Everyday things that trigger my OCD

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.

Why I am failing all my classes

My IQ is 126 in stress situations. I used to be really good at school. I never really had to study.

I am failing all my classes. I repeated this year. I am supposed to sit my A-Levels in a few months. I don’t think I ever will.

I am late for school almost every day. I can’t sleep at night. I can’t get up in the mornings. I lay in bed until I only have five minutes left. I missed my bus more often than I catched it.

I leave school early almost every day. I can’t concentrate. I can’t get through it. I feel like I can’t stay awake any longer. I feel like it doesn’t even matter if I am there or not. I can’t listen anyways. I never understand a thing. I don’t even try to.

I show up without my homework every single day. I don’t even try to do them. I don’t even write them down in class. I don’t even listen to what they are. I never unpack my books. I have to choose every day between lying to my teachers and risking the chance of them finding out and lowering my grade and telling them and have them lower my grade.

I don’t talk. If I do, it’s because I catched a few words and had an idea. I need so much time to build up the bravery to show up. I most often don’t think about the questions. I most often don’t even hear them.

I am afraid of every single teacher. I am pretty sure that they all think I’m lazy and always skipping school. I am pretty sure that they hate me just as much as I hate myself. I am pretty sure that they hate when I ask something. So I try to never ask.

I never study. I read a few sentences on the internet two minutes before an exam. I sit through an exam hating myself for not studying. I sit there panicking. But I end up not studying for the next one either.

My therapist always asks me to explain why it’s so hard to start. But it’s so hard to explain. I don’t think I can.

But when I think about doing homework, my thoughts are:
“I need to get up. I need to move my legs, my arms, my hands, my head, my everything. I need to walk to the hallway to get my bag. I need to open the bag. I need to find the right book. I need to take that book out of the bag. I need to take out my pencil case. I need to take out my notebook. I need to close the bag. I need to walk back to my room. I need to sit down. I need to get out the pen. I need to open the pen. I need to hold the pen. I need to put the pen down on the paper. I need to hold onto that paper. I need to open the book. I need to search for the right page. I need to search for the sentence. I need to focus my eyes on the letters. I need to read the sentences. I need to understand the text. I need to remember the facts. I need to focus my eyes on the paper again. I need to move my hand. I need to think about what letter to write. I need to find the right words. I need to move my hand all the way from the left to the right, up and down. I need to breathe. I need to blink. I need to shut out all the noise. I need to find a position I can sit in for a while. I need to make my brain think. I need to think. I need to stay awake. I need to …

I haven’t even started at this point. And even a single one of these tasks feels as if I could never master it. No matter how much I tried.

Why I started smoking in hospital

Arriving at the psychiatric ward, in which I stayed for the last three and a half months, the first thing you spot is the so called “smoking pavilion”, basically the most important place up there. It’s where you meet before and after therapy, it’s where you get visited by old fellow patients out of visiting time, it’s where you go when you’re upset, because you’ll always find someone to talk to. It’s where you meet in the middle of the night, because almost everyone in there has some trouble sleeping. It’s where the nurses and therapists walk you, when they need to have a talk with you. It’s the place you go to when you’re hungry, but you’re running low on snacks. It’s the place you go to when you’re bored, almost every time someone will lurk around the corner after a few minutes. You spend the sunny days in front of it, the rainy ones inside of it.

After you’ve seen the famous smoking pavilion it won’t take you long until you spot either a single smoker or a whole group of people smoking. There’s no in-between. And whilst a single person smoking is rather rare, the groups of smokers belong to that place like the trees that seem to have grown there all along.
You might think these groups are limited to patients, but nurses, therapists and doctors seem to not have learned so much during their education. It’s actually pretty hard to find a person that doesn’t smoke. Everyone’s doing it. The head physician, the well-educated therapist, the nurse that doesn’t even smoke at home, the trainee, the nursing student, even the addiction counsellor.

When a patient is admitted and tells the physicians that they do not smoke, they’ll probably hear the same thing every other non-smoker did on their first day: “Oh, one of the very few non-smokers here, that’ll be fun.”

I got to hear that sentence, too. But a few weeks later, when I lit up my first cigarette there, everyone was left in shock. Maybe, because I was one of the few that didn’t smoke when they were admitted. Maybe, because they thought I wasn’t ‘that type of girl’. I heard it all.

Now, being outpatient, I quit again. But I’m still getting horribly judged for even starting.

But, you know, it’s hard to explain to non-neurodivergents. And now, that I left it behind, it makes even less sense.

As a person who’s among other things being treated for depression, I as well went under treatment for suicidal thoughts and suicidal ideation.
Staying in hospital, you obviously can’t easily act on these or any other self-injurious ideas. I mean, you can, but it’s attached to a lot more stress and talks and justifications, as well as incredibly annoying behaviour analyses.

Not being able to actively harm myself all the time, my incredibly smart and disfunctional brain figured, that smoking could be an alternative.
It was something I didn’t like and I was kinda afraid of, the perfect thing to cause some harm to myself. Not forgetting the harm it causes to the body.

Some days I was sitting there hoping that this cigarette I was smoking might be the one that finally killed me. Other days I was just trying to numb the thoughts and the pain I felt. On even other days I just didn’t have stuff to do and I figured, that it would be a better option to smoke some cigarettes than to cut or burn myself.

If you never experienced this situation yourself, it’ll probably be hard to understand the feeling of having a little bit control over the damage you cause yourself, when most of it is taken away from you by rules the hospital put on you.

It was a way to cope, a way to numb my feelings, a way of limiting the damage.

Now that I am outpatient after a quarter of a year, I am proud to say that I quit.
But there are still days on which I can’t refuse, either because I am feeling okay, but not okay enough to not cause any harm to myself; or because I am just so fed up with everything, I have to turn it into a rebellious act against myself; or because I feel like it would be the better and less damaging option I have in that moment.

It were never my fellow patients that pressured me to start smoking, it was never out of peer-pressure, it was me that made that decision and it is me that has to be able to control whatever I choose to do.

I hope, that unlike a lot of people in life, you will question the things a person does, before judging them for their actions. Their behaviour might not fit your idea of reacting to certain events in life, but yours might not fit their idea either.

“Everyone deals with unimaginable pain in their own way, and everyone is entitled to that, without judgement.”