secrets, secrets, are no fun...

This isn’t about feminism, but it is about my life and how I’m negotiating it. This post is about a tightly kept secret, one I’ve kept from my parents and my husband and nearly all of my friends. I even kept it from myself for a while, but I think it might be time to do some therapeutic writing about this topic. I write this today knowing that it’s a subject that is widely misunderstood as it becomes a part of the American lexicon and trusting that my readers will be respectful and non-judgmental as I bare my soul on the world-wide-web. So grab a cup of coffee, this is a long read.

I have Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.

I don’t mean it casually, like “omg, I am being such a perfectionist today, I’m so OCD” or “I cleaned the same dish 3 times because it just didn’t look clean, I totally have OCD”, I mean like actual Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. Let those words sit in your mouth for a minute. It’s a disorder characterized by irrational, repetitive thoughts or behaviors aimed at reducing anxiety. Often, after time, these thoughts and behaviors are sources of anxiety as these actions only relieve anxiety momentarily and become crutches instead of real treatment for the cause of that anxiety. So, yes, Obsessive. Compulsive. Disorder. I have that.

Maybe I should clarify, I have well-managed Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. Like many things, OCD is a spectrum illness and I definitely wouldn’t say that I’m on the worst end, but at one time in my life I had it to the point of severe frustration. It negatively affected my life and my ability to function as a normal person. Anyone who suffers from OCD would agree with this statement: “It was torture.”

I’ve had OCD for almost as long as I can remember. In looking at my life from beginning to now, I can say that my periods of heightened OCD closely coincided with periods of heightened stress, but there were clearly a few years where it was overall worse than it is now. Partially I healed because I learned to manage it and partially because I removed some of the anxiety in my life.

The most important thing to understand about OCD is that it is a condition, and the behavior is a symptom. This means that the symptom may very well change throughout one’s life. It can be closely likened to the way a drug addict might get clean off of one drug but start using another. This doesn’t mean that they are no longer addicted to drugs, it just means that their drug of choice has changed. They are still an addict. Furthermore, if they get clean all together, they are still an addict. An alcoholic is always an alcoholic.

When you have OCD you feel at highest anxiety when you are not practicing that behavior, however, most of us with OCD know that we’re being irrational or phobic, and wish that we could just stop. That’s where the feeling of torture comes in, because you can’t shut off the mental narrative. No one wants to practice their repetitive behavior, but there is a “high” that comes from it, that release of anxiety. In fact, OCD and drug addiction are very, very similar. Related is Body Dismorphic Disorder (eating disorders, the need for extreme plastic surgery, etc.), Tourette syndrome and Hoarding.

Okay, I know you’re dying to know what kind of OCD I have. No, I definitely don’t have a cleanliness, or washing OCD, although those kinds of compulsions make up over half of all people with OCD. I have counting and order OCD. Counting compulsions make up a little under 3% of all OCD obsessions and order or arrangement OCD makes up for about 5%. I’m not sure if there are approved names for each kind of compulsion, but I would generally refer to my OCD as being one of these. The “order/arrangement” compulsion is really more like a sub-category of the “counting” compulsion for me because the order is really dependent on what numbers are associated with it. The counting compulsion does not manifest itself in a compulsion to do things a certain number of times, it is a mental track that counts steps and paces and objects in even numbers. Complicated, right?

Counting compulsions include counting steps, floor tiles, bricks, light poles, really anything that can be counted to be honest. Arrangement compulsions can vary, the kind I have is the kind where if I’m counting something I need it to be symmetrical, not the kind where I have to eat my chicken nuggets in even numbers, but it may very well affect my eating if my food isn’t portioned out in a symmetrical or mathematically divisible way. (For example, I’m likely to sort M&M’s by color and then eat the leftovers until I have even amounts of each color, then eat them in rainbow order. Not technically OCD since if I couldn’t practice this I don’t think I’d feel too much anxiety, but that’s an example of the compulsion.) Overall, my biggest compulsions are steps, floor tiles (sidewalks and the like), bricks or cinder blocks and symmetry in patterns. This manifests itself more mentally than behaviorally, as in when I look at a brick wall, I will look at every other brick on the entire wall, and if I accidentally look at an “off” brick I have to start over. If you can imagine looking at a chessboard and focusing only on the black tiles, and punishing yourself for looking at a white one by starting over and looking at each black tile until you’ve successfully completed that task, that is exactly what my brain does whenever I see objects with repetitive patterns.

I used to have an extreme compulsion about steps. I had little ways about walking up steps that involved only stepping on certain steps with a certain foot, or starting with one foot and having to end on the opposite foot, and so I would come up with little mathematical games in order to do this correctly, and if I couldn’t figure it out I would go up and down the steps over and over until I got it right. Now, keep in mind this wasn’t just some game I made up because I was an only child, in my head this was absolutely necessary. And when I couldn’t get it right, my punishment was to do it over and over again until I could get it right, but when I finally did, the satisfaction was pure bliss. Whenever I was home alone as a child, I could do this for hours. My parents had no idea. (Or maybe they did? Eh.)

