The O of OCD

I have OCD.  I have talked about it a bit before.  I have mostly discussed the "C" portion, which stands for compulsive.  It means that you feel the overwhelming need to do a certain thing and if you don't do it, then you can't concentrate until you do or you just have to remove yourself from the situation completely.  For me, my stongest compulsion is straightening pictures.  If there is a crooked picture in the room, I have to straighten it, even if I am out to dinner and the picture is all the way on the other side of the room and I have to walk past numerous other diners to get to it.  If I don't straighten the picture, I have to stare at something else so I don't accidentally look at the crooked picture again.  It makes me feel uncomfortable when there are pictures that aren't hanging straight.  A compulsion that I had when I was youger, but outgrew, was much much worse.  When I put on my pajamas before going to bed, I had to put my dirty clothes into the hamper a total of three times.  I couldn't toss everything in at once.  I had to do it in three separate times.  For example, I would put in my socks, then pick up my shirt and put that in, then my shirt last.  It had to total three times, not four, not two, not one, three.  If I didn't do it in three, then I felt like something very very bad was going to happen.  If I was just putting my socks into the hamper and nothing else, I had to put them in one at a time, then take one out and put it in again, so that it totalled three.  My parents were not aware of this behavior and therefore I was not diagnosed with OCD until I was in high school.

But I am not talking about compulsions today; I am talking about obsessions.  I'm sure that everyone knows what an obsession is.  Maybe you're obsessed with a famous person or a band or a certain TV show.  An obsession is something that you are so fascinated with that you cannot get it out of your head and can easily devote a large amount of your time, and in some cases money, to it.  It is possible for anyone to become obsessed with something.  It is much much easier for a person with OCD to become obsessed.  I'm not sure if I told you this story before but if I have it was a long time ago so I'll tell it again. 

When I was about 12 years old, my brother and I shared a Game Boy.  Not a Game Boy Color, but an old black-and-white Game Boy which had no backlit screen.  This was old technology at that time but it was what my mother allowed us to have so we were happy with it.  We were each allowed to play it for 20 minutes a day and not a minute more.  My uncle hit a deer on his motorcyle and became very badly injured.  He was in the hospital for a very long time.  He has recovered now, aside from brain damage.  When he was in the hospital, my mother and my grandmother would go to Portland to visit him every single day.  Since it was during the summer, my mother would drop my brother and I off with my grandfather while they went to the hospital.  We were allowed to visit later, but at first his injuries were so awful that if a kid saw them, they would be scarred for life.  Of course my brother and I would bring the Game Boy when we went to our grandfather's house for the day.  Our grandfather would sit in the dining room and watch TV while my brother and I were in the living room.  He didn't really check on us that often, except for when he brought us our lunch.  He definitely didn't enforce the rules.  Our mother allowed us to play Game Boy for one hour each while we were at grandpa's house.  We always played for much longer than that, but took turns, because we knew how to share.  We got this game called Bugs Bunny's Crazy Castle and it was one of those games where you couldn't save but you did get a password every time you beat a level.  My brother and I would each play until we died three times and then let the other one play.  We were trying really hard to beat this game, which must have had about 50 levels.  It took many days.  On the day that we would beat it, we played for a long time and then finally reached the last level, where the final boss was a big witch.  My brother tried again and again to defeat her, but couldn't figure out how.  He got frustrated and left me to defeating the final boss.  I tried and tried for hours and then I finally beat it!  Later our mom came and took us home.  I was in washing up for dinner and there were Bugs Bunny's floating in my vision as I washed my hands!  I was really frightened but my mom knew right away that I had played the Bugs Bunny game for too long.  The thing with the screen on the old Game Boy not being back-lit is that it causes much more eye strain than today's screens.  Bugs Bunny stayed in my vision for a few more hours and it was long enough that I never played longer than my time limit after that. 

