#fairly confident in writing some of efnisien's lived mental experiences

[not-poignant]

Hi Pia, I'm not sure if this question has been asked before, but how did you decide for Efnisien to have Pure O or even OCD in general?

Hi anon!

Tbh the answer to this is going to be very boring, because I decided through research. Like, I literally just did a lot of research.

I already knew he had PTSD, and I knew from the end of Falling Falling Stars that I quickly had added in some obsessional thinking (which he already demonstrated in how he texted Gwyn, so I was comfortable with that Dx), and then kind of forgot about it because I wasn't ever going to write about him again.

Before Falling Falling Stars I did the good old deep dive into OCD and the different variants of obsessional thinking. I already knew that a chunk of his obsessional thinking was kind of masking the true depth of his PTSD, and that once one started to alleviate, the true nature of his PTSD/C-PTSD would emerge.

Mental illnesses often don't work like this (though they can), but for Efnisien, obsessional thinking was a coping mechanism to hide from his own trauma and to have an anxious, life-damaging outlet for what he was going through. I doubt he ever would have developed Pure O if he'd been removed from that household at an earlier age.

But yeah like, research is how I decided!