Happy OCD Week, I Guess?

This week is OCD awareness week, which I somehow missed despite the International OCD Foundation telling me about it repeatedly in emails I forgot to read.

If it gives any hope to anyone who struggles with it, OCD and I have found a very tenuous ceasefire in the last couple of years. Don’t get me wrong — we are at a constant standoff and it likes to push boundaries and try to get up in my space all the time. It’s more that I am able to pick the battles in which to engage. Acceptance and other therapy not-bullshit-I-guess. Also Prozac.

I still do a lot of the more benign compulsions because fighting them makes them think they’re worth the effort. They’re not.

I’m definitely giving it a lot of side-eye during the pandemic. I had a couple of nights recently where I was absolutely convinced that I was going to die before the end of the pandemic and would never get to live my life or have fun again. A fun side effect of the ceasefire is that my brain kept circling around looking for a compulsion and I couldn’t find one to latch onto and that made me more anxious. Because that’s how the OCD do. I just kept reminding myself it was still better than spending hours curled up in the fetal position while policing my thoughts and forcing myself to think of every person I know in order to prevent bad things from happening.

I spent some time today reading through some of what I’ve written in the past about OCD. It features in a lot of my writing about anxiety – and I write about anxiety a lot – but I actually don’t have that many posts explicitly about it.

Here are the three that most directly express what it is sometimes like in my head — and the enemy that still likes to lurk in the shadows.

 

It’s Not All Hand Washing and Light Switches – This was the first thing I ever wrote about OCD. It was on the front page of HuffPost because I have a habit of going all in. I know it’s an essay that helped some people, so it is still among my most cherished.

 

Her Fearful Symmetry – This was the first time I made a deeper dive into what it’s sometimes like in my head. It chronicles some of the early-ish days in therapy and the fact that OCD isn’t just something you can turn off except for the times when you can.

 

The “What if” Light Bulb – My OCD doodlestrip. This one is specifically about my need to be sure in my relationships and how it is frequently a hidden form of a “checking” compulsion. OCD reassurance seeking at its finest.

 

And a picture of this tree. I am sure I could find some sort of metaphor or analogy about this tree and OCD, but really it’s more that I need a photo for this post and I thought this opera singing tree was cool. I came across it on a solo life-can-still-be-fun overnight trip to the mountains, which I suppose is relevant.