One night living with undiagnosed OCD: You are getting ready for bed and as you pass by the front door you get a sudden and very clear sort of image in your mind of an intruder breaking into your home through that door. You can imagine the exact way they would get in, the exact things they would steal all of which are the items you dread being gone the most. You can imagine the places in your home they would hide and what they would do to you when they catch you by surprise. The fear of the intruder itself may be based in reality, but the vividness of the scenario is not, you have no way of knowing that is what will happen. All of this plays out in your mind simply from passing your front door. Now the image wont leave, you wont be able to sleep because all you will think about is all the ways the intruder could be in your home waiting for you. So you try to prevent this, you go to your front door and you check the lock. Its locked tight but the idea of the intruder does not fade. So maybe the intruder wont get in through the front door, maybe they open a window. So you check all the windows in your house and sure enough, they are all locked too. But the intruder still feels real. Maybe the front door wasn't actually locked. So you check it again, the lock is in the locked position. Maybe it just looks that way? Maybe you forgot what the locked position is supposed to look like for that door, after all you have lived in many different places and different doors lock in different positions. So you jiggle the handle, the door doesn't budge. This seems to reassure you for a second but then you have another thought. What if the door is just jammed, and when you go to bed the intruder will get in because the door was never actually locked. This scares you, so you unlock the door, try it, it opens, you close it and lock it again. Its locked this time, you know that now. So you go to bed. Maybe you feel a little safer knowing the door is really locked. But the intruder may still be vivid in your mind. You may start to wonder if the intruder is already hiding. Maybe they have already broken in and are waiting for you to fall asleep. But no worries, you know all the spots they might be hiding, so now you have to check. You don't know what you will do if you find them because part of you knows that you never will. So you turn on all the lights in your house, all the ones you turned off before the intruder was a thought in your mind, and you begin to look. As you look you start to realize there are more hiding spaces in your house then you thought there were. Some of the ones that call out to you don't make any sense, full cabinets, the refrigerator, the washing machine, underneath your bed, But you think you should just check anyway, just to be safe. You check everywhere and there's nobody. Of course there is nobody. You are more awake then ever, you have work in the morning and you have spent the past hour and a half reassuring yourself that you will find an intruder that never existed in the first place. You are exhausted and overwhelmed and all you want to do is go to bed but now you have to turn all the lights off again and it starts to make you worry that maybe there's a spot you forgot to check. You are too tired to check again and you cant help but wonder why nobody else seems to live like this. Why nobody else is as afraid as you are of intruders, or spoiled food, or bug infestations, or germs, or kidnappings, or secretly being evil. You know on some level that the intruder was never real, but it felt like there was no other option but to check, to be 100% sure that there was no mistake you were safe. This was just one night. But it will happen again. Maybe it wont be an intruder next time, but it will happen.
Loading...
