Melissa's Story

OCD, OCD Stories
Apr 172007

My obsession is so difficult to describe. My brain sees the obsession as a logical solution to a problem that it imagines. If i say a certain phrase, touch certain objects, do certain things that in the past has maybe preceded a negative event, my brain tells me i have to fix what i have just done/said or another negative event will occur. Its one of those screwed if you do screwed if you don’t situations. If i give in to my obsession to fix the chain of events my brain feels i have set in motion, i feel relieved, but know in the back of my head i have just fed my illness. If i do not give in to my obsession and something bad does occur my brain kind of gives me a i told you so and i’m back to thinking that i need these obsessions.

My obsession is numbers. My brain thinks that everything can be turned off and on, and if you do it the correct amount of times it will set you down the right path again. The repetitions are 2, 8 and 16. It initially started with 2. Then my brain decided the more repetitions done the better chance of things being corrected. So its 2 has a chance of correcting things, 8 has a fairly good chance and 16 corrects it.

It almost feels every time i give in and repeat something i say or do, i change realms, everything around me feels different each time i do it, until i finally do the right amount and everything feels the way it should be.

As i do it i am fully aware of how ridiculous this pattern of thinking is and yet i am powerless to do anything about it.

I’ve always known I’ve had a problem but never actually knew what it was. This is honestly the first time i’ve ever actually researched it and i was lucky enough to find this site.

I can not tell you how reassuring it is to know that I’m not alone.

Posted by Incertus at 7:20 pm 1 Response »

Trading Places

OCD
Apr 072007

I have often said that if a normal(uh, non OCD person) were able to spend an hour inside our minds it would probably give them PTSD or something.

In this article a writer tries living life as one of her characters for a day. That character has OCD. It’s very interesting. Go give it a read.

And the money quote;

But I gained a new respect, and horror, for those living with OCD. Will I ever write that story? Only if I can imagine the life, and not live it.

It’s so refreshing to read something about OCD from a non OCD person that has some understanding of what we live with. I get really tired of those stupid psychological quiz/meme things that pop up all the time or people complaining they have OCD because they like to keep their CD collection in alphabetical order.

Posted by Incertus at 9:56 am 3 Responses »

Catching Up

My OCD, OCD
Apr 012007

I’ve been going through a bit of a hard time OCD-wise the last month or so. It’s always harder in the winter. Part of that is simple uh, logistics. In the winter there is more clothing to deal with and that’s a lot more stuff to get “contaminated”. I gave up long ago trying to wear gloves. There is just no way to deal with them and contamination. So my hands tend to get pretty beat up over the winter. Though I’ve managed to keep them from cracking and bleeding this year. You learn how to do stuff like this(wash with minimal damage) when dealing with OCD for as long as I have.

Another reason is I have been going out more. I had a couple of plays back to back that I was technical director/lighting designer for and that much outside world contact always spikes the OCD.

But the main culprit is the return of the Pure O. Usually that comes and goes and I think it is going finally. I have never been able to spot the triggers for why that shows up. When it’s around it’s easily triggered but when it’s not the exact same stimulus passes unnoticed. Go figure.

I’ve come across another new OCD blogger Obsessive Compulsive Delirium

Already she has a couple of posts up that I like a lot. One she is talking about how hard it is to describe OCD to another person. You know how they always say annoying things like, “Yeah, I do that too.” No. You don’t.

In another post she talks about one of the myths surrounding OCD. How some say it is caused by trauma. It isn’t. I know a lot of people can point to a traumatic event in their lives around the time their OCD started and blame that. Everyone has traumatic events in their life over the course of their lives. That is part of life. So any one of us, if we can pinpoint when our OCD started, can point to a traumatic event around that time. But that is not what caused it. Though I can concede that sometimes it may have been the straw that broke the camels back kind of thing but OCD is not caused by trauma.

Posted by Incertus at 8:53 am 2 Responses »
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