Living With OCD and Agoraphobia: What a Normal Day Actually Looks Like

I think one of the hardest things about explaining OCD is that so much of it is invisible.

From the outside, my day probably looks fairly ordinary.

I get up.

I work from home.

I sort eBay stock.

I make food.

I answer emails.

I spend time with my mum and my dog.

I work on blogs and digital products.

Maybe I go out for half an hour.

But underneath all of that, there is another layer running constantly.

Did you check that?

Are you sure?

What if something goes wrong?

What if somebody gets hurt?

What if it’s your fault?

That’s the part people don’t really see.

I live with fairly severe OCD and agoraphobia, and they affect almost every part of how I organise my life.

Not in the funny:

“Oh, I’m so OCD because I like my cushions straight.”

way.

I mean what I eat.

How I leave the house.

How I work.

Whether I trust an electrical appliance to be switched off.

How I send an email.

How I pack an eBay order.

Sometimes even whether I trust my own memory of something I looked at thirty seconds ago.

So I wanted to write about what an ordinary day actually looks like for me.

Not a textbook definition.

Just my version.

My work has had to fit around my agoraphobia

At the moment, I’m trying to build several income streams from home.

I sell digital products and have a community around that.

My mum works remotely too.

We’re building blogs that we hope will eventually become another meaningful income stream.

And most recently, I’ve started building an eBay reselling business.

Which I genuinely love.

But I don’t run it the way a lot of resellers do.

I live in a tiny rural Scottish village with a population of around 400 people.

There isn’t exactly a charity shop on every corner.

We have a little local one that I can get to every couple of weeks, but most of my sourcing has to happen online.

I use wholesale clothing boxes.

Accessory bundles.

Vinted.

Anything that means the stock can come to me.

And honestly, that’s one of the biggest things I’m trying to learn now:

I don’t have to wait until my life looks completely different before I’m allowed to build something.

I can work with the life I’ve got.

Shopping day is not just shopping day

Food is one of the areas where my OCD is most noticeable.

The main forms that affect me are contamination OCD, responsibility OCD and harm OCD, although there are other bits woven through as well.

Contamination OCD is probably the easiest one to explain.

For me it can involve food, drinks, surfaces, laundry, sweat and anything my brain decides might somehow be contaminated.

A few months ago I saw a couple of tiny bugs on our table.

That was enough.

One small thing happened once and OCD basically went:

Excellent. I’ll be adding that to the rulebook.

Now I don’t like my things being put directly on that table.

My clean laundry has to go into a zipped bag after it’s washed.

Food and drinks need to be covered.

Even my foil is covered in foil.

My mum says it looks like the aliens have landed.

She’s not entirely wrong.

And if I sweat even a small amount, I often feel like I need to shower.

That’s what OCD can do.

Something happens once and your brain stores it as though it has discovered an important new threat.

Responsibility OCD is the constant “what if?”

Responsibility OCD is a massive part of mine.

Anything that could possibly involve me being responsible for something bad happening can become a problem.

Cookers.

Straighteners.

Curlers.

Electrical appliances.

Doors.

Windows.

The alarm.

Fire.

Security.

The difficult part is that knowing something is safe doesn’t necessarily stop it.

I can know I haven’t used my straighteners.

I can know they’re sitting upstairs on a bench.

I can know they haven’t moved.

And I can still go and check them four times.

Someone without OCD quite reasonably says:

“But you know they’re off.”

Yes.

I do.

And then my brain asks:

“But do you KNOW know?”

That’s probably one of the best ways I can describe it.

It’s almost as though my brain doesn’t take a clear enough photograph of things.

I can look directly at a plug and see that it is unplugged.

Then walk away.

And suddenly the memory doesn’t feel trustworthy enough.

So I want to check it again.

Leaving the house becomes its own process

My agoraphobia means that at the moment I mostly go out around my small village.

I’m trying to keep doing that because I don’t want my world to become smaller and smaller.

Around half an hour is often manageable.

Going further away, particularly in a car, is much more difficult.

That can still trigger full panic attacks for me.

Crying.

Feeling trapped.

Wanting to get back home.

But the OCD also gets involved before I even leave.

I have to know Bobo is safe.

Doors need checking.

Windows need checking.

Electrical items need checking.

My dog camera needs to be on and working.

Sometimes I take photographs.

Window shut.

Plug unplugged.

Door locked.

Because otherwise I can be halfway down the road and suddenly think:

What if it wasn’t?

And then it doesn’t matter how clearly I remember checking.

The doubt has already arrived.

OCD really doesn’t care about logic

This is probably one of the hardest things for people around someone with OCD to understand.

Logic doesn’t always solve it.

I can understand logically that something is incredibly unlikely.

I can check something myself.

Someone else can check it.

I can take a photograph.

And my brain can still find another:

But what if…?

It’s like having someone auditing you all day.

Did you do that properly?

Are you sure?

What if something happens?

Could somebody get hurt?

Would you be responsible?

It is exhausting.

Harm OCD can be frightening to explain

Harm OCD is particularly difficult because intrusive thoughts can sound horrible when somebody doesn’t understand what they are.

They are unwanted.

They don’t reflect what I actually want.

In fact, mine tend to latch onto the exact things that would upset me most.

I could go swimming in the sea completely on my own, come home, and my brain could still find some ridiculous way of asking:

What if you hurt somebody?