The point of me telling this story is to illustrate how I can become obsessed with things fairly easily.  My brother quit when the game got frustrating but I had to keep playing until I beat it.  To this day, I get this way with computer games, which is why I can never ever start to play World of Warcraft.  I stick to Flash games like escape the room games and point and click games.  These games are shorter and can be beaten in the course of a day.  When I discover a TV show that I enjoy, I have to watch every single episode that exists all in a row until I'm done.  When I first started reading blogs and in fact up until the beginning of this year, when I discovered a new-to-me blog that I enjoyed I had to read all of it.  I would take days just reading through the archives and stopping only to eat, sleep, or take a bathroom break.  I don't do that with blogs any more.  I have managed to outgrow that obsession, but I do still love to read blogs.  Don't even get me started on websites where you earn achievements or badges.  I can stay on those for days until I earn all of the badges.  There is this really difficult Flash game called Achievement Unlocked.  Your character is an elephant and you have to traverse the small game area earning achievements.  You can see the names of the achievements but that is it.  There are over 100 different achievements.  You have to try things and push random keys on your keyboard until you figure out how to do things.  A random key will turn everything orange and you earn an achievement for that.  You earn an achievement for having your elephant hit the spikes 100 times.  I played that game for an entire day straight and most of the night until I earned all of the achievements.  By the end I was no longer having fun.  I even had to look up the walkthrough and then do everything it told me until I got the remaining achievements.  Most people would have been satisfied with just reading how in the walkthrough or even just quitting the game, but not me, I couldn't stop until I earned every last achievement.

The reason I share all of these personal things with you is to help you understand why I do some of the things that I do and also to be real.  I personally can't stand blogs where it's nothing but cute outfits and fun outings and yummy foods and nobody ever even gets a splinter.  I like to read about real people doing real things.  Real people make mistakes.  Real people don't have perfect lives.  Real people have things that make them weird and unique.  So this is me letting you all know that I am a real person, just in case you didn't already know that.

Living with OCD and Social Anxiety

OCD makes it hard for me to get things done sometimes.  Just on my laptop alone it's constantly check email, check other email, facebook, twitter, pinterest, etsy, my blog, 20sb.  And by constantly I mean a routine that can happen 5 seconds after it just happened.  I literally did it just after typing that.  I feel especially neurotic lately.  The social anxiety certainly doesn't help.  I can't bring myself to leave the house most days.  I have a package today.  I know that I have a package because the mailman knocked on the door, waited 20 seconds at the most for me to answer, and when I got to the door nobody was there but there was a note on the door saying they left my package in the office.  And I love mail.  I think you guys know how much I love mail.  I'm pretty sure I even wrote a post not too long ago called "I Love Mail", but not even the desire to obtain mail is enough to make me leave the house today.  The office is only half a block away.  The distance is not the problem.  I just am not capable of forcing myself to interact with human beings today, at least not ones who are basically strangers.  I never liked meeting new people as a kid and I still don't, only now it's much worse.  I just felt like giving you guys a peek into my perhaps crazy mind.

A journey into my mind

Bring a flashlight, it's probably not well lit in there. I also imagine it to be quite slippery so watch your step.

I have a lot of random thoughts twirling through my brain today so I'm going to shoot them from my fingertips and share them with you.

As you may know, I am a Christian. As such, I believe the Bible and everything it says.  Well, my mind was wandering yesterday and I somehow started thinking about the creation story.  Perhaps, I was influenced partially by Dru's imagined world of talking animals, but I came to the conclusion that in the garden of Eden, animals could talk.  This makes sense because if Eve hadn't been used to talking animals, when the Serpent spoke to her she would have been like, "Dude, this snake is talking. Something's up here. I'm going to have to talk to God about this, because that is just not normal."  However, she actually responded in this fashion (paraphrased), "Whoa, this snake that is talking to me, which is a perfectly normal thing, is probably right. I totally want to be smarter than God! I'm going to go eat some of that forbidden fruit right now."

