I believe everyone who has contributed to this thread has the sincere intent of being supportive to you, but we have divergent perspectives on how to best do so.
Though you and I have rarely interacted with one another, for years I have read your threads where you've chronicled your struggles, and your palpable loneliness and sense of despair made my heart ache. I felt unequipped to offer you any meaningful practical advice but I did earnestly pray for you. This past spring when you detailed in the College Life section how you sit alone in classes and feel ostracized by your classmates whom you fear perceive you as weird and awkward and who never extend invitations to you, I prayed for you and your desire for social inclusion and friendship. Quite literally what I prayed for after reading that thread is what you've described in this one, that you have a classmate who sees goodness in you, has chosen to sit by you, and is offering the opportunity for you to form a friendship and constructively work together in a group. I’m saddened that instead of this feeling like a boon to you it’s a source of consternation, but I think I do understand why, and I’m not intending to come across as being critical of you. I do feel it necessary to once again state that nothing that you've described of his behavior is what I'd quantify as abnormal, and certainly not with such vehement derogation as "creepy" or "verging on harassment." I do get why you feel validated when someone such as the person you were addressing in the post I quoted swoops in to vigorously insist that your perceptions are fully correct, to join you in your forceful condemnation of him, and to aggressively swat back at everyone else who has even a whiff of contrary opinion, because of course that would feel satisfying, but I in all honesty do not think that's to your long-term benefit. If someone with an eating disorder who is clinically underweight was adamant she needed to go on a restrictive diet, it’s doubtful you’d see the person affirming her assessment and squabbling with those who tried to persuade her otherwise as providing the best support for her overall health. I know that I'm likely not capable of convincing you to see your classmate’s actions through another lens, so that is why I simply urged you to treat him with the spirit of grace and charity, which is for the benefit of you both. He is a person who also has feelings.
I feel you've aided me in having more compassion towards a couple of guys in my personal life despite you and I having never met, so I do feel obliged to offer my thanks. It is because of your posts here that I learned about HOCD and was able to recognize the symptoms of it in a friend who reached out to me distraught - emotionally, mentally, and physically exhausted. It siphoned off his joy, his ability to concentrate on his school work, obligations, or family; to feel at peace while at church or with his family; to tame the thoughts feuding in his mind and sleep soundly; and incapacitated him from forming any friendships because he was constantly preoccupied with worries about his sexuality Like you, he's very intelligent and excels at math. He told me he finds a comfort in focusing on math because it doesn't intel any interpersonal analysis, it’s a retreat from people. He grew up in a Catholic family that has extremely negative views of homosexuality, and though he is actually heterosexual he expends enormous amounts of mental energy obsessing over his reactions to all men, from baseball players and male celebrities he'll never interact with in person to his classmates and teachers, to agonize over whether there's any part of him that could be gay. He also chronicles all nuances and body language of other men to scrutinize any trait that could be construed as homosexual. When he was 15 he began to have such frequent mental turmoil while attending his all-boys Jesuit school he switched to an online high school, which is where we became classmates. Even there where we engaged via webcams and text, he analyzed his classmate's actions and his own reactions to them, and rebuffed offers of friendship. He only interacts with other guys socially via video games. Even with girls it's been challenging because he is perpetually examining his level of attraction towards them. He "tests" himself by staring at pictures and trying to dissect his reactions. He bluntly told me he’d spent hours looking over my Instagram pictures of a beach weekend with friends and felt very troubled because he only found me and one other girl attractive, but we were both “flat chested” (haha, he wasn’t even trying to be insulting) and lacking womanly curves so he feared that meant he’d never find women to be desirable. Anytime someone has made an attempt to proffer kindness and friendship, he has mentally catalogued their quirks and personality and put them under a figurative microscope to analyze and obsess over. It’s both a cause of distress and a comfort to him to find reasons to push that person back instead of to proceed forward. He has finally been able to reclaim some peacefulness and joy by going through cognitive behavioral therapy specifically designed for treating OCD. He is now living on campus, on an all-male floor, feeling more confident in his own heterosexuality, and having normal interactions.
You also have made a genuine difference in how I treat my cousin who is my age and lives with my family. I am in college but must live at home because of an endocrine condition that requires multiple shots a day I have difficulty self-administrating. He does not have OCD but has other traits in common with you. I actually showed my dad a thread you wrote about how your dad turns off the hot water tank after your showers have exceeded 15 minutes because it drives me bonkers that on a daily basis my cousin takes excessively long showers in the bathroom connecting our bedrooms. This lead to my dad showing me a study by Yale of how it's not unusual for people who feel acutely lonely to take lengthy showers, to subconsciously use the warmth and touch of the hot water as a way to be comforted by the lack of social warmth and physical embrace. I literally think of this every. single. day. as he is in there to stop myself from starting the ignition of my annoyance. My dad told me it's not just my actual actions towards my cousin that matter, but the negativity about him festering in my own mind. Just as the physical repetitions of an exercise strengthens your actual heart, leading to tolerance and endurance, the repetition of exercising your tolerance, compassion, and grace can strengthen your spiritual heart. The fruit of the Spirit - love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control, is nourishing to ourselves as well as being a healthy precept for how to treat others and not diminish our ability to witness.
This is a lengthy post, the longest I’ve written in half a year on here, and I'm taking a bit of time from midterm prep to write it with the hope it could in some way be helpful. At the very least I hope you do feel cared about through the giving of time and prayer.
