Sometimes being too logical is a setback for being able to chill out and just simply be. I’ll very openly admit that.

Ivan

My compulsions have decreased as I’ve gotten older.

One thing that’s happened in the past 8 months or so is that when I’m walking with my 5-year-old son, who is paying attention to the sidewalk and either avoiding cracks or stepping on all of them, I need a few steps to observe his pattern, and then I match it, or we get all out of sync in the walking. And there’s something relaxing about getting into his pattern, joining him in his compulsion.

I was talking to Leif about how I once wasted nearly 45 minutes at work because I couldn’t stop admiring the aesthetics of a curl in a piece of clip art — and he told me that the idea of those Celtic crosses with all the ornate patterns carved on them was to assist people in achieving some kind of spiritual trance — y’know, by staring at ’em. I did not know that.

And O convenient woe to us — we both have very curly hair!

Oh, AND — gonna shut up real soon — I must, upon creating any text document, hit at least one (preferably two) returns before I begin typing letters. I also skip down a number of spaces on handwritten notes. I can’t stand any written document that doesn’t have a nice fat letterhead. I even skip down a couple of spaces when I enter comments on this site, though I don’t believe it ever translates in HTML. Though I’m still fairly satisfied with the spacing on these pages . . . nice’n’even. : P

I wish I could say more about this, but it’s hard to open up about it, partly because at one point we had a lot of ‘delusional’ (in the sense that they’d be perceived that way by psychiatry, not that I myself find the word particularly useful) ideas around what would happen if we did and didn’t do certain things, ideas that we could control whether people lived or died and affect things in other parts of the world. Hard to get close to that. Not because I am ashamed. It is just personal, and tangled, and complex, and hard to explain in the details.

…and then, also, there’s the fact that since we no longer do most of the things we did when doctors considered us to have “very bad OCD,” and can generally predict when we’re going to start tending towards those behaviors again, we fear talking about it at all because of that entire business about “Well, if you really have stopped feeling/doing those things, and you went off your medications, and don’t see a therapist about it, then you must not have ever had real OCD or ever have been severely afflicted. You obviously never had the real version of it.” …even if our “fake version” at one point resembled ideas of the “real version” in every way, from washing our hands dozens of times a day to spending hours doing certain things to try to keep certain thoughts and mental images away.

I actually think a lot of that fear was tied into the fact that I never knew when I was sick until it was, um, really obvious, so I developed all these superstitions about what was likely to make me sick and what made me sick, etc. Like, if I got sick when wearing a particular shirt I’d never want to wear that shirt again, because I’d think it was “cursed” or something like that. Eventually I realized I was being superstitious and that there was no empirical evidence that clothing or rituals could actually have any effect on whether I got sick or not, so that was the end of that, but it did last a number of years in childhood.

I also used to be afraid of certain buildings — like a local discount store in CT, and (for a while) the public library where I grew up. At the time, all I knew was that I didn’t want to go into them and that I had a horrible feeling of dread associated with them. I do remember, though, at one point realizing that my issues with the library had to do with “the lighting”, and looking back, I remember that that building did have some nasty horrid flickery fluorescent illumination. So I sort of wonder if whether in my case, the OCD-ish-ness was mainly related to (a) trying to feel like I had control over my body (since being sick was a very traumatic experience for me), and (b) having sensory issues but not knowing what they were. Either way, I don’t doubt that I may have been diagnosably OCD as a child, but I don’t think I’m that way now…perseverations feel very qualitatively different from obsessions. :)

But…

There’s certain kinds of patterns (most strongly a semi-regular pattern full of holes, like a chestnut burr with the spines taken out) where I feel an intense urge to stare and at the same time this bizaare irrational fear of staring, like if I look too long and too deeply something awful is going to happen. I almost always wind up looking away, forcing my eyes to avoid the whatever, so I don’t get sucked in. Irregular honeycomb-looking things are the worst. I have absolutely no idea why.

I also occasionally sort things for relaxation. Pick through a mix of beads and separate them by color, alphabetize my music collection, things like that. It’s not a compulsion, just a comforting thing to do. And while I can eat colored candies (like M&Ms) without sorting them by color, I really prefer to.

Transitions to from fascination to revulsions I don’t recall having. I can’t stand the sensation of wood on my teeth (i.e. popsicle sticks), but that feeling of that would pop into my mind over and over. I never liked that sensation, but I suppose I was kind of fascinated by it. Also, for a time, there was a really unpleasant image of a needle piercing my finger tip (like clear though and out the other side). There’d be a jolt, and flash of pain. What’s odd is that never happened, so I don’t know where the imagery came from.

There were so many other things — my handwriting is bad, so if a letter was mis-formed I’d have to erase it and start over, but then the fuzziness of the erased-on paper would make the letter look sloppy, so I’d erase & re-draw again and again until there’d be a hole in the paper. If I didn’t get started doing that I wouldn’t seem to get stuck in the compulsion, though.

Nowadays all that is 95% gone, though.

Augh, man, thanks so much for this post! I don’t think I’ve ever confessed these compulsions to anybody before . . . it’s so freeing!