You are not ‘sooo OCD’ because you like to clean.
For a year and a half now, I have consciously lived with what I now know to be Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, a mental health condition categorized by excessive, repetitive, and distressing thoughts, or obsessions, and repetitive actions in hopes of easing those thoughts, known as compulsions.
OCD takes what you love, it takes your values, your identity, your morals, your self-trust and anything else it can possibly get its grimy hands on and uses it against you. It forces horrifying intrusive thoughts into your brain that go against every moral standard you can possibly hold.
It is not enjoyable.
I told myself that I was “f–ing crazy.” I cried about something being wrong with me. I believed it. I didn’t understand how my own mind could turn against me.
Every day was war.
With what my disorder has put me through, I can almost pinpoint the exact moments where OCD poked and prodded me even as a child. Most prominently, bedtime.
I repeated my prayers again and again to keep my grandparents from dying because I hadn’t said them right the first time. I would get out of bed and run down the stairs to make sure my dad had locked the basement door. From there I would do it again after I got back upstairs ‘just to be sure’ it was actually locked, and then again. When I spent the night at my grandparents’ house or even in my own home, I would do the same thing for the front door. Check and check and check to make sure the doors were locked and no one could get in – every single night.
I didn’t want to do it, but my mind told me I had to, “just to be sure.” I couldn’t trust myself.
Just as my disorder attacked bedtime in childhood, it also did that as I grew into a teenager, but it only escalated. That’s when I became truly terrified.
I did the checking to make sure the doors were locked. This time because if I didn’t my mom would die in her sleep or someone would break into my house and murder my family. I would wake up and somehow be framed for their murder, awaiting my prison sentence.
Before I went to bed, I needed to turn the handle on the door to the basement exactly five times and count out loud to make sure it was locked. If it didn’t feel right or my count was off, I needed to restart, this time my count going up to seven – and again to ten if that didn’t work.
Everything had to be unplugged before I left. If it wasn’t, my house would catch on fire.
I had to take my earrings out before bed. Not doing so would mean my Grandpa Jack would die.
Driving was another thing that terrified me. Getting behind the wheel meant facing the likelihood that my brain would deceive me yet again.
I was prone to getting stuck in driving loops ten to fifteen-minutes long. Whether it was a weird sound coming from my car, hitting a pothole, an uneven road, or merely hyper-fixating on an animal I saw walking down the street, I convinced myself I hit something. So, in compulsory OCD fashion, I’d turn my car around and drive by the same spot because refusing to do so would mean I would be arrested. That only offered temporary relief because I’d do it again, and again, and again before I forced myself to leave.
I ruminated on my obsessions inside my head. I reviewed past experiences again and again, sometimes remembering instances that never truly occurred. Compulsory behavior isn’t just physical, it’s mental too.
This by no means depicts my entire experience with OCD, but what it does depict is my life. This is my day to day.
My diagnosis offered me solace, but my medication has not and will not rid me of OCD entirely. OCD still finds ways to attack what I know deep down to be true – it’s called the doubt disorder for a reason. Even knowing that it’s not productive, I still find myself carrying out some ridiculous, but seemingly necessary, uncorrelated action from time to time to remedy the anxiety of my thoughts.
Medication simply makes the noise less loud. It makes it manageable. It does not stop the noise completely.
When you say that you are ‘sooo OCD’ because you like to clean, you minimize my lived experience and that of about 3 million adults and 500,000 children in the United States, and millions of others around the globe. You reinforce stereotypes surrounding OCD, perpetuate misinformation, and contribute to an ongoing stigma that makes it difficult for us to be open and honest about what we are experiencing.
I do not find any joy in driving around the block over and over. I don’t find joy in twisting the door handle five and seven times or being alone with awful, terrifying thoughts I didn’t ask for.
And I most certainly do not find joy in OCD.