@OldRaver

11 months ago

PLEASE try to break this habit, folks!
It is actually an OCD compulsion!
I have had it my entire life.. I was not obsessed though, and it did not cause me any issue til I hit 50 and I developed Dry Eye Disorder (Blocked Meibomian glands that ironically cause WET eyes as my tears don’t adhere to my eyeballs, so my eyes OVER produce and they end up just running over my lower lids!)

But this ALSO meant that I felt EVERY tiny bit of mucus inside my lids (usually right up in the sockets) and often even soft tiny blobs of mucus felt like sharp little rocks!!
And that is our trigger to ‘go fishing’!
I dug and dug into my poor eyes fishing out the stringy mucus.
Trouble is, the mucus is produced by our eyes as an auto immune response normally to safely envelop bits of grit we get in our eyes, to safely transport them OUT of our eye sockets without scratching our fragile and necessarily super sensitive conjunctiva and corneas/iris.

So when we go digging in with our fingers our eyes think that it is a huge foreign body in our eye, and produces MORE mucus to ‘evict’ the offending item!

So we dig again.
And the cycle just perpetuates!

Whilst there is a weird satisfaction in removing a long stringy line of mucus, IF you continue down this route, as I have, the compulsion ends up causing very real damage, and has now massively impacted my life!
PLEASE read and be warned!!

My sleep suffers (now REALLY hard to fall asleep, then I constantly wake up with compulsion to pick at or wash out my eyes)
Sleep deprivation DESTROYS your exec function!! (- it’s effects mimics Dementia, and also causes depression!)

I wake up with my eyes glued shut to my eyeballs from built up mucus😵
NOT sexy!! Can you just imagine waking up next to someone with their eyelids crusted together??
Definitely no sexy “Hey you’s “ across the pillows in the morning! I feel more like Quasimodo saying ‘Don’t look at me! I’m so UGLY!” as I roll out of bed and scurry blindly as a mole to the bathroom, bumping into things on the way!!!
I am COMPLETELY blind every morning til I stumble into the bathroom and get a warm wet flannel onto my eyes to soften the dried clumpy mucus and enable me to open and wash my eyes.

My eye sockets have become very sunken and dark from constant pressure I put on them onsessively squeezing out mucus from the upper rims with the edge of my index fingers!

The skin BENEATH my eyes is now paper thin, sore and permanently dark and wrinkled prematurely from constant tearflow and rubbing!!
My vision has become impaired, constantly blurred.
Driving is difficult (I probably should not even BE driving!!)

This is NOT a joke!
This compulsion has honestly destroyed my life!

I can’t read books, I can’t do my job anymore (can’t do anything detailed on excel anymore! ) and I am utterly miserable.

PLEASE stop doing this now, before you wnd up like me 💔

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