Dear Santa, what I want for late Christmas is a Funami Yui nendoroid. Well, I'd say anime for me was more impactful on my life this year than I could have ever imagined. I'm currently a fighter against severe contamination OCD which has completely exploded this year in terms of intensity and driven me into isolation. I've ignored and pushed back friends and family due to fears of hurting them or scaring them, leading to my social life crumbling. I am no longer able to attend classes either due to crowds triggering extreme panic attacks. Most crippling of all is that I've been slowly but surely losing the ability to touch. I'd I bumped into a wall or a piece of furniture I would have to immediately jump in the shower. My hands are even worse and have been mutilated as a result of the disorder, hence why I'm typing this while wearing Nitrile gloves. To keep a long story short Grotesque. Another concern was money at this point, unable to eat regular food and drink regular beverages I was making family break down crying due to the fears that I was going to die of starvation. This lead to me basically having to live exclusively on food in sealed packages. Things like granola bars, trail mix, and single serving drink bottles. We basically had two grocery trips now, " groceries for the house" and "groceries for me". Which, on top of many medical bills (I had an emergency surgery) was driving us to fear of being able to make the next payment on the house. So that's a bit of a taste of OCD from the first person perspective. You'll be on the verge of tears every time someone says " I'm bored" because you wish you could remember the last time you were able to say those words. Which leads us to the topic, how much of a help was anime? The answer being that l would probably be in the hospital with a lot less bodily function. Because a very key thing in recovery is your ability to meditate and delay or completely stop responding to your obsessions, and that's something I didn't have. Because everything I used to relax kept getting linked to a new fear, making it worthless. The exception to this being anime. I was able to create a setup that could be operated pretty much entirely using one toe. The only thing I needed to hit with my hands was a button, but that's just one handwashing versus twenty. This seems like a small thing but in reality it's huge. I was now able to have a source of enjoyment in my day. These days that consisted of nothing more than waking up, eating, going to the bathroom, and then starting to get ready for bed (getting ready for bed would take somewhere around 6-8 hours I believe). So this was an extremely wonderful thing. But it only lead to better things, because due to having this new source of entertainment where I can finally relax, I can start improving myself. I can begin to go "hey, instead of washing my hands fifty more times, why don't I turn on a show I enjoy and check back in twenty minutes to see if im dead" which then starts to essentially re-train your mind into what is acceptable behavior and what is not. The shows themselves are also a help. Because I can watch a character do something, for instance, like touch a doorknob and then touch an apple and take a bite out of it. Which starts making me reconsider if that is really a "dangerous" action or not. It can relieve anxiety, if I feel like I'm on the edge of a panic attack I can start watching a show and going over my irrational thoughts. As an added bonus it helps me stay out of a depression. So to wrap it all up, TLDR: I've been overcoming my OCD slowly but surely and without anime I don't know if I could've found a source of meditation quickly enough to be able to at least partially save my hands and body from damage. These days I'm feeling so much better. I'm able to use some silverware and stoneware as well as eat family dinners. I'm able to make contact with things like walls and furniture and not let it affect me. I'm able to share things like cartons of juice or a pan of brownies. As for my hands, they're slowly recovering. The bleeding has stopped and the skin is recovering. For now I'm wearing Nitrile gloves to protect them and prevent having to wash my hands, which even when I wash, I do far less in a day. Basically I'm going to kick the crap out of this disorder, you can take my word for that.