Nobody was there.

Logic doesn’t matter.

The thought has arrived anyway.

Emails are another nightmare.

I can send an entirely normal email and immediately start thinking:

Was I rude?

Did I offend them?

Could that sentence be misunderstood?

Should I read it again?

And then again?

The same thing can happen while editing videos, writing blogs, doing voiceovers or replying to comments.

OCD is very good at grabbing whatever matters to you and attacking exactly that.

Even packing an eBay parcel can become checking

I’m really enjoying building my eBay business.

But obviously OCD has found its way into that too.

I check stock when it comes in.

I want to know the condition.

Any marks.

Any damage.

Anything I need to disclose.

Some of that is just responsible reselling.

The problem is knowing when:

“I should check this item properly.”

turns into:

“Check it again. And again. And again.”

That’s something I’m constantly trying to separate.

Good business practice from OCD asking for another ritual.

Sometimes the reaction feels completely disproportionate

If somebody in my family forgets one of my OCD rules, the reaction inside me can be huge.

It can genuinely feel like my blood is boiling.

Like my brain is on fire.

And the actual thing that happened might look tiny from the outside.

Someone left something plugged in.

A door was handled differently.

Something was put somewhere I don’t like.

But my nervous system reacts as though something terrible has happened.

That’s one of the reasons OCD can be difficult for families as well.

One person sees a plug.

The person with OCD sees:

potential fire, somebody getting hurt, everything going wrong and somehow being responsible for all of it.

Those are two very different emotional experiences.

My OCD keeps finding new things

Recently it has started with the taps.

Why?

Because I left one running once.

Once was enough.

Now taps have joined the list.

That’s probably one of the things I find most exhausting about my OCD.

It changes.

It adds things.

Something happens and suddenly a completely ordinary part of life becomes another thing that needs checking.

Sometimes I think of OCD as an incredibly overprotective friend.

A terrible friend.

One who says:

“I’m only trying to keep you safe.”

while making you frightened of absolutely everything.

Other days it feels more like a demon.

Depends on the day.

I’ve had therapy

I’ve worked with three different therapists over the years.

I’ve also done exposure-based therapy.

ERP — exposure and response prevention — is one of the main treatments used for OCD and it helps many people enormously.

My own experience just hasn’t been straightforward.

I haven’t had the response I hoped for.

That doesn’t mean treatment doesn’t work.

It means I’m still living with mine.

Still managing it.

Still trying.

Still building a life alongside it.

OCD has already taken things from me

I used to have a candle business.

I loved it.

I’d built a lovely community around it.

But severe responsibility OCD and a product involving fire were not a particularly good combination.

I couldn’t stop thinking about what somebody might do with one of my candles.

What if they put it beside a curtain?

What if they left it unattended?

What if their house caught fire?

What if somebody was hurt?

Would it somehow be my fault because I had made the candle?

Eventually, my OCD became severe enough that I ended up involved with the crisis team here in the UK.

And the candle business had to go.

That was incredibly difficult.

Why eBay feels different

Maybe that’s part of why I’m enjoying eBay so much now.

My brain doesn’t attach the same catastrophic stakes to it.

Someone receives a £15 top and doesn’t like it?

Okay.

Send it back.

I’ll refund you.

Obviously there are still problems.

Returns.

Missing parcels.

Customer service.

Normal business things.

But selling somebody a second-hand dress doesn’t give my responsibility OCD the same material to work with that selling something involving an actual flame did.

And that feels incredibly freeing.

I can source from home.

Photograph here.

List here.

Store everything here.

Pack here.

Build something physical again.

And I don’t have to wait until my agoraphobia disappears to start.

Even YouTube is something I’m having to push through

I really want to build my YouTube channel again.

I miss the kind of community I had before.

But uploading can be difficult.

One negative comment can send me into a spiral.

I can replay it in my head for days.

Lose sleep over it.

Wonder whether I’ve done something wrong.

So I’ve had to decide that I’m going to try anyway.

And if one day comments become too damaging?

I’ll switch them off.

And keep uploading.

That has become quite an important idea for me:

I’m allowed to change the way I do something without giving the whole thing up.

I don’t want to keep waiting to live

I have my digital products.

Our blogs.

YouTube.

My eBay business.

And I’m not willing to keep letting OCD automatically take everything I enjoy.

It may affect how I do things.

Maybe I need more systems.

Maybe I need help from my mum.

Maybe I source stock online.

Maybe I only manage half an hour outside.

Maybe I need my dog camera.

Maybe I need stricter boundaries online.

Fine.

I can work with that.

Because I don’t want to wait for some imaginary future version of myself who has absolutely no OCD or agoraphobia before I’m allowed to have a life.

I want one now.

Even if mine has to be built a little differently.

If you live with OCD too

I know how awful it can feel.

Sometimes it genuinely feels as though you’re burning on the inside while everybody around you is wondering why you can’t just stop checking something.

They might never completely understand it.

How could they?

They’re not experiencing what your brain is telling you.

But you’re not the only person whose brain works like this.

And if getting through an ordinary day sometimes feels like an achievement, I understand why.

I’m still working things out.

Still trying to expand my world.

Still trying to build the businesses I want.

Still trying to make videos.

Still trying to find my own way through it.

Maybe that’s enough for now.

I don’t need to build my life exactly the same way someone else would.

I just need to keep building it.