And following the pattern of complete randomness with absolutely no logical transitions whatsoever, I will now discuss the dream that I had last night.  For some reason, my parents and I were going to Africa.  We were planning the trip and then all of a sudden we were there and we were staying in this super fancy hotel. We just skipped the airplane part and I didn't even wonder how I got to Africa when I just been in the United States, because it was a dream so this was a normal sort of thing.  For some reason, everyone in the hotel speaks only English, which I also don't find strange.  I was going to take the elevator to my room, but when the door opened, there was this really creepy guy in there and nobody else, so I acted like I didn't want to take the elevator after all.  So I waited for the next elevator and it was empty so I took it to my room. After another lack of transition, I was seated in the dining room, where there wasn't any food.  Not weird at all.  All of a sudden, my brother was sitting next to me even though he hadn't gone to Africa with us.  He started playing the piano, which in real life he can't play.  The really strange part is that there was no piano; it was still just an ordinary table, but piano music was coming out of it nonetheless and I found this in no way bizarre.  So he proceeded to play some Rammstein, just like any respectable piano player would.  Then he had to stop because some famous actress I had never heard of had to give a speech about why she was so awesome.  She was carrying around an Emmy Award, just in case anyone didn't know she was famous, I guess.  I decided that this was an excellent opportunity to be elsewhere.  I actually had to walk out of the dining room and go to the elevator, no more teleportation for me, I suppose.  I was once again the only person in the elevator.  This was not built like an ordinary elevator.  Well the inside was, but the doors were peculiar.  Instead of closing from either side or both sides, there was a door that closed from the top and one that closed from the bottom.  I got in the elevator, and pushed the button for my floor, which incidentally was two floors below the lobby.  For some strange reason, the elevator ignored my command and decided to scare me.  It shot up to the 8th floor and then waited there with the door open, even though nobody was there to get on it.  I pushed the door close button but for some reason, the door obstinately remained open. I took my finger off the button and patiently waited for the elevator to decide to close the doors when it was good and ready.  The bottom door slid up, but the top door remained open, which was slightly disconcerting as the elevator was now barely big enough for one person.  It was even more disconcerting because there was no elevator shaft at this point, just a seemingly endless drop awaiting me if I fell out.  The elevator took this opportunity to make a career change. It now tried its very best to become a yoyo. Luckily for me, this elevator had not mastered the skill of shapeshifting and remained elevator-shaped.  Unluckily, it really knew how yoyos behave and proceeded to plummet at breakneck speed then ascend at the same speed until I thought it would surely burst through the roof, which at this point I was not even sure that a roof actually existed.  It then repeated the cycle about five more times.  Luckily enough, I didn't get slammed around or fall out.  I did have adrenaline rushing like it had put off all of its shopping until the day before Christmas and my stomach seemed to keep being left either above or below where I was.  It was at this point that I made the happy discovery of that handy dandy telephone that is in most elevators in case you get stuck.  Even more exciting was the fact that when I opened the cover of the telephone so I could use it, the cover was long enough to partially cover the scary gap at the top half of the door.  I frantically used the phone and told them that the elevator was trying to kill me.  For some reason, they didn't even attempt to help me or shut down the power or anything.  Luckily for me, I woke up soon after.

You might recall that I have OCD.  Part of OCD is sometimes having unsettling thoughts that cannot be pushed from your mind, things that you would never purposely think.  While usually these come to me in the form of a powerful urge to throw myself off of things that are really high up, such as pedestrian overpasses, which I must resist with all my might, today I had a very strange and different feeling.  For some reason, all of a sudden I was certain that I was dead, not like that I had just died or something, but that I had died a while ago and was just sticking around for some reason.  My mind was pretty adamantly telling me this, but I combatted it with my excellent logical skills.  While my brain argued to me that I really had died in real life during one of my many dreams which include my death, my logic countered with the fact that if I were dead, people would probably not be able to see me or hear me, or freak out when they did see or hear me, because I would be a ghost.  Logic overpowered OCD and I confirmed the fact that I am alive.  I do realize that I now sound more insane than I ever have, but OCD does this sort of thing and this is the best explanation I can provide for someone who has not experienced it.

You know what song is pretty awesome if you're in the mood for something calm? Acoustic Alchemy by Norwegian Recycling.

I am pretty close to my 100th blog post, which is pretty crazy and will probably not be any different than the ones I always do, but it's still a milestone and I'll probably just start out with, this is my 100th blog post and that's crazy!

