A bad thing happened

A bad thing happened to me today, but it wasn't caused by my intrusive thoughts.

It was a complete accident. A car accident, actually. This morning, my car accidentally crashed into the back of another. It's beat up pretty badly -- totaled. My body is sore, my anxiety is heightened, but my OCD is surprisingly okay... I mean, kind of.

Of course this situation causes me to overthink and obsess, but somehow I know that my intrusive thoughts didn't cause this. For a while, every time I'd get into my car, I'd have to ritualize in order to avoid a car crash. This hasn't been a problem in quite some time, and it wasn't a problem today when I got into my car. But I can't help but wonder what kind of mental tool it would have on me if I were to ritualize and then experience this car crash. Would my OCD win? Would I be convinced that by "magically thinking" I could prevent a catastrophe from happening? It's all hard to say.

But even so, why don't I feel like this car crash is linked to my intrusive thoughts of the past?

Certainly some of the credit can be attributed to my medication, and obviously a lot of credit goes to my exposure and response prevention therapy.

My composure (OCD wise) with this situation is baffling. Don't get me wrong, I love that I'm not having a major OCD episode right now, but it's just interesting to me that I'm not reacting as much as one might think. Perhaps the incident was so random and quick that my brain didn't have enough time to even form any sort of OCD thought.

I don't know.

I do know that for some reason, living through this incident has (for now at least) diminished my urge to be obsessively compulsive. Maybe my brain is just exhausted from the initial shock of the accident. Maybe it takes an actual, unpredicted bad thing to happen in order to shake me from my OCD behavior.

Or maybe I should just chalk it up to the fact that I've been working very hard to better myself and that this hard work is apparently paying off.

Thankfully no one was severely injured in this accident (besides my beloved car, Putt Putt).

Attribute my safety to whatever you believe, but I'll stick to counting myself as just being lucky.

And as always, have a lovely evening.