This ended up getting quite long and off topic but I enjoyed reflecting on my ocs and mindset making them so I hope you don't mind!
To talk about this I first have to address the reason I started making ocs, and why I make ocs now. Originally making up ocs and stories was very much a form of escapism for me. I was not the happiest kid, and instead of thinking about my life or trying to deal with any of my problems I spent all my free time reading books. My ocs at first, were a way of continuing the books when I wasn't reading them, say I'd finished a book and needed to wait until the next day to get another one from the school library, or when I wasn't allowed to be reading books during recess in school, or the main time I thought about ocs, the hours it took me to fall asleep. My sleeping problems are barely an issue for me now as long as I keep a consistent sleeping schedule but when I was young it took me literal hours between getting in bed and falling asleep. And if I let my anxiety steer my thoughts and though about my life and how much I hated myself, mhmmm it took even longer. So instead I though made ocs, put them in stories I was reading, and eventually, made up their own stories for themselves. I'll talk more about them later but Lumi, Fir, Shino, and Ravi are direct remnants of that time, though much changed now.
The next different stage of oc making was when I started high school and actually made friends, friends that also had ocs and another key thing, friends that drew their ocs. While I'd pretty much always had ocs and also pretty much always drew things I'd never really connected the two. Sure I had this one project when I drew characters based on prompt sheets I made my classmates (and teachers) fill out but I never really addressed those characters beyond drawing them for the first time. And so I started drawing my ocs, my friends ocs, and we started making more together. My reason for making ocs had changed. They were still a form of escapism, and I still struggled with sleep and thought about them to help with that, but they were also a way of interacting with my friends. This was the time I made Solenris as an rp group for me and my friends and oh my I still have records of all the dramatic and cheesy rps we did on google drive, and alll the drama that came from it. It was a good time. I still rp now, and with different friends, but now with the same fervor as back then. My friends also took off with the concept and made worlds of their own to rp in, the main second one being where many (around half) of the original concepts and characters of Beledrift come from (I didn't steal it or anything don't worry, my friend had never made a world before and asked me for help creating it, turning it into a joint project that I was too attached to to let go of when we drifted apart as friends so I took only the parts I had created, rehashed them, and went from there). Outside of those two rp groups other characters from this time include Tsu, Citrine, Gul, Loleus and Elterin. This was also the time I made a deviantart and actually started talking to people online a tinnnny bit. I know the usual stereotype is loner has no real life friends so talks to people on the internet but nah I was too anxious to talk to people on the internet too so I didn't have internet friends until after I had real life friends.
And then we get to high school part two! A few big things happened half way through high school, which led to me transferring schools :( but being in a much better situation overall :) I was slowly but surely dealing with my issues and despite my fears I made some more great friends! One of whom was yonah who to this day my main oc bud and likely my closest friend overall. I know you'll read this Yon so let me tell you that I love you lots. I made new ocs and new stories with the new friends but things were slowly changing, and my mental health was getting a lot better. Most of the rest of my ocs are from this time up til now. Now I still have a lot to work on but am in a much better place than I was when I started making ocs. Yet, ocs and storytelling from a personal perspective is still extremely important to me, so I continue to make them with maybe even more zeal than in the past. My reasons now are rather simple, I just enjoy making stories, designing characters, thinking about how they fit into worlds, designing worlds, ect. And beyond that I like to explore people who aren't me and who are in situations that are not my own. I like to explore relationships between people and how they affect them, and people's relationships with the world around them. And sure my worlds are often still fantastical with magic and non-humans, for sure a remnant of the days when ocs were a form of escapism for me, but the fantastical elements are less of the focus and more the people and societies that are different from our own. So! With that "introduction" out of the way, onwards to the actual question this post is asking. I'll put it under spoilers to keep this from getting too long haha
My ocs rarely deal with issues similar to mine except by coincidence, back when I used them to help deal with my issues they were a way to avoid thinking about them, and now I'm far more interested in exploring different people in different environments which rarely have anything to do with me. That said, most of my ocs have some aspect of my personality in them. I suppose it's easier for me to write characters I relate to on at least some level. There's been less of this recently but my older ocs for sure each has at least one part of me in them. Themes that are important to me however, ah my writing is filled to the brim with those, some of these themes are a lot more personal, some I just think are important to think and talk about, and some I just enjoy exploring.
One exception to the 'I want to write different characters that all have different experiences that sure might have one aspect of me or another but I want those aspects to be different for different ocs' rule is familial relations, specifically mothers and mother figures. A lot of my ocs don't have families, have dead families, or just their families aren't important to their stories. Any family members that play an important part in a character's story are usually siblings. And when they do have a mother figure, it's rarely a good one. This isn't an intentional thing, rather something I noticed that likely has to do with my own trauma.
