OCDiary

Guy at work: You know how you have your OCD’s...well this is one of mine. PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT.  OCD Is a disorder, not a quirk. OCD is a whole disorder, not individual pet peeves. Please stop saying that having a particularity about something or a strong pet peeve is having an OCD or being OCD about that particular thing. That isn’t how the disorder works and you’re making it incredibly difficult for actual people living with OCD to be taken seriously. 

It is okay to talk about your obsessions/compulsions as though they are normal. For you, they are and it is natural that part of your everyday life would come up in conversation. Destroy the idea that your mental illness is something you have to be ashamed of.

 Myth # 45672 about OCD : A person with OCD will keep their house impeccably clean.  No. cleanliness is not a blanket obsession, not every person diagnosed with OCD keeps their house clean and labeled and pristine at all times.  Obsessions can often involve organization and/or things being in a particular order/pattern/just so. Having obsessions of that nature vary person to person in so many ways. Thanks to endless stereotyping and the media everyone is really only familiar with the Adrian Monk-ish need to be tidy.  I can only speak to my personal experience.  I am anything but tidy. In fact I’m pretty messy. My boyfriend and I used to go round and round about how he didn’t think I had OCD because I’m almost the direct antithesis of a clean-freak.  But I DO have obsessions about certain things being organized or in certain places/certain ways. These pop up at irritatingly unpredictable times. For example, I can’t handle things being uneven while out in public, if I see it I am compelled to fix it, if it’s something I cannot fix, it will make me squirm. I can’t handle basically all of the things you see in those buzzfeed posts of “cringeworthy” things where something is out of place or a pattern is crudely disrupted. I don’t ever think anything horrible is going to happen as a result of things being out of order in examples like this, which is another common thing in OCD (in fact, I have heard horror stories of doctors who’ve told patients that they couldn’t possibly have OCD because this factor isn’t present.) It’s more like I can’t stand the thought of leaving it that way and so I HAVE to fix it. not fixing it isn’t an option, it’s just something I need to do to relieve the anxiety caused by seeing whatever is wrong at the moment. It’s that feeling that’s important: I may not think something horrible or doomy will happen, but I will just feel extremely uncomfortable and stressed out and obsess over whatever is causing me to feel so miserable until I feel more miserable or give in to compulsion and correct the pattern which will make the negative stimulus go away. 

This morning I woke up to go to the bathroom. Shortly after I came back to bed, I heard my text tone go off.  I lay there paralyzed with my boyfriend all cuddled up asleep because I could neither let go of the need to get BACK up to check my text message nor the fear of getting back up and disturbing him.  An hour I was laying there falling in and out of light sleep obsessing over checking that text message and dreaming up the things it could be (did my friend sleeping downstairs text me to tell me she was up and to get up so we could hang? Did someone from work text me asking me to come in early? Did my mom text me?), thinking over and over again that I had checked my phone only to wake back up with a jolt and realize that text was still there unchecked and ready to drive me crazy until I did get up.