The Birth of My OCD

I had to get out



 

    It was as pure and simple, and yet as complicated as that. My OCD was as bad as it had been in years. My bedroom looked like something out of Hoarders and I allowed no one to enter it. I’d taken to sleeping on the couch because I physically could not take the anxiety that came with cleaning up after myself. My hands were raw as a result of the surgeon like scrubbing I gave myself at least 10 times a day. I felt completely powerless against the voice and compulsion telling me that I had to do such things. I felt paralyzed by fear and I couldn’t see a horizon no matter how far out I looked.  I was out of answers and at the highest dose of my anti-depressant. I needed a fresh start, a way out. I needed to move.



    OCD: It’s a combination of an overactive imagination and a belief in extreme superstition. The examples are going to be unbelievable and seemingly exaggerated, but they’re not- they are my life. I  hardly go anywhere outside the house without my 75 count Clorox wipes. I go through roughly 5 tubs of those per week, depending on what I’m doing and where I’m going. If I need to do laundry I have to sanitize the washer outside and in, before removing my freshly washed clothes and moving them over into the dryer. I have completely eliminated laundry baskets because they require me to Clorox wipe them between every load. Since I had gotten to the point of having to do maybe 6 loads a week to start clearing my bedroom floor in preparation for the move, the laundry basket was just taking up too much time. No one said OCD wasn’t based on logic!



    Of the few who knew about this particular obsession, they actually came to agree with my reasoning. Why put clean clothes back into a dirty laundry basket? See what I mean, an overactive imagination (taking laundry dirtiness to the extreme), combined with superstition. If I did not clean the washer in between, then everything I had just washed was technically still dirty. I was constantly racing my mom to the washer, in order to protect her from being tainted. She tried so hard to help me, and all she wanted to do was change over my wash for me, make things a little easier. But if that happened before I disinfected, then I watched everything she touched for the rest of the day and suddenly, hundreds of things were tainted, including the dog.

   

    Sadly, this was better than some of the obsessions I started out with back in high school. It was the night before we were supposed to have finished “The Scarlet Letter” for English class and I hadn’t even started it. I remember having had trouble reading a few months prior to that night. Not that I had trouble with sounding out words or anything like that, but suddenly words had meaning. If my eye were to catch a certain  5-letter-word and it happened to be a ‘provocative’ one, I was stuck. I had to read and re-read that word until it felt right and the ‘dirty’ thought that came with it was out of my head. It was also a problem because back then the number 5 meant death. Lots of different numbers meant different things. For example, each one of my family members (the people I loved most in the world) had an assigned number. If it was 2:13 pm I had to look at the clock twice. If I added the 13 twice it became 26, which was a safe number. 13 by itself was very dangerous because it was my mom’s number. If I did not balance it out by doubling it and theoretically erasing it, then that meant my mom was going to die and it’d be my fault. Again, see what I mean by superstition to the extreme?

 

    Back to ‘The Scarlet Letter’. I was attempting to read this entire book in one night, something that by itself is at least moderately stressful. Add in the word meanings, and the counting, and the fact that I’d just had a fight with my dad and you get...my first panic attack. I started crying and gasping uncontrollably. You see, up until this point I thought that everyone had thoughts like this and I was the only one who wasn’t able to handle them. It sounds dumb but so was me thinking that the D in Disney was actually a backwards G. Deny it all you want, but we’ve all I thought stupid things until we were told different. In this case, my brain realized that there was no way everyone went through all these thoughts day in and day out like I did. I needed help. I went down the hall to my parents room where my mom was watching tv and I unloaded. Hysterically I cried to her that there was something really wrong with me and I was going crazy! She went and got my dad who somehow knew exactly what I was going through! Not only was that night the date of my first panic attack, it was also the first time I learned about my family’s history of depression. Out of respect for my family and because this is my story, not theirs, I’m not going to go into specifics. But I will say that I wasn’t the only one in my family who struggled with mental illness. My dad told me something that night that has helped me time and time again get through some tough situations. ‘Erin, don’t you know the rule? If you think you’re going crazy, it means you’re sane!’ Meaning, schziophrenics have no idea that what they’re thinking isn’t normal. So, until I go to the point where I was seeing new friends and becoming super paranoid, chances were I was okay.



    That being said...the summer after that I started having somewhat ‘visual hallucinations’. I can remember driving to go babysit my baby cousin. It was a short 15 minute drive from my parents house, but it could easily turn into a half hour to 45 minutes. Occasionally on the way there I would see a bag of trash on the side of the road, usually a garbage bag. But if I looked at it look enough and if I thought about it long enough, my mind started to shift its matter. Suddenly, in my head, there was a chance that the garbage bag was actually a body of a person in distress. Or worse than that, a dead body. If I didn’t turn around and check someone could be hurt or dead and I’d have done nothing about it!  So I’d have to pull a U turn, and go past it again, and again, and again. I was late for that babysitting job quite a bit.



    I know what you’re thinking, this girl had convinced herself she wasn’t crazy? But if you are one of the lucky few who know something about mental illness, you’ll take my side. Really, all I was doing was being overprotective right?! Okay, not really but I do and did recognize how insane these things are. But, even though you know that there is literally a one in a million chance you’ll win the lottery, something inside you still convinces you to play. Even though you know that the infomerical product won’t actually make you instantly thin, suddenly eat more fruits and vegetables because you’ll  be using your juicer on everything, or make your hair shiny, pin straight, and grow 10 inches in a month...you still buy the product! Literally got to the point where I threw away change rather than having to disinfect it.