My apologies for the LONG lapse in blog updates. Thank you, though, to all of you faithful who have continued to comment and check! I have been so encouraged by the comments and emails I receive - it just shows me that we are not alone in our struggles, even though sometimes our symptoms seem so private and unique.

My job as an insurance agent has been going very well. I still have the same struggles - worrying about if I touched something after another female touched it, thoughts about if I brushed up against a female, etc., but luckily I've been able to avoid ridiculous amounts of handwashing thanks in part to a) being tethered to a phone all day, and b) not wanting to be obviously OCD in public. Of course, sometimes I'm able to just "not care" or turn off the OCD thoughts as well.

My insurance should kick in pretty soon, and then I hope to eventually get back into therapy. I always enjoyed therapy - you can get thoughts off your chest, feel encouraged, and develop coping skills to fight the OCD.

I should mention something about my last post - I had put a list of people that had annoying tendecies that annoyed me as an OCD-er, such as "Clicky McClickerson". I did not in any way mean to offend or cause insecurity to anyone whose OCD actually causes them to BE Clicky, etc. I just thought it was a funny little way of pegging the people who usually trigger my OCD, not offend anyone whose OCD might cause them to be Clicky, etc. My apologies if that was in any way insensitive.

On a different note, is there anything I can blog about that would be of any help to anyone? For example, is there any symptom you might want to ask me about, or any part of my experience I can share? Is there anything you'd like to see on this blog that is not currently here?

A New Job, A Better Day

Here's a happy update: I have a new job as an insurance agent. I'm in training right now, and will take my state licensing test tomorrow. In addition to being a boost to my wallet, this job also brings a boost to my life with OCD. Now I'm busy all day, and around other people, so my tendency to perform rituals and compulsions is diminished. (As they say, an idle mind is OCD's playground.) I am doing really well, and maybe, once my insurance kicks in, I can go to therapy once in a while.

My training right now involves sitting in a classroom with others, and if you've been through school or really, been in any classroom setting, you know there are certain people who always attend. For those of you who are sensitive to sounds (like I am), hopefully you will find this listing humorous (if not accurate). Here are a list of people who always seem to be in class with you (I also posted this on my general blog, http://www.playtah.com/, so if you see it there also, don't worry - I didn't copy it, I wrote it.):

Clicky McClickerson - Constantly has a click-type pen in hand. Waits until everyone is concentrating, and then begins the rhythmic audio torture, oblivious to the pain of everyone else. I think I speak for everyone when I say, “Clicky, put the pen down, or I will put the pen down for you. And by “down,” I mean, “in one of your less comfortable orifices.”

Sniffy McSnifferson - For the love of all that is pure and holy, please just blow your nose. And then, if you feel a bit of nasal drippage again, use the tissue to wipe it away. Don’t sniff so much. Or so hard. I think I had a pen in my hand a minute ago.

Bouncy McBouncerson - You are moving the WHOLE table! Seriously! Take some meds. Or make sure you’ve gone through your withdrawals before work. If I wanted everything around me to shake, I’d move to California.

Chewy McChewerson - It’s cool to chew ice. If you’re alone. If you are around me and I hear you chewing ice, I will assume you need help crushing the ice, and will help - with my fist.

Wrappy McWrapperson - When it’s really quiet in the classroom, there’s no way you’re going to open that bag of chips or piece of hard candy unnoticed. Bite the bullet and open it quickly, don’t drag it out into a 5-minute production of trying to gently open the bag. If you do drag it out, I will wait until we are in the lunchroom, then loudly ask you if that rash has gone away yet.

Whispy McWhisperson - Usually Whispy is a girl who, for whatever reason, knows the answer to a question in class, but doesn’t want to say it at regular volume. This basically says, “I know the answer, and I’d like those around me to know I know the answer, but I just don’t have the courage/energy/confidence to commit this answer to my vocal cords.” I’ve found that if you taze Whispy everytime she tries to answer under her breath, she eventually stops. Well, stops moving. Turn that tazer down a notch.

Mouthy McMoutherson - Along with Chewy, this classmate thinks that others enjoy listening to the wonderful sounds that they can make with their mouth. Whether it is chewing loudly, making “tsk” sounds, or clicking their tongues, these people must be stopped at all costs. Normal assault laws do not apply in this case - you can act with impunity. Suggestion: Use large sticks.

