To the lady who gave me £1 to buy a cookie today

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My OCD affects my eating a lot. (It’s a lot better than it used to be. There was one horrible time when I barely ate at all.) The most difficult part of my new therapy, by far, has been teaching myself to eat whatever I want instead of letting my brain just go ahead and say to me “If you eat X food, Y will die, even though that makes no sense whatsoever.” OCD is like that (i.e. horrible)

Anyway today there was a food market in Leicester and everything smelled DELICIOUS. It really sucks to be around food you know you can’t eat, but I wanted to try and break this OCD cycle (I’d just come out a therapy session) and have a shot at actually eating something when I wanted to eat something. So, encouraged by my boyfriend, I went to get a chocolate chip cookie. But it turned out that between us, we didn’t actually have enough change for one. Which was fine, in a sense, because we could’ve just gone to the cash machine and gotten more (after a long, long period of having no money, we’re now back on our feet, which is really great) but honestly I’d have probably lost my nerve by then.

It takes a LOT of nerve to break an OCD thing, honestly. It sucks. But – you were behind us in the queue and you gave me a pound. Which might well have been a tiny thing to you, but – I bought the cookie, and I ate it, and I was incredibly nervous for ages, but no-one died. Wow, it sounds completely ridiculous when you put it like that, but OCD is completely ridiculous I guess.

So thank you for giving me that pound coin. It really meant one hell of a lot to me.