part 1: how to hide your OCD
*from yourself
I was the last person to find out I had Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. Twenty-three months ago ago, I sent this email to my now-therapist:
She replied “I love weird anxiety!” and we set up a consultation for later that week.
In our first session, she told me that my symptoms were consistent with mild obsessive compulsive disorder and because it only manifests in certain locations (mostly my apartment) I was able to successfully hide it from most people in my life — including myself.
When I texted my friends “I have OCD” one of them (hi, Mariah) not-so-gently replied “I thought you knew that?”
I didn’t know that. Having only ever learned about OCD from television, I assumed that because I was not washing my hands for an hour a day, counting my steps, or repeatedly touching the same few objects in the house, I did not have OCD. I just had anxiety that was a little, well, weird. Even now, I sometimes feel guilty (?) saying I have OCD, because I am managing it well right now. I have mental health imposter syndrome.
And I don’t primarily have OCD. I have anxiety, and the OCD rears its very well organized head when I am too anxious for too long. A lot of my compulsions were, at one point in my life, very helpful strategies for survival that simply went too far, and now stay by my side when I feel unbalanced.
Most of my compulsions involve cleaning, because my primary obsession is a fear of contamination and dirt. This made treatment tricky, something my therapist was quick to acknowledge — cleaning can be a healthy coping mechanism, not to mention something objectively necessary to do every few days.
I learned that, for me, the best way to manage my symptoms is to interrupt them. Because the ritual and the process are the essential parts of my OCD, disrupting those processes can unravel the whole tightly-contained ordeal. But first, let’s review what OCD does to my strange little brain.
Fear of contamination or dirt. This is King symptom, the foundation to the whole house of cards. If I don’t manage my symptoms, this manifests in cleaning nearly constantly. At my worst, I was cleaning for 30-45 minutes before work, 1-2 hours every night after work, and 4-6 hours on Sundays.
When the rituals and symptoms start to affect your ability to function, then it’s no longer considered mild. I didn’t know this was a line I could cross so many times, having severe OCD sometimes and mild OCD other times. Because it’s contingent on my anxiety, that’s exactly what happens. For more than a year, I was late to work at least 2-3 times a week — only ever by 10-15 minutes, and I would come in along with other stragglers to start the work day so it never seemed too bad. But unlike coworkers who maybe stopped for coffee or encountered the infinite MTA delays, I was usually late because I was cleaning my Already Very Clean apartment.
Following a strict routine. I knew I needed help when I realized I was physically incapable of making my morning coffee & getting the cat her breakfast unless I did it in a very specific order, down to which hand picked up the fork and where I put down the cat’s arthritis medicine. If I didn’t do it in the same order, or something disrupted the routine, the day was ruined and I spent all day looking forward to trying again the next morning.
Intrusive thoughts. “Your hands are dirty” is one of my most common ones. This leads to a lot of covert hand sanitizing, unnecessary trips to the bathroom to wash my hands, and a rigorous cleaning of everything I touch throughout the day. The other intrusive thought is “your scalp is dirty,” which leads to:
Hair pulling. I didn’t know this was what I was doing, and I’ve been doing it since middle school. I used to spend over an hour every day sitting on the bathroom sink, staring at my parent’s vanity mirror, and carefully plucking hairs from my head that looked wrong. I can’t tell you what makes a hair right or wrong (which, wow! who knew that mental illness wasn’t logical!). I didn’t know what hair pulling was, and even if I did, I wouldn’t have believed what I was doing counted as “hair pulling.” I was hair plucking. I was using tweezers, not my hands. My hair was not coming out in clumps while I had a breakdown. Nothing about this habit was hair pulling. In college, when I shared a bathroom with 20-some girls in my freshman dorm and could no longer spend an hour diligently removing the incorrect hairs on my head, I stopped hair pulling. But the intrusive thoughts remained: Your scalp is dirty, and these hairs are wrong. Enter:
Skin picking. I started to scratch my scalp raw in very small sections, believing that 1) no one could see what I was doing, and 2) I was removing dead skin cells, so actually this was healthy. My scalp would scab overnight, and I would spend all day re-picking those spots raw. Even now I fall into this pattern when I’m anxious, and my head is covered in small bumps, scar tissue from where my body finally managed to heal by sealing my scalp off, impenetrable to my nails.
Okay, friends. This is already too long, and my scalp is starting to tingle because I’m thinking about it too much.
I will say that things are better now. Two years of diligent therapy and very long, nearly unbearable weeks of slowly breaking down my compulsions did, in fact, pay off. My therapist told me that maybe I should write about this journey, what it’s been like for me to regain so much time lost to these obsessions and compulsions.
I’ve never been an addict (caffeine is legal and therefore does not count) but I feel like I’m in recovery right now, on the other side of something that took over my life for so long. More on that later.
If you’d like to be around for part two and haven’t yet, please do a subscribe now. And if you have OCD or want to talk about it, my Twitter DMs are open @ByErinWeaver.