I think I’ve always been a paranoid person. From as far back as I can remember I’ve had a variety of fears, ranging from things like the dark to nightmares I had that scared me for days, but instead of fading with time like it typically did with other kids, I feel feel like my paranoia has gotten exponentially worse over the years.
I think it all started to go downhill back in 2015, I remember being home alone with a family friend as my parents were out at a parent teacher interview with my brother. I was watching a YouTube video ranking the worst boyfriends and girlfriends, and I remember the announcer saying “theres very few things that will get you into Hell.” I don’t know why, but for some reason, after he said that I felt the urge to look up what will get you into Hell, and I found a list on some religious website that said things like saying the lords name in vain which, as a recent teenager, I did quite a bit. Over the next few weeks I kept feeling the need to apologise to God for every little thing I did wrong, from swearing to getting angry, to the thoughts in my head, pretty soon I kept having intrusive thoughts, saying that I hated God, that I wanted family member to rot in Hell, that I wanted people and animals to die. I didn’t mean any of it, but I kept apologising in my mind because I thought that if I didn’t something bad would happen, or God would think that I really meant it.
Then, in 2016, I started worrying about conspiracy theories. At first it was creationism, and then this theory that dinosaurs never existed. This one got to me because I love dinosaurs. I could’ve just ignored it and went about my day, but I didn’t. I obsessed over everything these people would say, I found myself to listen to every single last one of their arguments, thinking I would be a closed minded idiot if I didn’t, thinking that every time they would come at me with irrefutable proof of their theories, but they never did.
But then, at the end of 2019 and well into 2020, I forced myself to get into politics. I had dabbled in things during the “SJW” era, but this time was different. Over the last five years I’ve subjected myself to some of the most horrible bullshit I’ve ever heard, first it was about women, then people of colour, then LGBT people, then liberals and conservatives in general. I think what really got to me about these debates is that they actually used scientific sources, but because I wasn’t well versed in politics or psychology, I felt like I had to believe them because I couldn’t rebut much of what they said. Even then, there were also a variety of contradictory sources, so most of the time I didn’t know what to believe.
I just don’t know what to do anymore. I can’t keep on living like this, but I force myself to. I’ve never been in a relationship, I’ve struggled through much of school, struggled through uni, struggled through finding a job, I’m not anywhere near where I wanted to be in life by now, and I think it’s at least partially due to these useless worries. I feel guilty on the occasion that I choose not to engage in politics or conspiracies after having seen a certain article or book or whatever, and part of me is telling myself that I’m a coward who doesn’t want to face the real world by coming here, but a bigger part of me is just sad, sad that I’ve wasted so much of my life, sad that I spend hours worrying about things that probably don’t matter, sad that I barely get joy out of things I used to love, sad that I hardly have the energy to do anything.
I just really want some help, some advice, anything g to stop me feeling the way that I
