Though I have been plenty vocal about the challenges in my life, one thing I have never really talked about in detail was living with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder or OCD.
Though it’s a mental illness most people know about, very few people, in my experience, fully understand its extent. Yes, to some degree it’s the obsessive hand-washing or compulsive cleaning of things. After seeing how this disorder was portrayed on Fox TV show, “Glee,” I understand where this stereotype comes from. I don’t despise neurotypical people who joke about being “so organized and OCD,” but I’ll admit that sometimes it’s a thorn in my side.
The thing is, OCD manifests itself in a myriad of different ways for people. I don’t struggle with a fear of germs, but intrusive thoughts and counting compulsions are a daily pain. These thoughts aren’t necessarily severe and debilitating, either, which most people would expect. In reality, they’re generally nothing more than a nuisance. I call them my “hypotheses” since they’re typically formatted as if-then statements.
For example, If I don’t rinse my mouth out three times, then I’m going to have a bad day. If I don’t reach the elevator door before it begins to close, then that person I’m hoping to see won’t talk to me today. If I don’t type in my password on the first try without an error, someone I love is going to face a serious misfortune.
Other times, I’m compelled to do the infamous touch-three-times routine that is all too familiar thanks to Hollywood. I don’t have to touch everything I come into contact with repeatedly, but if I, say, accidentally brush against a wall, I’ll have to touch the wall, wait, and then touch it again to “undo” the original touch. If I put my hair up in a ponytail before a test, I have to redo it twice because doing things three times somehow makes everything okay. Now, if you think about it logically, I’d only have to do an action once more to theoretically “undo” it, but of course, OCD never is logical.
It’s the moments when things just “don’t feel right” that cause the most anxiety, however.
When I started meditating, the primary reason why I struggled so much wasn’t that my mind was racing but rather because my eyelids “felt uneven.” This is something I’ve struggled with all my life whenever I tried to close my eyes, and I distinctly remember a period of time in my childhood where I couldn’t fall asleep because of it.
Essentially, my right eyelid feels “lighter” than my left eyelid, and I get the sense that it doesn’t close “symmetrically.” The feeling becomes so uncomfortable sometimes that I either have to sit there squeezing my eyes as tight as I can to “reset” the balance of my eyelids or just keep both eyes open. You can see how this becomes a more pertinent issue when I’m trying to sleep.
If I wake up and don’t shower before it “feels like it’s too late,” I can’t shower until that night when it feels right again. Unless the situation is absolutely dire and I’m drop dead tired, I have to clean my room before starting my homework, no matter how long it will take to do so.
I’m known in my family for waking up in the middle of the night just to spend literal hours rearranging my furniture until everything felt in place. Sometimes even, it can take me a solid 15 minutes to make a bed because I have to make sure every corner is tucked perfectly, and every layer perfectly folded.
Rewriting things, in particular, has always been my biggest issue. Maybe a corner of the page was torn, or perhaps my handwriting started slanting for a couple words which made it imperfect. Ask anyone of my closest friends and they’ll attest to the fact that I rewrote my notes for each class at least five different times this semester, and tried at least three different brands of notebooks while doing so. I’d sit there frustrated, tired, and blatantly ignoring more important and time-sensitive obligations, but I can’t stop myself from rewriting.
In the past, I’ve gone through journal after journal, quite literally ripping a barely-used one to shreds because it wasn’t neat enough. I must have gone through four different planners this past school year simply because the one before it was too messy. I wasted far too much paper in my life because I couldn’t handle too many eraser marks or white-out stains. I’m an eco-friendly person’s worst nightmare.
With the exception of my rewriting fiasco a couple of months ago, college has actually helped me overcome a lot of these compulsions. They’re still there, of course, and I continue to fight against them every day. However, the mere fact that I simply don’t have time to cater to the majority of these impulsive needs allowed me to ignore them, which in turns reinforced the idea that, yes, I can ignore my OCD and still be okay.
I know my friends would support me if I told them about my OCD successes, but I feel too foolish celebrating what should be ordinary behavior. I know there are kind people in the world, but there are also judgemental people.
As some love to point out, everything I do because of OCD is irrational — trust me, I’ve spent enough years fighting against it to know — but that doesn’t make the discomfort and anxiety they bring any less valid. Ignoring these voices in my head sounds logical in theory, but there is nothing logical about mental illness. In fact, irrationality forms a large premise of what OCD is about. I know I don’t have to close my dorm door, lock it, and shake the handle in a specific beat, that it's OCD, but I don’t have to justify any of my compulsions to anyone.
Telling me to just ignore the compulsion is akin to telling someone with depression to just “cheer up.” It’s downright ignorant, but I also know that some people simply don’t understand the disorder. I’ve learned to not overreact anytime something like this happens but rather use these moments as a time to educate people on why their statement is, for lack of a better term, unkind. You don’t beat stigmas by attacking the uninformed — you teach them.
