BrockLi Soup

It’s been a few weeks since my first post about OCD, and the response has been pretty big (for this blog).

First off, I think a couple people may have read it the wrong way. I wasn’t trying to pull some woe-is-me crap, and I’m certainly not any worse off for it. If anything, I may consider taking meds for it just because it’s irritating.

Now, the real reason I posted that was to get feedback. I wanted to see what other people had to say about it, and see if anyone else had experience with it. JR linked me to a blog post at Penny Arcade from a couple days prior that described something similar. One reader e-mailed me and told me about experiences nearly identical to my own, and not just regarding OCD.

But, as several people pointed out, nothing I mentioned is unusual: everyone gets songs stuck in their head, everyone recounts earlier conversations. As my buddy Brian said, there’s nothing “clinically OCD” about it. The difficulty is identifying the line between normal and obsessive. Obviously, there’s no way that I can look in on someone else’s thoughts and see how they compare. I can’t possibly tell if this happens to other people to the same degree or not. A couple days ago, I woke up with the name Hüsker Dü running through my head. I didn’t know anything about them until I checked Wikipedia, and I have no idea where I heard of them, but their name kept repeating in my head all day. Maybe that kind of thing happens to other people, but I’m guessing not. Stuff like that isn’t harmful or anything, it’s just really irritating - kind of like having an annoying co-worker that won’t shut up, except you can’t even leave the room. Imagine someone sitting in front of you slowly repeating the name “Bob Saget” for about four hours; it’s kind of like that.

I’m sure I have dozens of other oddities that I could list here, but there are two more that I’ve noticed recently. For one, I can’t have one wet hand. If I’m cooking and splash something on one hand, I can’t just rinse it off and be done with it. I need to rinse the other hand too or I feel uneven. I also avoid stepping on lines on the ground - not for any superstitious reason, I just feel uneasy when I do. There’s a parking lot near our apartment that I walk through a lot. They hosted a basketball tournament or something there, so it’s got the lines for a basketball court painted on the ground along with parking spot lines. Not only do I have to avoid all of these, but I ALSO have to avoid stepping where the parking spot lines WOULD fall, if they were connected between adjacent rows. That part? That part’s just stupid.

Maybe I’m just weird. Either way, it was really therapeutic to write that first post. I haven’t been experiencing that stuff as much, but it may just be because I got it off my chest and kind forgot about it. I still haven’t talked to a doctor, and I probably never will unless it gets considerably worse - or my curiosity gets the best of me. I mean, Erin said the difference was incredible once she took meds for a little while, and she had the same “this is just the way it is” mentality I did not too long ago. I can’t help but wonder if things would really be that much different, but I also know that drugs don’t come cheap, so I probably won’t bother.

It’s been a couple months now since Erin pointed out that I may well have Obsessive-compulsive Disorder.

I don’t even know what we were talking about, but I must have mentioned that my mom used to joke that I was OCD - when I was a kid, I would wash my hands all the time. I wasn’t the type that would scrub them incessantly; I just felt like I needed to rinse them off after touching…well, almost anything: the dog, doorknobs, any kind of food - anything.

The problem is that I really don’t know much about OCD. About a decade ago, I read a Reader’s Digest article about a teenage kid that exercised constantly, and there’s a Scrubs episode where Michael J. Fox plays an OCD surgeon, but that’s about all I know of it. Of course, I had never really given it any thought. I don’t know much about mental illness, but it seems that there are a lot more people dealing with mild, manageable forms of illnesses than those who can’t function normally. It makes sense that OCD doesn’t necessarily mean counting steps and touching everything in the room; I don’t know why it never occurred to me that there are probably thousands of people that deal with mild forms of it.

Erin has a little more experience in this than I do. She was diagnosed with OCD when she was a teenager, and took drugs for it for a few years. When she described her symptoms, I started to think she might be right about me having it. The thing is, I don’t know how other people think; it’s just not possible. Until she pointed it out, I just assumed that everybody would get songs and phrases stuck in their head for days at a time. I did some reading online, and WebMD gave me a pretty good list that made her case even stronger.

Here’s what I got:

• Songs stuck in my head: Not whole songs, just a part. Not even songs, necessarily - sometimes, I hear an interesting phrase, and that gets stuck in my head. And I don’t mean that I’m humming a jingle all afternoon, I mean I’m singing two lines of a song for hours (if not days) at a time.
• Hand washing: I still do this more than most people, but less than I did as a kid.
• Spitting: I don’t know if this one counts, but I spit into the sink almost every time I wash my hands. Kind of gross, I know.
• Nail biting: Might just be a nervous habit, but I’ve been doing it since I was like six and I have been completely unable to stop.
• Replaying/rehearsing conversation: After a lot of conversations, I replay parts of it in my head dozens of times, agonizing over things I may has misspoken about, or points I should have made. I also rehearse conversations the same way. Same goes for e-mails and blog posts: if it occurs to me that I’ve got an e-mail to write, or a blog post I want to make, I keep writing and re-wording it in my head until I can get to a computer and type it up.
• Compulsion to document my life: I always feel like I need to track things happening in my life, for reference later. I’ve been tracking movies I watch for a few years. I’ve also been trying to figure out some kind of life tracking web application for a long time, to track people I know, books I read, movies I see, events I go to, trips I take - everything. I feel like I need to be able to look things up later on to see what I did with who and when. I already track some of this in a wiki on my laptop, but I want an easier way to add and link things.
• Runaway imagination: I have a habit of considering the worst case scenario, and then letting my imagination run wild with it. In the five and a half months we’ve been together, I’ve imagined Erin dumping me at least a dozen times. Before we moved in together, Erin lived in a row house, and one night I had myself entirely convinced that the old-house noises were zombies in the attic. And every time I go to the bathroom in the middle of the night, I expect to find a demon staring back at me when I open the door. I know it’s completely and utterly ridiculous, but the image just gets more and more horrible in my mind until I open the door and see, just as I suspected, that nothing is there (except for the time that Erin WAS there and scared the Christ out of me).

I still don’t know if I actually have OCD. I haven’t talked to a doctor, and like I said, I have no idea how other people think, so I can’t tell if any of this is “normal.” I did mention it to my mom and learned that there are other folks with OCD in my family, so she wasn’t entirely joking back when I was a hand-washing kid.

Whether I do have OCD or not, I still haven’t figured out what to do with this information. I was actually literally speechless when Erin first told me, and I haven’t made it much further than that. If anything, I’m more conscious of it, and because I think about it more, it seems like it happens more.

Anyway, I don’t have a good reason for posting this. I doubt that I’ll bother seeing a doctor about it or anything; I mean, I’m obviously getting by, but Erin claims that the difference was incredible when she started taking meds for it. I suppose I’m kind of hoping that other people will chime in with their take on the matter, because I’m curious if anyone else knows what I’m talking about.