Let's talk specifics. I mentioned Lumi earlier. Lumi is more or less my first oc, and she's existed a few years longer than the rest of her group. I've had a lot of variants of her that acted as my self-insert character when I was continuing stories, one of which is Luki, a non-binary character from before I knew that was a thing that existed. Lumi was less the me that I was but rather the ideal person I wanted to be, and as this changed over the year so did Lumi. Now she exists as somewhat of a mix of the character I made when I was younger, some more recent ideals for myself, and some extra elements that make her unique and separate from me. She also holds within herself several of my favorite themes/character types. For one she's a bard! Gosh do I love bards, and I don't mean the 20 charisma wants to seduce everyone they meet bard stereotype that's come from modern dnd stuff, nor really a proper historical bard, I mean the concept of a traveling storyteller. Someone who through music and the spoken work commands attention, conveys news from town to town, and sees the world on their own two feet. I love stories and storytelling, maybe because they've played such a huge role in my life, and stories passed down orally are a huge interest of mine. Travelers as well are something I love and I have so many ocs who go around seeing the world, meeting and learning about different people and their lives and cultures. I guess this comes from my interest in the same thing, though I have the internet at my hands and less of a desire to travel physically.
Shen somewhat is Lumi 2.0, an oc I dumped a lot of aspects of myself into but in a different way and a lot less than Lumi, while he's got aspects of me he's not meant to be me at all. His story and the details of his life have nothing to do with mine, but his personality takes a lot from the type of person I was at the time of making him. His sarcasm, love of puns, the teasing way he interacts with his friends, how dramatic he is, how he gets frustrated at small things, and keeps any problems to himself, the fact that he probably spends way more time thinking about what people might think of him than other people so actually thinking about him, are all things pulled directly from me. Also his role as the one that kind of watches over/acts as glue for a friend group and the fact the he was trans, once more before I really knew what being trans was. Some of these things were an accident some were on purpose, but I think creating a character with aspects of myself that didn't necessarily like helped me come to terms with them, since I did like Shen a lot and I could come to terms with these aspects through him.
Created at the same time as Shen, Armond had a lot more of my... I don't know what to call them, more gentle traits? While Shen was blunt and more harsh, Armond was created to be a good person, even at the sacrifice of himself. Around this time calling me nice or a good person was very hurtful to me since most of the time me being nice was very much to the sacrifice of myself, and yet it was also very important for me to be a good person, because of insecurities and anxieties (and well in general I think it's good to be a good person, but not to the point where you're the one suffering because of it). He's also quiet and quite anxious and a huge bookworm, some more aspects of me. I suppose the fact that Shen and Armond reflect these two different sides of me and are good friends that support each other also says something about the different aspects of my personality working together. Armond was my favorite character for a while.
Something else to note with Armond is a theme you can see in a lot of my characters, people who've been through a lot and had the world through all sorts of trouble at them who come out of it still trying to be a good person. I love angsty characters that hate the world for what it did to them too but I guess it's a bit more personal to me seeing characters that just keep standing back up. Sometimes it make take a while, sometimes they might have to leave something behind, but no matter what they keep on going. I guess that's just me looking for optimism in my own recovery.
Zhully has struggles socializing and expressing how they're feeling, to a much stronger extreme than me but still, and came from a large rather extroverted family while being the quiet kid who reads books which are all aspects of mine.
Nigh has a lot of my anxiety and worries about the future. Her story is all about personal growth and development which I suppose reflects my own.
Emer is somewhat similar to Armond in the doing things for other people to the detriment of oneself way but beyond that a big thing I can relate to with them, especially right now in my third year of uni, is a tendency to take on too many things and overwork oneself. I don't use Emer to explore this or anything though, it's just a trait we both happen to share and both are working on.
Valysa and Cloudy are two characters who have accidentally come to deal with issues of mine beyond just personality traits.
Valysa has a strong disconnect with her birth country/culture due to circumstances beyond her control, and now she's interested in making a connection again but struggles with where to start and struggles relating to her brother who grew up with it. This is a really big issue for me, a first generation american child born to a russian family whose culture is now so different from my own and yet is my own at the same time. And I'm working on rebuilding a stronger connection to russian culture and yet I know I will never be the same as someone who grew up properly in it, not like me surrounded half by russian culture and half with american and feeling like an outsider to both. It's half the reason I decided to move halfway across the world for uni to a country unrelated to either. Valysa also doesn't properly have a place to call home.
Cloudy's a student who despite being told how much talent he has and how well he should be doing struggles with the smallest things and barely passes his classes. He doesn't get why everything seems so difficult for him, and a big development moment for him later in his story is when he discovers that things really are more difficult for him than everyone else and his struggles weren't just laziness. Again big themes with my own mental health and recovery and difficulties with school, which aren't the same as Cloudy's but they do have similarities.