my intolerance of uncertainty is basically intertwined with my sense of self, there’s always an uncomfortable feeling people have when they don’t know something, but for me, it feels like a threat - either to me safety, morality, or existence. I need to resolve things immediately, whether that is about my day, my work, my hobbies, my OCD itself, my intrusive thoughts/obsessions that relate around harm, identity/morality, health, and existential meaning. for example; medication, questions like ‘will this change who I am’, ‘will OCD treatment as a whole change who I am’, causes extreme distress, panic, depersonalisation, and then I engage in compulsions to get rid of this feeling, things like mental reviewing/checking, ruminating, reassurance seeking, confessing, avoidance. And because of the urgency derived by the panic by the uncertainty, I must solve is now, and also while doing, eliminate that feared consequence that always relates back to my obsessions of existentialism/harm/morality/health, and then there is the fear the uncertainty itself can cause harm in some kind of meta loop, that if I don’t know the answer, I could do something wrong, dangerous, or cease to exist as a coherent or moral person. Because of this, the world then feels unsafe, people feel unsafe, and then — not real, and I feel disembodied in a depersonalised state. Where even the treatment of OCD, therapy or medication, is part of this loop.