse than the first time. Just awful things that would pop into my head about women. I couldn’t even watch TV shows or movies when women would appear in a scene, because my mind raged out of control. What if I want to kiss her or have sex with her?? And on and on and on. It got to the point that I sought psychiatric help, not because I doubted my sexuality, but because I was actually annoyed over the thoughts. At this point, I had been doing research – yes online – about recurring and intrusive thoughts, and I knew that I was not alone.

And to be honest, over the past year and a half of isolation, the problem came back again! Thankfully, I am at a point where I am like NO! We are not doing this again.

I can’t see. I can’t see! I CAN’T SEE!!! I’ve Got My Eyes Closed! (old Three Stooges joke)

Then there are the fear of blindness thoughts. Years ago, again, stupid me had to conduct research online about my eye floaters, a common occurrence of people who are near-sighted, which I am one. But what I read on the subject caused me to go into yet another of my mental tailspins: If the eye floaters worsen or there are suddenly a lot of floaters in your eyes, it could mean retinal detachment and eventual blindness. And ever since then every now and then, I will think I am going to go blind. And awful thoughts will pop in my mind saying that I even WANT to experience blindness, which is not true! And these are the recurring thoughts that dominate my mind at this very moment of me writing this!! It is pure torture. And I am considering seeking professional help again.

What’s more in my study of manifesting the kind of life I want, I’ve read that if you focus on something a lot, it expands. So, these intrusive thoughts of blindness don’t help with that.

I know I am not going blind and that I have nothing to fear, but my mind tells me otherwise.

So, my friends, I have said all of the above to say again, I am officially at war with my own mind. I absolutely REFUSE to continue this way.

Please allow me to stop there, as this will need to be continued in a Part 2 next Friday.

In the meantime, remember you’ve got this journey, and stay and be mentally well always!!

And especially to my intrusive thought sufferers, hang in there. You are NOT your thoughts!!!