This was the hardest stage of my life. I still don’t know if it came from overthinking, from feelings I couldn’t shut down, from heredity, or from both. At 10 years old, my mind turned into a battlefield. I tried to obey it, sometimes I tried to resist, but either way I lost ground. My father first noticed it after a rock-throwing accident.
I went from being top of my class to hating school. Fear and disgust took over. I wanted to quit, but my family, especially my father, didn’t let me. That kept me going, even when I didn’t want to. This carried on until I turned 18.
During those years I thought about giving up more times than I can count. It didn’t matter if I was happy, sad, or under stress. Every day was filled with pain, strange ideas, and an imaginary world that swallowed my time. I couldn’t enjoy anything. My studies became the only thing that tied me to life.
The name for what I had was Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. Like a virus corrupts a system, it corrupted me. It tore through my mind and those years of my life. It also pushed me into introversion. I closed myself off from people, avoided social life, and lived inside my thoughts more than in reality. That isolation became part of me, shaping how I moved through the world.