One of the most lonely, isolating, awful things about intrusive thoughts—of violence, of racist acts, of abusing a pet or a child—is that they’re so terrible they make you feel like you’re a bad person and you’re certain if you share them people will think you’re a bad person.

And the thing is?

We often aren’t wrong.

Because we have this fucked up cultural notion that if you think about something, you must want to do it. When in fact with intrusive thoughts *it’s the precise opposite*.

Illnesses on the OCD spectrum are so distressing because your brain is your abuser. Your brain gaslights you constantly. Your brain cuts you off from people and controls your behavior in ways you don’t want and makes you believe you’re horrible.

And this is different from other kinds of anxiety and depression because of how your brain *feels so separate from you*, or it can.

It makes me understand why some people feel that they’re afflicted with demonic entities.

There are varying degrees of severity, of course, and they can change over time. Not all of us experience it in the same way. Certainly not all of us have the same thoughts.

But we all recognize it in others. Unspoken, we look at each other and nod.

In the way you do when you share something that no one who hasn’t experienced it can ever fully understand.

And this notion that if you think about something, you must want to do it or think it’s good? Is one of the reasons why fandom purity culture is so terrible and toxic.

It’s basically *grown in a lab* to make mentally ill people certain that their worst fears are correct, that they are abusers and racists and pedophiles, and if they ever breathe a word of it to anyone their lives will be over.

Your thoughts. Are not. You.

This “your thoughts are you” notion is not unique to fandom purity culture, it’s culture-wide in general, but it’s been refined into a particularly nasty form in that context.

Fandom purity culture is profoundly ableist and we need to talk about that more.

I thank CHRIST that I am not in that world because I can’t even imagine the hopeless, despairing place I would be in if I was.

And you need to understand that there are so many more of us than you know. We just generally don’t tell people about what we go through.

Y’all have this cutesy, sanitized version of OCD, and Tumblr hasn’t remotely helped that. Fandom hasn’t remotely helped that.

It won’t let us talk about what we struggle with. It won’t let us write about what torments us.

It won’t allow us to use fiction for the therapy it can be, which is to take what our brains use to hurt us and put it in fiction where we can look at it and take away its claws and fangs.

And again, this is all over. Not just fandom. But God.

If you think people’s thoughts are who they are, fuck you, because you are hurting me and you are hurting everyone like me.

And Christ knows we’ve been hurt enough.

And “well okay you piece of garbage I guess write about it but never share it”.

Thank you for your input. Thank you for contributing to our awful isolation. You ableist motherfucker.

I can’t even count the number of times I’ve talked about it publicly and people have told me, in the most heartbreaking terms, “I thought I was the only one.”

How dare you try to silence us.