Breathey McBreatherson - Yes, we know you can breathe. And really, you’re quite good at it. We just don’t want to hear EVERY FREAKING ONE of your breaths. Clear your sinuses, close your mouth, and we’ll all get along just fine. (WARNING: Breathey may morph into Sniffy if he manages to clear his sinuses, but they start running. Hold on to your pen if you don’t want it to become a casualty of Sniffy’s nasal vortex.)

In spite of the flaws of the above mentioned classmates, I am so happy to have a job, and so happy that my OCD is not as strong. I hope that all of you are having a good day!

OCD Is A Full-Time Job, Even If I Don't Have One

I don't think I've mentioned this before, but I've been unemployed for the last six months. The economy in my state (**cough** Michigan **cough**) is really crappy right now, so good jobs have been hard to come by. It stinks to have little money, lots of debt, and an uncertain job future.

It stinks even more to add OCD to this mess. After my OCD finally caught on to the fact that I was not waking up at unrighteous hours of the morning to trudge to work, I'm almost certain I heard it exclaim (with a certain amount of glee), "Yay! Now we have MORE quality time together!" And so we did. My OCD has become more pronounced in the past six months, mostly because I have much more time to dwell on and carry out the obsessions and compulsions. Whereas I might shrug off compulsions at work because I didn't have time, NOW I do have time. So why not spend that 15 minutes washing my hands? Why not spend a few more hours doing laundry? Why not spend more time reciting things out loud to ward off bad thoughts or perceived danger to others? Indeed, why not. So I have been doing those things.

It's kind of funny. When I'm in public, you'd never know I had OCD. If I didn't know you, and we went out for coffee or lunch, you'd have no idea that there was anything different about me. I'm good at hiding my OCD when it can reflect badly on me. But when I get home and I'm alone, watch out. If there were a hidden camera in my apartment, you'd see a completely different side of me. Washing, touching things, rotating cups and bottles, eating a certain number of chips or cookies, reciting things - these are things you'd see me do. And since I'm home much more now, I do all these things much more, too.

One of my most prominent obsessions/compulsions lately has to do with my bathroom. I mentioned in a previous post that one of my worries is sexual contamination from females. Lately, my apartment has been pretty clean (an accomplishment, I assure you), so a good female friend of mine has visited. She used my bathroom a few times, so now whenever I use the bathroom, I get stressed out. When I use the toilet and wipe, my hand comes pretty close to the toilet seat. This stresses me out because she has touched the toilet seat. When I wash my hands, I know that she has also touched the sink and maybe even leaned against the counter. This stresses me out and has led to many 5+ minute hand washings. I go through a bar of soap about every 1.5 days. Luckily it's Ivory, so washing doesn't chap my hands. (Look! Product placement! Hey Ivory, how about a free case?! And if that works, I'd like to say how much I enjoy the fuel-efficiency and earth-friendliness of the Toyota Prius...)

Because of this latest obsession, I put off going to the bathroom until I have to. (Because when push comes to shove, I'd rather wash my hands than the couch.) I have amazing bladder tolerance, but I know it can't be that healthy. But you'd probably put off something too, if doing that thing meant intense mental discomfort and anxiety. (Taxes, anyone?)

And now the good news. I am starting a new job today, so the time I spend at home will be drastically reduced. I will be a server in a high-end restaurant, so I'm sure I'll be too busy and too image-conscious to give in to OCD much at work.

So there you go. If you have OCD and are currently unemployed or spend a lot of time at home, I can empathize with you. If you have OCD and hide it in public, but then battle with it when you get home, I can empathize with you. And if you work at Toyota, I can give you my delivery address if you happen to have an extra Magnetic Gray Metallic (or any color, really) Prius laying around...

Like Eden, But With More Stress and Less Web Access

There comes a time in every person's life when they must ask themselves a very important question: "Why am I sitting in front of the computer with no clothes on?"

