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.