7/27/2026
- My memory and reality may be replaced or changed entirely every second, so I do not own any form of continuous experience.
- Continuity is an illusion. My life may be stacked with completely unrelated fragments with no continuity in between.
8/5/2026, exposure writing from a therapy session
- My mom, my dad, my brother, my grandparents that I love so much, may or may not disappear next second and be gone from my memory.
- (Compulsion) I check my memory and familiarity so I may live in a continuous world. I check for the continuity of the things I am doing.
My episode of existential OCD is: being trapped in a dreadful yet agnostic possibility of my existence & surroundings that can never be tested or falsified.
My history with OCD goes back a long way, including mysophobia and a series of others that are too detailed to mention. Even if mysophobia gradually lost its dominance on me after my move to college, this framework of OCD always lays within me and gives me anxiety and unease now and then both mentally and physically. Around May 10th this year, after finishing my final exam, I recalled a short story I read six years ago. It may be The Egg by Andy Weir or a similar story, and it brought back a thought from my (or maybe everyone’s) childhood: what if I am the only conscious being in the entire universe? A few days later, I discovered that my worry has been discussed by philosophers for centuries under the title of solipsism, or more specifically, the problem of other minds. In other words, I did not mind living in a simulated world at all as long as other people had subjective experience as I did. Hereafter, my OCD misled me into pursuing certainty and trying to disprove the doubt on others’ minds completely, where I turned to philosophy in search for a cure. Consequently, I fell into cycles of anxiety, loneliness and depression for realizing the impossibility of excluding such possibility. Thought experiments such as the Boltzmann brain or philosophical zombies frightened me as well. Such paranoid stance of skepticism also led me to other worries, such as, what if different people have completely different sensual experience but in a perfect alignment? These thoughts, however, were far less intimidating than the doubt on others’ minds for me.
After staying with these thoughts for over two months without significant improvement, a much worse doubt struck me on July 22th, the one mentioned in the beginning of this writing. It has dominated me ever since and completely overshadowed my worries for others’ minds. In the first week of living with this doubt, the amount of anxiety and despair completely overwhelmed me. I felt like losing my anchor to reality and never being able to find a sense of peace, security or something to cling on. I lost my motivation for almost everything, since every action of mine seemed to battle with this doubt fiercely. Due to my lack of experience in dealing with anxiety, I slept during the day as a runaway for a long time, partially due to my lack of discipline. I was clear that sleeping is one of the worst strategies ever, for it temporarily took away my consciousness but completely exposed and trapped me in the ruminations of my own thoughts with nothing else to shift my attention away by the time I woke up. Naturally, waking up from a daytime sleep became my worst moment of the day. I even lost the comfort from fantasizing suicide, since it was not even a choice aligning with my doubt.
In the morning of July 29th, after the email from a therapist at UIUC counseling center saying that she can’t offer remote treatments for out-of-state students, the amount of anxiety in me is so unbearable that I never felt so desired to call 911 and ship my body to a psych ward. I made some calls to therapists / institutions, all of which ended in voicemails. Hence, I went to an urgent care hoping for immediate treatment. In the end, I registered for a next day’s therapy session. After two weekly sessions, I determined that I could no longer get any useful guidance from this therapist, who simply guided me through the ERP template without digging into or even acknowledging my cognitive pain, and even implied I would be alright and no longer required therapy. Luckily, I found another advisor who helped me with my cognitive confusion and brought me some comfort, and I decided to continue my weekly treatment with him. Still, I decided to look for professional therapy sessions after returning to college.
As days passed by, the anxiety inside me began to fade, but such intrusive thought remains deeply connected with my everyday experience, taking away my senses of stability, security, and accomplishment. I feels like the best strategy I have to live with is to stay occupied, shifting my attention to anything possible and freeing myself from my mind with actions. Among all activities I do, socializing seems to bring me most comfort.
Still there is one thing I am certain of, which is the same as treatment for solipsism: the cure is not convincing myself to reject this doubt but radical acceptance. Even if my doubt is the truth, I choose not to care, and continue what I am working on at the moment and receive joy from it, which is like telling it: “I can still pursue happiness even with your existence.” And more importantly, I hope to convince myself that all these sufferings are merely temporary and shall not last forever, even though it looks like it would be at this current moment. And maybe this quote from mathematician Hong Wang can be my guidance as well: “go for it and don’t think too much.”