A very important question, to be sure. (And no, the answer does not involve Internet porn.) When I asked myself this important question just minutes ago, the answer was simple: OCD. For some months now, my OCD has been telling me that certain just-washed things are contaminated. Yesterday while looking in the dryer for a t-shirt to wear to bed, I was overwhelmed with that certain "OCD" feeling - you know what it's like: anxiousness, stress, impulse - that made me feel like the shirt that I just pulled out of the dryer was contaminated. Not by chemicals, germs, or anything like that - just by my thought that it might be contaminated. Just the thought of it being contaminated made it seem to my mind as if it was. A stronger person perhaps might have been able to resist the impulse. Many of our OCD impulses go away or lessen considerably if we just delay the doing of the compulsion that our obsessions cause. But I became stressed quickly, and gave in. I threw the clean, dry t-shirt in the dirty laundry pile and grabbed another shirt.

Today, the bedclothes I actually wore last night were thrown in the dirty clothes pile not long after I got up. They were not "dirty" in the classical sense. But into the pile they went anyway. But now what would I wear tonight? No problem - I had a similar pair of pajama bottoms and another shirt to wear. Both clean. But wait - crap. Now I "felt" like those pajama bottoms were contaminated. In fact, I felt like all the clothes in the clean clothes basket with the clean pajama bottoms must be washed again. No one touched them but me. But the feeling was overwhelming, even after I called my Dad and asked him (as I always do - perhaps to the detriment of my recovery, but dangit, he's so nice about it) for reassurance. So, I packed up all my clothes from the clean basket, the dirty pile, and the ones in the dryer, and stuffed them into the washing machine. Then I took off the clothes I was wearing. (After all, they felt contaminated now.) So into the washer went my capris, my tank top, and my undergarments. I had, for the moment, given in to my OCD.

Failure is never fun. Yes, I feel better that my clothes will soon be clean, but who's to say they're not going to also feel contaminated this time I remove them from the dryer? That is the horrid cycle of OCD. I'm not afraid to say it. I have had some spectacular (or so they felt) wins. Golden moments when I have soared on the wings of conquest around the golden sun of victory. And then tonight, like Icarus, I have considered soaring, perhaps even gotten into the air a bit, then lost altitude, crashing into a cow pasture onto a steaming mound of OCD and drawn-out analogy.

On the upside, since I've started writing this entry, my clothes have finished in the washer and are now in the dryer. I'm going to wear the first pajama bottoms and t-shirt that I pull out of that dryer. That's my plan of action. Tomorrow is a new day, filled with the possibility of more victory, less laundry, and better analogies than tonight.

Wow. It's Been A While

Yeah, I've gone for too long without posting. But thank you to all who have stopped here in the meantime, and left your posts. I value all of them, and am encouraged that this blog can be of some interest to you!

I am still struggling with washing my hands a lot, and worrying about sexual contamination from people of my own gender. I have switched to Ivory aloe bar soap, which, while of course not helping to assuage the symptoms, has lessened the chapping of my hands. If you can't be cured, at least be moisturized, that's my motto.

I'm still struggling with counting. Whether it's pushing buttons on my cell phone, rewinding scenes in a movie on dvd, or yet again washing my hands, I still have the feeling that I have to do things a certain amount of times. Grr.

Is there anything you are struggling with right now?

OCD and Worldview

In our more honest moments, I think many of us with OCD have found within ourselves an anger, and at some point harbored (or even now harbor) a somewhat pessimistic view of the universe. Emotionally, I consider myself a realist, even an optimist. But I think I have developed what I’ll refer to as an intellectual pessimism. I derived this term from a passage in C. S. Lewis’s book Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life.

...there was in me a deeply ingrained pessimism; a pessimism, by that time, much more of intellect than of temper. I was now by no means unhappy; but I had very definitely formed the opinion that the universe was, in the main, a rather regrettable institution. I am well aware that some will feel disgust and some will laugh, at the idea of a loutish, well-fed boy in an Eton collar, passing an unfavorable judgment on the cosmos. They may be right in either reaction, but no more right because I wore an Eton collar….As to the sources of my pessimism, the reader will remember that, though in many ways most fortunate, yet I had very early in life met a great dismay. But I am now inclined to think that the seeds of pessimism were sown before my mother’s death. Ridiculous as it may sound, I believe that the clumsiness of my hands was at the root of the matter. How could this be? Not, certainly, that a child says, “I can’t cut a straight line with a pair of scissors, therefore the universe is evil.”…I was not comparing myself to other boys; my defeats occurred in solitude. What they really bred in me was a deep (and of course, inarticulate) sense of resistance or opposition on the part of inanimate things. Even that makes it too abstract and adult. Perhaps I had better call it a settled expectation that everything would do what you did not want it to do. Whatever you wanted to remain straight, would bend; whatever you tried to bend would fly back to the straight; all knots which you wished to be firm would come untied; all knots you wanted to untie would remain firm. It is not possible to put it into language without making it comic, and I have indeed no wish to see it (now) except as something comic. But it is perhaps just these early experiences which are so fugitive and, to an adult, so groteque, that give the mind its earliest bias, it’s habitual sense of what is or is not plausible.

