#actuallyocpd

Comparison of an Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Style vs Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorder

Personally, I’ve experienced this most dramatically with “obsession with work to the exclusion of friends and family,” “excessive rule following,” “refusal to accept disorder diagnoses,” and “perfect formal language.” These are nearly all things I used to have the traditional OCPD presentation of, but for personal reasons have strongarmed them into something that looks very different at a glance but isn’t really that different from a psychological perspective.

For large chunks of my life I just straight up never spent time with friends unless forced to because I was too busy working. I still do this to some degree with in-person hangouts (I do not ever really tend to initiate them), but in general nowadays I will drop everything I’m doing for friends and family, regardless of personal cost and even if the proposed activity is something I hate doing, as long as they have initiated the interaction. At a glance that obviously seems like a completely opposite symptom. However, it operates on the same mechanism. I do not do this because I like hanging out with people (I like my friends and sometimes I have fun with activities but this isn’t really a factor in the decision) - it is because I did many, many hours of research and introspection about ethics and philosophy and political systems and came to the conclusion that making others happy by doing helpful things and not giving disappointing responses to invitations was a more important component of being a perfect person than producing a work output valued by capitalism, and as such have switched to doggedly pursuing that as an essential component of my identity to the detriment of all else. I haven’t even stopped with the work obsession, either, I’ve just learned to quiet down about it in public a little bit and switched which things I abandon first. Instead of relationships it’s self care now, followed by non-work important tasks such as paperwork or email responses. If I fail at the interpersonal relationships I go into a tailspin. If I fail at the work I still go into a tailspin, too, but quieter than I used to.

Excessive rule following is another symptom that I have “inverted” but not really, once again because obsessive moral and ethical rigidity is probably my single most prominent symptom. In middle and high school I used to fly into an actual rage, sometimes to the point of violence, if people did extremely minor things wrong such as jaywalking, not paying what I considered an adequate level of attention in class, sitting in a seat other than their assigned one, saying a swear word, etc. Without a doubt, I was an absolute nightmare to be around. However, once again, after a great deal of research and introspection and picking everything about myself and other people and the world apart to the minutest detail, I discovered that actually, many laws and rules are bullshit and/or tools of oppression, and so obviously could not continue strictly demanding that they be followed to everyone by the letter. All the rules I am rigid about now are ones I personally decided on (not necessarily ones I came up with, though - of course plenty are just ones I saw other people come up with that I agreed with) and many of them directly contradict “official” rules. I would characterize my contempt for most official authorities as “all-consuming.” Once again, this kind of looks like I’ve abandoned the rules thing at a glance... but I’ve actually got approximately nine fucking million strict rules I personally follow and a far smaller but still substantial quantity of them that I become very, very upset if other people don’t follow. The strict rules just aren’t immediately obvious to an outside observer because I don’t go about loudly declaring them all of the time and they aren’t the same as other people’s rules. I haven’t written my personal legal code which I made up down anywhere, because it would take days to finish due to its length and would require constant revision due to the fact that I am constantly adding and removing rules based on new info. If anything this symptom has become more debilitating for me, albeit far less deleterious to everybody near me. There are way more rules now, and I have to constantly think about and revise them instead of just being told them and therefore knowing.

Refusal to accept a diagnosis for fear of admitting a flaw is something else I often see listed as a symptom, but out of this list, it’s the only one I haven’t ever had the apparent usual presentation of. This, too, is due to personal philosophy. I honestly find the inclusion of this as a common OCPD symptom absolutely baffling - if you’re functioning poorly, but don’t want to admit any personal imperfections, and you go see a doctor and she says “It’s not your fault, you have a disorder, this isn’t a personal failure,” how on earth do you NOT latch onto that right away to prove that you aren’t a fundamentally flawed person after all??? I’ve actually had the opposite symptom here for my entire life - the second I notice any sort of physical or mental problem, no matter how insignificant, it’s a mad scramble to discover what’s causing it so I have something else to blame, haha. I don’t just claim to have things randomly, because I also have a desperate need to be correct about everything, but I can, have, and will spend countless hours of personal research and subject myself to countless unpleasant tests at various doctors to try to figure out what every single little thing is. That’s why I have so many professional diagnoses! If I notice something may be amiss, the only thing that ever prevents me from pursuing it to the ends of the earth for a diagnosis is if I’m severely concerned that I could face medical abuse about it. Even then, though, I never make a self diagnosis without hours and hours of research that I redo every couple of months just to check and be sure that it didn’t go away somehow. I’ve done exhaustive research on every single disorder I could think of and also all the ones I see other people mention, even when I obviously did not have them and didn’t even need to research to figure that out, just to be 100% sure. I probably know more about diagnostic criteria of various disorders than a lot of doctors do. I’ve definitely had doctors google stuff in front of me before, more than once, after I brought up disorders I thought I might have that I then turned out to indeed have and received professional diagnoses for.

Perfect formal language doesn’t require such a long explanation. I have simply changed which language I find appropriate for situations. It isn’t in this post, at least not to that high of a degree, but my typical writing style could be described as informal but with big words. However, that approachable charm is a front! I don’t say anything without running calculations first, and as long as I don’t have a time limit like I do in a real time conversation, I never say anything that I haven’t read and made edits to many, many times. I certainly can speak and write with proper formal language, but quite frankly it’s become very difficult for me because I don’t consider it to do an adequate job at conveying a full range of meaning and so even though I can easily meet the technical requirements, it is painful to turn it in for anything because it inevitably reads to me as bad writing. Does everything i say and write have to be perfect? Absolutely. Does it have to be perfect by official standards? No, and in fact, if it is, then there is no way in hell it will possibly meet my standards for perfection, which are entirely different. I have a similar thing going on with personal appearance. I tend to look somewhat bizarre, sometimes to the point that strangers ask if they can take photos or express loud disbelief, especially if I have the time and energy to put together a really well thought out outfit (this falls into self care and is therefore a lower priority), but it is not that I don’t care so much as it is that I have a very specific image that I am very careful about maintaining and which I care a lot about.... but that image is NOT the same one most people would consider “proper,” and in fact I’ll often make careful and deliberate efforts to avoid looking too much like I’m “supposed” to. It simply isn’t the message I want to send.

Got some stuff done i was supposed to. Will have phone sesh next week, which is alright for me. Not like i look at her anyway you know? Beause of my fear of eye contact.