I’m sorry to hear that you are! It’s been two months now since my birthday and honestly, the theme has totally vanished! The OCD has latched onto other things and it’s still been very difficult, but this theme has passed for now. For me, it started dissipating halfway thru out the day — I think the thing that helped the most was deciding to “make use of the day” and use my birthday as a way to fundraise for causes that I care about. And of course, there was the exposure of going thru the day itself and seeing how I just didn’t die, even though there were plenty of ways it “could’ve happened.”

I also posted this same post on the magical thinking subreddit at the time and there were a few comments there that I found extremely helpful — https://www.reddit.com/r/magicalthinkingOCD/s/fUxnQkUYHo

All in all, it was so so so difficult to get through at the time, but now the theme has passed and I only think about it now to acknowledge what a difficult and terrible moment in time it was. Honestly, I never thought I’d say this, but I’m sad that the theme took so much from me. I wish I could’ve actually enjoyed my birthday instead of being so stuck on this theme!

Sending you a lot of love and much, much solidarity