Over time, my compulsions have changed slightly, and become highly managed. While I no longer count steps I still count bricks and floor tiles. Some of the counting has transformed into a need for certain objects to be arranged in a symmetrical fashion. To be honest, it’s natural for humans to prefer symmetry over asymmetry, our faces and bodies are symmetrical, many objects in nature are symmetrical and I think that human nature is to prefer order over chaos. But at times this need has interfered with my ability to be a functioning adult.

For a while in high school I developed low-end trichotillomania (pulling out one’s hair) but fortunately that subsided and eyelashes grow back. There were a smattering of times where I had a bit of a number compulsion, not counting but over specific numbers or number combinations. Some numbers were good, some were bad. Some numbers were more symmetrical than others and that made them preferable. (8 for example was more symmetrical than 6 because if you break it in half you have 4 which is an even number) I still have an affinity for remembering phone numbers, street addresses and zip codes.  I still love arithmetic and number games, however my need for symmetrical numbers took a serious toll on my academics when I was introduced to Algebra. Algebraic equations created so much anxiety because I lost all control of the numbers. I couldn’t keep them symmetrical and because it’s a math problem you can’t just rearrange the numbers to suit your needs like magnets on a fridge, no there is a proper way to keep them and you can’t just move the 3 to the other side because it’s a bad number. (I was exponentially better at Geometry, if I may say so.)

In addition to algebra class, my high school career suffered because of my OCD. The walls in my high school were made up of cinderblock. Cinderblock is possibly the worst for me. Not only did I have to sit there and count all the blocks, but whenever I couldn’t see all the cinderblock because it went behind the chalkboard or a cabinet or whatever, I felt anxiety. So then I’d start all over again. With the same result. (Remind me again for that word used to describe repeating an action over and over with the same result?) Concentration on anything but the counting became very difficult. A couple times after class I would casually walk up to a bookshelf and look behind it so that I could get the satisfaction of seeing the rest of the cinderblocks so I could resolve that count. Lord help me if I am ever institutionalized in a prison.

If I had to put my finger on the times when this was worst I would say ages 6-10 and 13-15. I know that’s kind of broad, but that’s pretty accurate. And yes, I had OCD when I was 6 years old. I had (and still do) an obsession with keeping anything and everything in rainbow order, I seriously LOST IT when my crayons were out of order. But even then, I knew that was irrational so I tried to keep my temper under check. The counting thing started not long after. When you’re 6 years old, you don’t know you have OCD, it’s all a game to you. But at a certain point the fun of the game stops and the obsession takes over. It was incredibly frustrating for me, I couldn’t decide if I was totally normal and everyone experienced the same nagging counting behaviors or if I was totally crazy. Either way, I sure as hell wasn’t going to say anything.

The most common treatment for OCD is something called “exposure therapy”. Obviously, it is exactly what it sounds like, you are exposed to that thing in order to stop being afraid of it. For people with my kind of OCD it would mean exposing myself to not participate in that specific behavior and learning to manage my anxiety while not using that crutch. When done correctly this therapy gives you great power over your compulsion and over other fears in life. Learning to “expose” properly has greatly improved my well-being and my ability to confront situations where I am reasonably afraid or otherwise anxious. As my natural anxiety subsided I was able to slowly wean myself off of these behaviors, but like I said before the underlying cause still exists. I still have OCD. I am cognizant to try to avoid developing other compulsions, although the urge is still there.

I know you might be thinking: “Uh just don’t count things. Don’t look at bricks. Don’t look at floor tiles.” But it’s not that simple. Remember above when I said the purpose of the repetitive behaviors was to reduce anxiety? That means that avoiding them will create more anxiety. You’d have as much success telling an anorexic to “just eat” or a meth addict to “just stop using”. It’s not that simple. In a single instance, yes, I can achieve victory over one instance, but for someone with OCD or for anyone trying to reverse chronic behavior patterns, even one second can be made up of multiple instances.

I am writing about this now because at my current job I am christening a new office with my presence and have had to fill it starting from scratch. I find myself constantly rearranging things, even pieces of paper to be in a symmetrical and organized pattern and am discovering that even well-managed OCD can easily slip into not-at-all-managed OCD. And the hallway tiles here don’t help. They’re in this weird pattern that I blame for moving my OCD management down a notch, but I’m trying to look forward instead of down. (So far, unsuccessful.) Oh and also EVERYTHING HERE IS BRICK! But let me take a deep breath and continue…

You know the movie “A Beautiful Mind” where he looks at magazines and certain words just highlight themselves and float out in the air to them? That’s kind of what a counting compulsion is like, only with every other brick, tile or square and I’m also not a mathematic genius. Also, I’m not batshit crazy. I have OCD. Well-managed OCD. I keep telling myself that. Over and over and over again… (see what I did there?)

I do want to say that everything I've described here is not all-inclusive of my disorder. I do have another manifestation of this disorder that is better left not on the world-wide-web. Not because it is shameful or embarassing but because I'm still working through it and discovering how it affects my adult life. It is drastically different from what I've described above. If you also suffer from OCD whether it's well-managed or otherwise, or just to learn more about OCD, I encourage you to visit the International OCD Foundation for more information.