*trigger warning*

He was your average, typical teenager. With scruffy, inky hair and twinkling eyes, nothing about him made him stick out or seem unusual. He was always laughing and smiling, He was known as one of the happiest, most care-free boys at school.
But he had the secret.

We all have them, but these were different. If these leaked he would be labeled “crazy,” “insane,” “dangerous,” and suddenly an outcast among everyone. On the outside, he looked fine, but on the inside he was tortured by frightening thoughts.

He believed he was a crazy, dangerous, sinful person, malicious secretly at heart. he lived in fear, not knowing what to believe on any level, philosophically, religiously, politically. At night sometimes when the thick darkness enveloped him, it felt like the darkness inside.
There was only one place he was allowed to tell the secret.

Inside a tall building, in a small room, every week met a group of teens who shared the secret. They met together, laughed together, cried together, talked together. But outside of the building, no one could know.

Some would have considered them physcotic, schizophrenic, but they knew their frightening thoughts were irrational, untrue. Others might consider those with the secret dangerous. But those with the secret were the least dangerous out of the entire population.

Those with the secret had thoughts of hurting others, but they were unwanted. They would pop in their heads like those annoying pop-up ads on your computer. Those with the secret tried desperately to get rid of those thoughts. They were willing to do anything, to go to a mental hospital and be hooked up to an IV, to do compulsions of checking, hoarding, neutralizing, and replacing every single bad thought with a good thought; compulsions that took hours.

He avoided anything immoral or violent; he played no violent games, carefully choose his music, did everything possible to keep the thoughts from coming. But it was when he stopped doing compulsions that the thoughts went away. It was the long process where he stopped checking, hoarding, replacing, neutralizing, asking for reassurance, when the secret began to leave.
He learned that thousands struggle with the secret. He also learned that everyone has strange, immoral thoughts sometimes. It’s just, they dismiss them as “wow that was silly, I’d never do that,” and then the secret doesn’t come to them anymore. So why was it that it had to be the secret? When they were just like everyone else, good people, who wanted with all their hearts not to snap, lose it, go crazy, hurt someone else.

Over 3 million people in his country had the secret.
That secret was Obsessive compulsive disorder.