Living in Two Worlds

For my type of OCD, there are two worlds: one contaminated world and one clean world. My clean world is my bedroom, it is the only place in the whole world that I consider clean. Nobody steps inside it, nothing from the outside comes inside without being decontaminated, and I will not reenter the room once I have left it without taking a shower. If I leave the clean world, I have entered the contaminated one. This means I can do whatever I desire in the contaminated world with minimal anxiety because I know I’m showering before entering the clean one. These worlds exist side by side but must never touch. To avoid the hassle it is to decontaminate myself, I just choose to never leave my room unless I am leaving the house. I do this so I time when I eat to right when I return home so I have enough food in me to get me till Dylan gets home from work around 10pm. When I have just come home, I can do pretty much anything without having to clean myself but this is because I had turned everything contaminated. When I was able to feed myself two years ago, the worlds were mixed. My house and my car were “clean” with exceptions, I still had to complete rituals when entering and leaving to feel okay but it was much more mundane. Now that I’ve deemed every room in my house as dirty besides my room, I can’t find it in myself to merge them again. It’s too dirty and can’t be decontaminated in my mind. Through therapy, she’s trying to slowly bring contamination into my clean space to hopefully eliminate that barrier. Because I’ve spent so long with this as my safe, clean space, it’s been nearly impossible to do so. The few times I have brought something in here, I end up throwing it out and re deep cleaning the whole room. This usually involves Dylan doing the work while I close my eyes and ears because if I watch him do it, I’ll think he is doing it wrong and re contaminating things. What I don’t see or hear can’t hurt me. That phrase has turned my OCD from going alright to completely debilitating me. After two years of slowly pushing more and more compulsions onto Dylan, I have eliminated my need to complete them which gives me less exposure leading to in the long run, 100000% more anxiety and stress. One way to eliminate the two worlds is to completely contaminate the clean one, but this would probably cause me so much anxiety I would kill myself because everything I had done to keep myself safe was useless and I could never get it back. Hopefully one day, the worlds can remerge and I can take back some control over my life. Everything is so strategic and I usually end up starving a majority of the day because I would rather die than leave the clean world.