EXTREMELY TRIGGERING: Germs, Mold, Rotting Food, Gross Imagery

I don’t recommend anyone read this and I’m afraid that by sharing it will trigger others. But maybe it will help other people who feel the same way.

But sometimes my depression causes new types of germ phobia and intense anxiety over gross things. 

To be specific, washing dishes is one of the hardest things to do when I’m depressed. My depressive episodes can get very bad too. So bad that I stop being physically and mentally able to talk. And I get so tired that I don’t have enough energy to get out of bed for days at a time. I try to remember to eat but there-in lies my problem. After eating there’s always dishes. And they ALWAYS pile up. 

I do eventually get around to cleaning it up but not before a good bit of mold sets in. I lose a lot of money by just throwing the dishes in my sink away. But the image and what I see stays with me. If anything, the mental images get grosser the longer they stay in my mind. So even though that particular dish is gone, the grossness of it stays and makes using the matching dishes incredibly difficult. I can also never eat that food again.

Like only one of a 4 piece plate or cup set is gone. But when I use the remaining peices, I still see the yucky version. This leads to me obsessively washing it before I use it. And after that, I’m extremely afraid I’m ingesting soap, bleach, or poison.

The worst part is that I don’t actively realize I’m avoiding eating and drinking out of my dishes. Instead, I find myself drinking an unusual amount of sodas or eating out. I’m not in a depressive mood right now at all and I haven’t had a moldy dish in months. But I was going over my food and nutrition journals and noticed how much my eating habits were changing. And how I was avoiding the kitchen all together. I’ve been trying to eat healthier which is how I started using my dishes regularly again and I feel disgusted. I can’t stop seeing the gross versions. So I drink very little water now and don’t eat. Eating out is becoming less effective because despite being from a restaurant, I feel terrible eating it because I remember my own gross version. Like the rice I made got moldy but I can still see it in the restaurant version

I wish I had a better word for “grossed out” because it’s more than that. It’s panic attack inducing. And I don’t know if I would call it germ-phobia because I’m not afraid of the abstract possibility or doorknobs or even sick people. Just food rot, the way it looked smelled, and that I’m ingesting that. I spend 20 minutes washing a cup and I know what you’re thinking, “if you had washed your dishes like that in the first place, you wouldn’t be in this situation.” But I honestly haven’t let dishes get that bad in a while and I still have this lingering issue