Background:

In my early childhood I had it a bit rough, growing up with a substance-abusing father mixed with a bad economical state of household. Since then I swore that I would never try alcohol or other mind-altering substances.

Fast-forward to early/mid high school when I was 16. I was trying to fit in, the cool kids were never my thing but that had recently changed. Trying to impress other people mixed with peer-pressure led to me starting to attend parties and drinking alcohol. During this period I think I went out/drank about 30 times. About 10 of these times it escalated to throwing up as a result of overconsumption of alcohol. 

Some of these low-moments of mine were filmed at parties and posted on social media. At the time I thought that that was a pretty normal and cool thing. I don’t know if you could say I was an alcoholic. It was more that I thought that drinking excessively would
make me special in the eyes of others, as depressing as that sounds. 

The situation right now:

I’m 21 years old now, and haven’t hung out with the same people nor had a drink since turning 19. I threw the peer pressure the fuck away. I’m at this moment studying physics with a dream of becoming a physicist and going into academic scientific research later on. 

The problem/ why I’m writing this:

As the title says, I’m losing it. A couple of months back I started showing signs of OCD, that has now developed into me having to have a lot of random stuff in exact places. For example, I usually spend 10 minutes correcting how my jacket is hung, because if it’s not hung in the correct way I feel like I’m never going to make it, anywhere in life. 

This is combined with a big, really big fear and anxiety of having some of that old footage of me puking and being really drunk leaked once I make it. I feel like I can do everything in life, do amazing things like some great scientific discovery, or maybe find a way to save the earth from the environmental crisis. But I also feel that as soon as I start my career, it will be shut down directly, because of those old videos. Someone will leak them somewhere or to someone, or maybe the institute I’ll be working at will find them themselves and poof* it’s all gone. This is pretty much all I’m thinking about, day in and day out, and I can’t stop it.