Realising I suffer from OCD after 7 years

Will start this off by saying I'm not diagnosed, and I'm not going to seek one either out of not wanting the bias of OCD attached to me, but I am going to discuss this with my psychologist

How I realised and why I believe this

for a while now i've always thought of myself as 'adjacent' to OCD, i always related to OCD posts, and experiences such as intrusive thoughts, obsessive thinking, etc, but i could never identify compulsions in myself so i brushed it off

I'm fairly certain i suffer from pure 'O' OCD, meaning most of the compulsions are mental, like reassurance seeking, avoidance, scanning memories, etc. i've even made worrying itself a compulsion, like i genuinely believe if i dont worry about something it'll happen lol

atm a lot of my obsessions/compulsions surround rejection. any hint of rejection from literally anyone and i become hyper paranoid people are conspiring against me or worse, they're abandoning me

what to do now/reflection

on one hand, im glad i'll be able to feel more free about relating to people with ocd now and the community, on the other hand, the next step now would be to start ERP (Exposure and Responsive Preventetion Therapy), which terrifies me! Like Ok i'm probably about to discover how deep these compulsions and fears go! i already feel like crying at the thought

i think the worst example of this was about almost 2 years ago now, i had started talking to this guy and i immediately developed this massive crush on him, we talked every day. it didn't take long for me to start NEEDING him to talk to me or else it felt like he was going to abandon me. if he didn't say goodmorning/goodnight i'd need to seriously reassure myself, look through our messages for signs that things were okay, etc. if he didn't respond for a while, left me on seen, same thing. the stress of this caused me to stop eating and relapse. im not 100% sure what happened but i think my clinginess became too much and he eventually ghosted me which crushed me at the time.

im relieved to finally understand why i did this now more beyond than just, 'i was insecure', but i'm also seriously upset it took me 7 years of symptoms like this to realise. like okay cool i know now but now i have 7 years of compulsions to break out of. 

this probably could've been caught sooner

even worse is that i think this could've been addressed way sooner, like 3-4 years ago i did bring this up with my psychologist but because i couldn't identify any compulsions at the time she told me it was my autism and GAD making something that 'looked like OCD'. she said this knowing i had been suffering from ruminations, intrusive thoughts, etc, and i had to have mentioned something that could've rung an alarm bell as a compulsion right? 

i've been seeing her for 8 years. i feel bad that im putting her down like this, shes helped me so much and if i couldnt identify any compulsions to her, then yeah it makes sense why she told me it was that, but also it feels like it was brushed off too quickly. 

thank you for anyone who read this through, means a lot really, if you have had similar experiences or if this is also helping you realise something is up i'd love to discuss this with other ppl