How I argue with myself

My OCD lives in my thoughts.

This is both the problem and, inconveniently, the reason I’m good at many things.

My mind fixates. It locks on. It stays. When I am working on something, my attention feels almost devotional. I follow tasks through. I notice loose threads. I return to unfinished things until they are finished properly. People call this discipline. They call it focus. They praise it as though it were a choice.

What they don’t see is how easily the fixation turns inward.

OCD takes my insecurities and repeats them until they sound like conclusions. You haven’t done enough. You’ll never be rich. You’ll never amount to much. It doesn’t shout these things. It delivers them calmly, with the confidence of a voice that believes it is simply being honest.

There is something uniquely terrifying and destabilizing about a mind that uses your own voice against you.

The thoughts arrive without fanfare. Fully formed. Uninvited. They don’t feel like anxieties. They feel like facts that have somehow been overlooked. And because my brain is very good at staying with an idea, the thought doesn’t pass. It circles. It revisits. It asks me, patiently, to account for myself.

Some mornings, this happens before I’ve even left my bed.

I lie there staring at the ceiling, already assembling a case against my own life. The argument is familiar. It cites time. It cites age. It cites imagined versions of who I should have been by now. By the time I get up, I’m already behind, already defending myself against a verdict that hasn’t been formally delivered.

There have been stretches, months at a time, that haven’t been good.

I keep going anyway. I push a little further. I try very hard to remain clear, to stay articulate about what I’m experiencing, as though naming it precisely might keep it from overtaking me. Some days it works. Other days, it doesn’t.

There are days I lose.

On the worst days, a quieter fear follows. Maybe this is what losing looks like. Maybe this is what people mean when they talk about losing their minds. The thought feels dangerous because it almost sounds reasonable.

But confusion isn’t insanity. Exhaustion isn’t collapse. A mind under pressure will say many things that aren’t true. It will narrate difficulty as failure. It will narrate struggle as identity.

So I respond.

Sometimes, I respond out loud.

When a thought crosses the line from doubt into accusation, I answer it. When my mind says, your partner is going to leave you, I say, softly but firmly, he loves me. He isn’t leaving. When it says, your best friend doesn’t love you the way you think, I repeat myself. I say it again. I say it until the sentence steadies.

People close to me hear this. They hear me talking back to myself, correcting the record. It can be funny, if you don’t know what’s happening. A person alone in a room, rehearsing reassurance like a fact that must be protected.

But this isn’t confusion. Maybe it’s resistance.

OCD isn’t interested in being soothed. It wants engagement. It wants response. And if it insists on conversation, then I’ll speak back.

I also keep notes.

This isn’t metaphorical. I write things down. Completed work. Risks taken. Small, undeniable progress. When my brain insists that I’ve done nothing useful with my life, I open the record. I read it like evidence.

This is how I argue with myself.

There’s a weird irony in needing documentation and dialogue to believe your own worth. But OCD isn’t interested in reassurance. It wants certainty. It wants proof. It wants repetition.

And so I meet it where it is.

This isn’t resilience in the inspirational sense. There’s no triumph here. It’s closer to negotiation. Adaptation. Learning the rules of a mind that doesn’t trust praise, memory, or instinct, but will pause, briefly, when confronted with facts and answered directly.

Living this way teaches you strange distinctions. You learn that productivity and value aren’t the same thing, even when your brain insists they are inseparable. You learn that being competent doesn’t protect you from believing you’re failing at being a person. You learn that a thought can feel intimate, urgent, and persuasive without being true.

I don’t write this to present OCD as a hidden advantage. I don’t believe in turning disorder into metaphorical grit. My fixation isn’t a gift. It’s simply how my mind moves through the world, sometimes efficiently, sometimes excruciatingly painfully, often both at once.

OCD isn’t who I am. But it is something I live inside. It shapes the weather of my days. It affects how hard I have to work to remain steady. It doesn’t erase my values, my agency, or my ability to name what is happening to me.

What I’ve stopped doing is treating every thought as an authority. I’ve stopped assuming that repetition is the same thing as truth. I’ve stopped asking my mind to be kind, because kindness has never been its strength.

Instead, I speak to it plainly.

Instead, I ask it to be accurate.

Some days, that is enough.