So hey it's ur old friend hickory ham Elle here and I'm gonna talk about Intrusive Thoughts for a moment because lord do I hate them

Today I was sitting in the car, in the parking lot of an Aldi while my husband went in to buy wine. I was just sitting there, playing the ol' PokemonGO, trying to catch a shiny Delibird when my brain was like:

"hey, pssst hey hey listen: imagine someone coming up behind u & hitting u in the head REALLY HARD like with, idk, a 2x4 or something. Like, just SLAMMING u in the back of the head. it'd hurt right?? oh man it'd hurt. Think about it!! go on! THINK ABOUT IT"

And like, of course it was an entirely ridiculous notion.

Rationally, I knew no one was going to hit me in the back of the head with a 2x4 as I sat in the car in the Aldi parking lot.

But here's the problem with intrusive thoughts: your brain doesn't really care about logic

Instead ur brain turns into a CD with a scratch on it (for all u Zoomers CDs were shiny music circles we used in the Before Times) and gets snagged on thought. It can't move past it, it can't just think about something else. It's stuck.

It's like having a really annoying song stuck in your head but instead of "Daydream Believer" it's the viscerally detailed notion of someone slamming you in the head with a 2x4

And the thing about intrusive thoughts is they're not things you think are actually going to happen. It's not like sudden-onset paranoia. Your brain isn't trying to tell you "watch out for people w/wood." Instead your brain's just like "hmmm what if" and you can't make it stop

Sometimes intrusive thoughts are about things YOU could possibly do.

In my old house, whenever the door to the basement staircase was open, my brain would be like "hey u know u could just like throw urself down those stairs right? like it's totally something u could do"

It was never a question of wanting to do it. It was just...the thought itself.

Another one I have gets set off by forks/other sharp things. I won't go into it because you don't need the details but it's really....troubling

And again! No part of me WANTS to do these things!

That's what makes talking about intrusive thoughts so difficult because when you describe them to the normies, of course they're gonna think "oh no they're planning on doing it!!"