I’ve been an anxious person for pretty much my whole life. From
childhood to now I’ve had a variety of bizarre, almost crippling fears
and anxieties, mainly about the end of the world, religious guilt, etc.
For the last few years, however, these anxi...
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I’ve been an anxious person for pretty much my whole life. From
childhood to now I’ve had a variety of bizarre, almost crippling fears
and anxieties, mainly about the end of the world, religious guilt, etc.
For the last few years, however, these anxieties have just gotten worse
and worse, constantly stirring around in my mind in a seemingly endless
cycle. I was originally just obsessed with stuff like creationism, I
would constantly obsess over the things creationists would say to
disprove evolution and take it upon myself to thoroughly read through it
and try to debunk everything. Pretty soon, however, that shifted over to
conspiracy theories, namely things like dinosaurs never existed of flat
earth and the like. Looking back on it now, these theories were always
completely stupid, but because I’ve always loved dinosaurs I took it
personally and tried to obsessively debunk every single conspiracy blog,
video, podcast, etc, dedicated to this conspiracy, and that was my main
obsession between 2017 and 2021. At the start of 2020, however, I also
began to delve into some unsavoury things regarding politics, generally
websites and videos that spouted off terrible, hateful things directed
towards women, people of colour, LGBT, and quite a few others. While
most people would typically just ignore this stuff and move on with
their lives, for some reason I just couldn’t do that, especially since
some of the people spouting these things tried to use science or
statistics to prove their points, so I forced myself to analyse as much
as I can no matter how much I hated every minute of it. I don’t want to
get into the “science” these people used, but it was generally highly
biased, cherry picked sources which at best didn’t fully support their
beliefs or were built on sketchy foundations and at worst didn’t make
any sense at all regardless of how much I tried to understand it. And so
much of this contradicted with other sources that I just didn’t know
what to believe at times.But I just do take this any more. I’m living in
a constant state of fear and anxiety that every single thought or
opinion I have is wrong, with this little voice in my head constantly
nagging me to look into these things or else I’m being wilfully
ignorant. And it’s not just a few times a week, it’s pretty much every
day. These thoughts just keep ruminating in my head, with a worrying
thought appearing in my mind and me trying to use my own logic and
research to combat it which just devolves into me repeating the same
things over and over in my head for what’s sometimes hours. And when one
thought eventually fades another just takes its place. Sometimes I don’t
cave into my obsessive need to research these topics, and I’m left
feeling this gnawing sense of guilt over choosing not to engage my
obsessions, but whenever I do cave I just feel so drained and tired with
this pit in my chest, like I’m forcing myself to stay awake for hours on
end. In fact, I’ve actually stayed up well into the early morning doing
this, as well as take time away from things I could be doing, like
studying or my hobbies. Sometimes my obsessions even cause me to
research the same things over and over again just in case I missed
something potentially world shattering.I just don’t know what to do
anymore. My obsessive tendencies and anxieties feel like some kind of
hideous parasite that burrowed into the bask of my skull and started
pumping chemicals into my brain to control me. Every time I promise
myself that I’m not gonna look these things up or stop obsessing
altogether, I eventually just break again and start the cycle again. I
just don’t know what to do anymore.
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