I really want some sweet potato fries right now. I also want some chocolate but that is for an entirely different reason.

The movie Mean Girls 2 premieres tonight on ABC Family and if I end up watching it, which I probably will, I'll review it tomorrow.

You may now leave my mind. Please exit in an orderly fashion. The gift shop is located to the right of exit.  I hope you enjoyed your tour and hope to see you again soon.

OCD and Laundry

But before my riveting story about my OCD, here's the word of the day. It's lacuna, meaning a blank space or missing part.

I'm not sure if I told you this, but I have obsessive compulsive disorder.  Because of this, it takes me a really long time to fold laundry.  I have to do it in the same order every time and I have to fold everything the exact same way every time.  Everything has to be perfectly lined up.  I always fold my jeans first, then long sleeved shirts, then short sleeved shirts, then tanktops, then underwear and socks. I fold my towels last.  When I say that everything has to be perfect, I mean that it takes about two minutes to fold a shirt satisfactorily.  I fold and unfold everything multiple times until it's just right.  Some people who have OCD feel like something very bad will happen if they change their routine.  I used to feel like this when I was little.  Now, if I change my routine, it makes my head hurt and I can't think straight or pay attention until I fix whatever it was.  I am a picture straightener and a germophobic.  I wash my hands and use hand sanitizer so much that my skin gets really dry.  I wash my hands and use sanitizer at least twice an hour.  I used to take two showers every day, but now that my legs are paralyzed, I am lucky to take one.  After I set my alarm clock before I go to bed, I have to check it about 5 times to make sure that it is set for the correct time and AM not PM.  This might just seem overcautious, but I set the alarm, check it 5 seconds later, set it down, pick it up and check again, about five times.  The weird thing is that when I think about it, I know that this behavior makes no sense.  My clock will not change itself 2 seconds after I set it down.  That doesn't happen.  I know that it is silly and ridiculous, but if I don't do it, it makes my mind foggy.  When I was younger, I had to put things into my laundry basket three separate times.  After I changed, I had to separate everything into three piles and then put them into my laundry basket one pile at a time.  I am not sure why I did this, but I felt like something very bad would happen if I didn't.  It had to be three, no more, no less.  If I only had one thing to put in the laundry basket, I would put it in, then take it out, then put it in again two more times.  I never told anyone about this.  I guess that even then I knew it was kind of crazy and that it didn't make sense.  I got over the laundry thing, but there are other things now.  This next part will probably sound really crazy, so let me explain something first.  Part of OCD is the routines that you have to do, but another part is in your head.  Sometimes you think thoughts that you don't want to be thinking but you can't help it.  I don't hear voices.  I'd like to make that clear.  Sometimes, I will see a complete stranger and feel the urge to hurt them.  When this happens, I have to just keep walking and try to think of something else.  The feeling goes away after a little bit.  Back before my legs were paralyzed, when I was able to walk to class by myself, I had to walk across what I call the skybridge.  It is a pedestrian overpass that goes above the road.  Multiple times I have thought of jumping off it.  This is really frightening, because I cannot stop thinking it and I just have to walk in the middle and get down the stairs as fast as I can.  Don't worry, I don't want to kill myself.  This thought just comes into my brain sometime and it's hard to ignore.  It completely terrifies me because I'm afraid of heights, and the skybridge is really high up.  At first, I was scared to even walk across it.  I definitely do not want to jump off it.  (I have learned that this is an actual thing that happens to people and not just me.  It's called l' appel du vide.)

And also, if you want to watch a movie about someone who's way more messed up than me, watch Ginger Snaps Unleashed.  It is seriously messed up.  That's all I'm going to say, other than I feel sorry for Brigette and I liked Ghost, until the end.  Ghost reminds me of Luna Lovegood, and Luna Lovegood is my favorite character on Harry Potter.

And also, H came over and watched a movie with me last night.  We watched the Blues Brothers.  He is so nice.  He makes it really hard for me to be okay with being just friends, but I managed to not try to hold his hand or lean my head on his shoulder.  He wants to be just friends, so I don't want to scare him away.