Lewis, C. S. Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early
Life. San Diego: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1955.


That passage resonates with me. For example, especially because of my OCD, my experience with inanimate objects and their nonconformity to my will has bred in me a sort of anger…an anger against the object, an anger against the laws of the universe, an anger against God. More than once, while in a fit of hand washing, the soap has slipped out of my hands, bounced down around the plunger, and settled on the floor at the base of the toilet. To someone without OCD, this might be a comic scene. “Oops! I dropped the soap! How clumsy of me!” But to me, it is infuriating. Not only did I feel compelled to perform my secret washing rituals in the first place, but now I have to get a new soap and start all over - not to mention having to get my hands dirty by picking up the now contaminated soap. It’s times like that when I want to (and sometimes do) say to God, “You like that? You enjoy watching the little obsessive-compulsive girl suffer like that? What, no people to kill with tidal waves, so You have to go around and torment the ones who are already at a disadvantage?” I think to Him, You’re the Creator of the Universe. I would think that you would be able to stop something meaningless like this from happening. What good will come out of me dropping the soap? There’s no lesson to learn, no turning it into good. Why not just step in and stop this from happening?

Do any of you ever struggle with that kind of anger?

O Baby

As I've learned all too well in my struggles with OCD, so many of the fears and worries we have are completely irrational. Because of our "magical thinking" however, we fear that if we don't perform a ritual in the right way, something completely unrelated will happen. For instance, if I don't touch something the right way, or a certain amount of times before I throw it away, somehow I will be cursing God.

When I was about junior high aged, one of my irrational fears was that I was pregnant. It was irrational because I was (and still am) a virgin. But I thought that if I did or didn't do certain things, that I would get pregnant. I remember at times being relieved when I started my period, because that meant I wasn't pregnant.

As with most parts of my OCD, my spiritual beliefs only exacerbated the stress. In the Old Testament of the Bible, there are verses relating to when a woman makes a vow. Here are some verses (Numbers 30:3-5, NIV):

3 "When a young woman still living in her father's house makes a vow to the LORD or obligates herself by a pledge 4 and her father hears about her vow or pledge but says nothing to her, then all her vows and every pledge by which she obligated herself will stand. 5 But if her father forbids her when he hears about it, none of her vows or the pledges by which she obligated herself will stand; the LORD will release her because her father has forbidden her."

Of course, no one heard me make these 'vows', so there was no one to release me from them. Thus, the vow would stand. I would make 'vows' like, "I vow that I am pregnant if I don't touch this wall 10 times." Of course, then the doubt would enter...did I touch the wall 10 times?, etc. I had a mantra that I would repeat: "Not pregnant no matter what." Sometimes it would be attached to a condition, such as, "Not pregnant no matter what, if I touch the table 10 times." Or, "Not pregnant no matter what, if I do or do not touch my pen 3 times." You see, I'd make counter-vows to make sure I wasn't going to get pregnant.

The funny thing is that even now, I still repeat the "Not pregnant no matter what" phrase under my breath or when I'm alone, but I no longer think I'm going to get pregnant. It's more like a representative phrase--I may repeat the "Not pregnant no matter what" when what I really am trying to stave off is the fear of cursing God, not of getting pregnant.

On a side note, the fear of getting pregnant affected my writing. For example, when you draw the letter 'o', sometimes where you start the 'o' and where you end it cross, so you have some of the line inside the 'o', like this:


I would have to rewrite or erase the lines that were inside the 'o', or else that meant pregnancy (you could think of the 'o' as a womb, and the line inside was the baby).

Isn't it funny how even the most irrational fears can have such a complicated, 'logical' structure?