As a person that grew up with multiple mental illnesses, in a rather unstable environment and without getting help until the age of 16, my obsessive compulsive disorder had quite a lot of time to develope into something that takes up more space in my brain than I want to admit.
Because I have been living with it for such a long time, without knowing what ‘it’ was and without trying to do something against it, I didn’t recognize just how much it interferes with my every day life and even by today I still stumble across seemingly normal habits that my therapist says are due to the OCD.
When looking at me at first, you might think I am the perfect stereotype of a person with OCD. I have to tidy my room all the time, I can’t sleep if I didn’t move things to a place that feels right, I won’t be in my room if I can’t make it feel right, I rewrite papers all the time because they don’t look perfect to me, everything has to be very neat and clean, I obsessivly wash my hands with water that’s way too hot for human skin, I clean my phone at least ten times a day, I barely touch door knobs, ..
I could go on and on, but there’s so much more to it than just those stereotypical things (by the way, not everyone experiencing perfectionism or a love of neatness suffers from OCD and not everyone with OCF experiences stereotypical behaviour).
It starts with laying in bed. I have to turn around until it feels right. I have to sleep on a certain side in a certain position or I won’t sleep at all, because I’m absolutely sure I will wake up ill. I can not not use my phone before bed, because it would interrupt my usual behaviour and that would mean I will wake up ill. …
Trying to pick an outfit, I have to be aware of how I’m feeling. If I’m really really anxious, I will certainly wear something I don’t like that much in case I experience something bad and won’t be able to wear those clothes again due to my fear of it happening again.
At school, I can’t write anything down until I’m a 100% sure that it’s right, meaning I can’t bring myself to do any of the exercises and just sit there waiting for the right answers to write them down. When I have to read something I have to reread the sentences, because I am so afraid of not getting a part of the information. I have to reorganize everything until it feels right, no matter what I should be doing. My pens have to show their tips to one side and they need to be in order from down to top.
It takes ages for me to answer on WhatsApp or texts in general. I feel pressured into having to answer immediately, I try to write something or to make something up in my head, but then I get so obsessed over finding out if I might actually say or write anything inappropriate and then I keep spiralling and it takes so much time that it gets worse with every minute, because I feel so bad for not answering.
I obsess over checking if stuff is real. I always fear that I made everything up in my mind. I am always afraid of going to the wrong place, saying something wrong, waiting for someone that never even knew anything about me, waiting for busses that do not exist and so on.
I constantly unfollow people that are really important to me on Instagram, because I feel the need to keep my abonnements under 30, because it’s a bad number, but it can’t be 29, because that’s an uneven number, but it also can’t be 40, because that’s too near at 50 and 50 is bad, 60 is near 70 and 70 is bad and 80 is too much and would overwhelm me, so it has to be 28.
I always check my memory and if I can still remember something, because I am so afraid of forgetting something or certain moments, but then again I’m never sure if they really happened or if I just made them up.
I constantly apologize, because I am sure that I made everyone mad. I’m so convinced everyone hates me that I apologize even for things that might not even have happened or that were not my fault.
I can’t look into mirrors, because I can’t convince myself that it is really me that I am looking at. If I look in a mirror I have to constantly check if the person in there does the same movements I do and more often than not I just dissociate by looking into one.
These are just a few thoughts and / or actions that I get to deal with every day.
Looking at all those memes of perfectly fitting tiles subtitled with ‘The OCD people will love this’ or seeing someone comment ‘This makes my OCD-self so uncomfortable’ under a picture of one thing being out of order or hearing someone say ‘I’m so OCD’, because they carry handsanatizer just makes me so angry, because people don’t see what we’re really going through.
Mistakes happen and I would never think poorly of someone that once said something like this, but I wish that there was more awareness and education on topics like this to help reduce the stigma we’re all experiencing.
Zoloft Zombie 