Imagine this,you are going trough worst period of your life,questioning very essence of everything you are, you find yourself disgusted by what you are seeing, you are this secretive deceiver, pulling strings behind everyone, playing with them to your own benefit, that no one really knows you or at least this is what you see with all self loathing and self condemnation, but you've genuinely loved all of your friends, you've believed you would do anything for them, and then you go back to self loathing telling yourself theres nothing but self interest driving you, but again that isn't true, emotions drive me as well. And thats when you start claiming to yourself that those emotions are in fact sexual feelings, thats the moment when you tell yourself that someone who've you viewed as younger brother is nothing to you except an object to your sexuality, and all close friendships you've accumulated are results of your sexuality as well. then all trembling,anxiety,erratic thoughts,depression gets associated with that answer, and you start telling yourself that will all go away when you accept the fact that you are homosexual or bisexual Then in that light you find gay erotica, telling yourself all your problems will go away if you masturbate to it, its a way of accepting who you are, you use all tools of acceptance you know of, talking to everybody, telling them what im going trough, them telling you they would accept you no matter what,them even joking about it. Then you start retrospecting searching for ques you haven't seen, and the more you search the more you don't know whats going on, there is nothing there, you even go as far to attribute arousals to some women in your past to associating them to your sister, then crushes you concealed from eyes of others you attribute to wanting to be accepted paradoxically. losing 10 killos during this, you finally find something online that relates to what you are experiencing, a psychological disorder called SO OCD. you've been checking for attractions every day so much that you actually got confused about what attraction really is,what arousal is,then you use music to help yourself relax and everything there reminds about the one that got away. but the problem is you've been doing everything they recommend for getting over this even before you've seen it, and you try and try again and again doing ERP agreeing with yourself that you are gay, but to no avail. finally you give up thinking its futile, how can you be gay when you're not attracted to men, but you still remember you questioning, how could you get in so deep unless there's something there. All intrusions you've had are not leaving you they are just changing form. from reacting to: son hugging his father to behinds of old men, scream to you that you are gay, every form of male to male relations become a symbol of dread. 4 months in you've learned to live with this, you've told everyone that its settled since they can't really help you figure this out. Trembling,anxiety,erratic thoughts,depression are not leaving you but now they are joined by this questioning and one fuels the others, your life because this constant questioning, you can't see anything else but it, your life and work are suffering for it. Future seems unclear,enveloped by fear of mistaking, the only thing you know is that you would give everything for this to end New day dawns and the world doesn't stop nor waits for those who are falling behind, and yet you lay motionless unsure what step to take.
I think that before you can actually solve the question of your sexuality you must find a way of dealing with your anxiety and depression first. The problem is that depression can warp your every thought and emotion against you, so finding the answer under these circumstances can be hard. To me it seems like your already very deep in the self destructing cycle that is depression. So my advice on this would be to go to a therapist and let them help you out of there because at that point it's almost impossible getting out of there on your own. Just know that when you feel all those horrible things about yourself, that's just your head lying to you. It may seem impossible now but there's a way out. Good luck.
There's so much going on in that post there's no way anyone can begin to address it in an online forum. You said you related to descriptions of OCD. I don't know about that but you are definitely obsessing. Brother you gotta find some other ways to spend your time and mental energy. All of us here trying to figure this out and can obsess a bit. But there's a helluva lot more to life than sex. Take a break from this stuff and work on something else for awhile.
Honestly, this seems very familiar. A while back I kind of shoved into my own face that I might not be quite as cis-binary and not quite straight as I previously thought, The folks that I live around and work with have very cut and dry lives, and I spent a couple of months totally and very quietly headtripping myself before I found a therapist that had the right experience where I felt comfortable talking about things. I don't think that I had the self loathing that you have expressed; it was more an external thing with me. I was sure that I was at risk of being bashed if I so much as blinked in the wrong manner. At least part of my challenge is to accept that there is room in this world for someone like me, that it's ok for me to try different stuff and still be accepted. I suspect that part of your challenge is to accept that there is room in yourself for someone like you so that you can think about and/or try different stuff and still accept yourself. Who knows where you will end up; it's your life, and you get to decide that. (Thinking about it, it wasn't like I was always accepting of myself. The epiphany was when I realized that I was half-consciously pushing this weird compartmentalized part of me out of the way and calling it stupid, and every time I did that I felt invalidated and stupid. This also helped a lot with the depression and anxiety that I have felt since ...maybe forever.) it really helped me to find a therapist familiar with this stuff that I could get along with (and believe me, I made that search a lot harder than it needed to be.) I was really afraid that I was bipolar or was having a psychotic break due to other stuff that led up to this. What I took from my first session was 1) All those thoughts that I had were ok, and 2) I had (and still have) major issues unrelated to identity or orientation that were making things worse. Eh, such is life; we all have somewhere that we're growing from. ---------- Post added 7th Mar 2017 at 01:31 PM ---------- ...And yeah, this is way too much to solve in an online forum, but I can see why you might have taken the most anonymous route possible as a first step. Keep at it; you're going to do fine.
