intrusive thoughts are such a nightmare, i feel for you cousin. i wish people who didn't experience them understood the sudden waterfall of shame/horror that come with them.
i can't speak to your therapy comment without knowing specifics, but i do feel like stuff that's too exclusively CBT-focused can result in yeah, just feeling like you're better at stuffing things & being Just OK Enough To Work for the Machine. not sure if that's your situation but could be something to consider!
good luck!! assuming it's with someone new, remember that a first date is - fundamentally - just hanging out with a new person in a slightly different context, vibing out whether there's romantic potential is a secondary background thing. and as far as the second part, you're trying to get a read on them for compatibility as much as they are with you! hope that takes the pressure off (though i know social anxiety doesn't obey reason in a 1:1 way)
Need a new collection of hobbies and hyperfixations to shitpost about so that people can't ID me from my old account - looking for maybe a solid half-dozen (6). Suggestions???
Preferably nothing involving physical coordination since I'm a depressed nerd 
& also nothing math-like because I'm more of an Actual Art Degree nerd 
than a STEM nerd 
I was a religious cushvlog watcher and you could kinda see Matt become more and more Chinapilled in real time. idk if he ever made it all the way way to "China is genuinely socialist," but I also think that's the kind of question Matt would probably have written off as unanswerable theorycrafting that people ruminate endlessly on mostly online - or otherwise in isolation - which they mistake for actually doing politics (I don't really have an opinion on whether that last part is right or wrong, just educated guessing where he'd be at during the later cushvlogs era).
I periodically get the fantasy worldbuilding itch and honestly it's more annoying than anything. Mostly because I don't write want to write a fantasy novel (and don't write fantasy-as-such for my larger creative projects in general), and realistically working full time combined with the active communist lifestyle wouldn't make a d&d group feasible, my main friend group I'd recruit from for such a thing would be people with the same issue schedule-wise.
Maybe I'll pick my d&d hobby back up if I make it to retirement 
Wot if a Tales from the Crypt eppy were two and a half hours long?? 
(angry that i'm sleep deprived at work because i stayed up watching The Substance - fun-if-shallow mids if it were a tight 90 but at that length i'm leaning toward active dislike)
yeah i can't speak to your branch's recruitment needs b/c every local is slightly different, but it's very possible they were just prioritizing certain areas/demographics. but def hit someone back up! whenever a good volunteer-comrade fades away, our first thought after "a certain amount of volunteer churn is inevitable" is "damn, what are we not doing well enough when it comes to retention???" so there's a very good chance comrades near you are bummed that you fell off their radar and want you to come back!
also some of our most dedicated cadres were active friends of the party for years before becoming members, so try not to be discouraged! i do feel you though re: paranoia you did something wrong, serious political organizing can kinda be extreme exposure therapy if you're already rejection sensitive.
been there lol but the best thing for your mental health and everyone's interests is almost always to just log off and do something enjoyable irl. IME no one is ever truly "owned" on the internet people are just running on parallel hamster wheels of psychic misery that push them toward the endpoint of either leaving the cave and 
or going absolutely insane like they saw 
or similar.
i do feel you though the internet is evil and the online left can be painfully annoying.
see my previous comment to LeninsBeard, hoping u can get linked up!
did they never get back to you? or did they decide it wasn’t a good fit? if the former i would try and find organizing meetings, etc, in person and try to build irl relationships w/ members and express your interest in joining there. it’s easy for online applications to slip through the cracks due to spinning a lot of plates. there’s also just a lot of layers/vetting so patience is needed.
@GalaxyBrain@hexbear.net the worldbuilding ideas would be for a setting ive worked on on and off for years (industrialized fantasy with weird fiction and communist themes) so doing actual serious work on it would involve wading through/decoding my scattered, nerodivergent-ass google docs sadly. just the thought of it gives me anxiety!! but the ideas i was having were for big picture creation myth and cosmology and metaphysics shit, which does lend itself more to vaguery & brain vomit so maybe i should give it a whirl anyway
it's funny, you and i are kind of the opposite - the type of details you stress over w/ worldbuilding is the kind of shit i really struggle with. whenever i think about realistic logistics around climate, geography, etc on a micro level, my brain derobes itself of its burdensome, chafing wrinkles and my eyes lose their spark and i become