This is a post I've been thinking over for a while, but I could never figure out how to say it in one post instead of three or four. As I'm getting back into working on my site regularly, though, I really wanted to give it another shot.

I've had a lot of internet accounts over the years. I've been active on forums, tumblr, twitter, tumblr again. I made a bluesky but have never posted on it. Carrd was my landing page for years. I've used AO3 and 8tracks and soundcloud and youtube and deviantart. Nowadays I'm mostly active on tumblr, AO3, and youtube. So as I work on my neocities, I've asked myself, what makes this site different? How do I decide what to post here but not on tumblr, or vice versa?

I think the answer is in a saying in my house that's part anti-anxiety affirmation, part running gag: "This, too, is ERP."

ERP, in this context, stands for Exposure Response Prevention. It's a type of therapy used for OCD that has absolutely changed my life and allowed me to make more progress in about two years than the decade before. Essentially, ERP relies on breaking the loop in your brain that leads to your compulsion. Normally, that loop goes like obsession → compulsion → relief. In ERP, it goes obsession → response prevention (don't do the compulsion!) → discomfort → relief. Over time the discomfort gets lesser and lesser.

In addition to things like my obsessive fear of sexual violence or contamination, I have a lot of scrupulosity/moral OCD issues, where my brain will pretty much take my ethics and stretch them to re-interpret pretty much anything I'm doing as terrible and wrong.

If you're curious what that looks like in practice, here's some examples of things my OCD has convinced me I'm a bad person for.

• Skipping a week of organizing to do homework (selfish)
• Not wanting to be seen as a lesbian because being aroace is integral to my identity (homophobic)
• Deciding to identify as a butch cis woman because I prefer being understood as a gnc woman than a nonbinary person (transphobic, buying into TERF bs)
• Asserting boundaries re: my triggers (putting my mental health before my friends')
• Having an obsessive fear of sexual violence (claiming trauma that isn't mine)
• Telling a black man I didn't know who called me "baby" that I couldn't give him a ride across town (racist)

"This, too, is ERP" is something Danny and I say to each other when encouraging one another to do something that we feel anxious about. And I decided that ERP is something I want my Neocities account to be, too.

By that, I mostly mean that I don't want to censor myself here. I'll post what I want to, without disclaimers or caveats about why it's okay that I'm doing that. This is my place to disentangle what I actually feel and want from what my scrupulosity tries to corral me into thinking. If I find that I want to post something, but feel like I shouldn't because of some vague anxiety, it's okay if that stops me from posting it on tumblr or wherever. But I don't want to let that stop me from sharing it here. This is my little corner of the internet, and I want to be as authentic as I can be on it, even if that makes me uncomfortable, because I think it's an important part of my recovery process.

Don't worry that this means this is going to become my #edgy website or anything. Most of it will be pretty benign. Honestly, a huge example of this is that I let myself include star ratings on my RPG Maker page, or that I listed some of my scrupulosity thoughts earlier in the post! I am, at the end of the day, here to have fun and mostly talk about media and my creative projects. I'll just be doing that as honestly as I can here.