My Experience With OCD

Welcome to my first ever spacehey blog. Im not sure what im going to make of this account but i would like to make more blogs around health and wellbeing. Today though, im going to be talking about my experience with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder from where it started, to the heaviest periods of obsessive paranoia, and to where i stand now. 

Im going to break this long essay down into around 8 headed paragraphs that follow this key: 

1. Roots
2.  Pet That Dawg
3. Liar Liar The Wall Is on Fire
4. Behind the Blind
5. Refresh and Breathe
6. A+ or Nothing At All
7. Midnight Flood
8. What Now

Roots 

Now when I sat down to start writing this section of the paper I was a bit caught off guard when i started to try and think of a specific event that set all of these habits ablaze and I realized that I simply didn't know. Now its to say that during my childhood and only up until recently that I had been living in an environment that was itself verbally abusive due to substance abuse. My father has always been an alcoholic, at least for as long as I can remember and would sometimes become verbally abusive toward my mother and I, but this blog isn't about him but it is important to say due to the stresses of childhood, my father's habits to obsessively clean when he was intoxicated and other negative factors, that could have been something that effected me negatively in terms of a few of my paranoid obsessive compulsive behaviours. I also grew up in a time period where the internet was suddenly very accessible and unfortunately, not that anyone is to blame-- i was left unsupervised on the interweb and also led me to later in life fall into some of the habits mentioned in the chapter Refresh and Breathe. Now with almost all of the fine roots out of the way lets get started into the next chapter. 

Pet That Dawg

I think this was one of the first instances of my obsessive compulsions that truly stood out to me when I look back on it and of course im sure there were many instances before this that could have been worse but apparently I cant remember it. When I was 14 or even 13 at the time, my first year of highschool, my father and I would sit outside on the deck in the mornings and wait for the bus with our dog. We wouldn't talk much but my mind was always so busy in the mornings to fit into that strict routine i had made for myself before i went off to school down to the very minutes it would take me to lounge around on my phone before getting dressed. One morning while me and my father in our comfortable silence waited for the bus on the deck, i decided to pet my dog. im not sure how the habit started in my mind but I would make sure i would always pet the dog with an even amount of strokes before i saw the bus come out from the tree line otherwise it wouldn't count. This habit in particular would make or break my day, not that anything bad would happen but i sure believed it would and it would throw me off for the rest of the day to the point i even started to text my mom in the morning about having headaches and feeling sick while on the trip to school just to see if there was a chance someone could pick me up and take me home because in my mind i swore that something awful might just happen because I didn't "Pet the dog right". Thankfully for me, this habit faded out around the end of my first year of highschool after COVID 19 stopped us from attending in person classes for a few years. 

Liar Liar The Wall Is On Fire

This is another habit thats pretty old, to the point I cant even really pinpoint when it started and this is one that I still do to this day! I always check the outlets. My bed is located in a bit of an alcove where the one side of the bed is pressed against the wall where the outlet is located and I usually have something plugged into that outlet like an extension cord running to the end of my bed for a fan and a light and charger and so on. Now, someone told me a long time ago that if i slept with my phone in my bed while plugged in, that it could heat up and cause a fire while i slept (Most likely to attempt to go to sleep early at night instead of being up late on my phone), This in combination with me learning about internal wall fires due to electrical shortages in outlets and switches in grade school caused me to become seriously worried about these "possible random fires". Granted, the obsessive behaviour around me and checking my outlets for heat, checking to see if the plug is fully and correctly inside the socket or completely unplugging the cord from the wall has lessened significantly, I still occasionally-when it strikes me check the outlet and make sure its properly inserted before leaving my house, But I have  managed to force myself to leave without checking it a few times for the sake of growing. One time maybe a year ago I had an episode where i was feeling up my wall near one of the outlets in my home because i swore i felt heat emanating from the wall from where I had plugged my charger into but That in truth has been the worst of it (I still haven't used that specific outlet since.)

Behind The Blind

This habit and more of a paranoid idea of mine started during the first few years of the COVID Lockdowns and is one of two different habits that started during this time (the other being the Refresh and Breathe chapter). Now as i said before, Behind the Blind was a big nothing created in my head after I realized just how scary home invasions were. Now it all might sound silly which i can agree on now that it isn't an on going worry of mine and that im clear headed, it indeed does sound silly.. However!! at the time i felt that i was the height of my worries! I live out pretty rurally and the community is pretty tight nit but to me for a period of time I always felt that someone was watching me and was out to get me. Every night I would try and close the curtains tight enough so there wasn't a visible gap between the two curtain's so "nobody could see in" and I would go as far as to try and sleep with my blankets over me and sometimes even sleep with my flashlight on to light up the room. This started a bad cycle of staying up as late as I could before falling asleep because in all truth I was too nervous to sleep at night. My only comfort through this time in my life was the friends online who would reassure me of my safety and my mother who tried her best to console me on my worst nights of anxiety which wherever my online friends are now and to my mum, Thank you so much. Like I said before the behaviour with closing the curtains and having to sleep with my back to the wall has long since faded away but there are some nights where that gap in the curtain's makes me a little nervous. 

Refresh and Breathe

This is the second paranoid habit that formed through the latter years of the COVID Lockdowns and is a combination of many small habits fuelled by the same paranoid idea that relates to my past experiences as a child on the unsupervised web back in the mid 2010's. Refresh and Breathe was a habit that consisted of a lot of wild ideas about what an employer in my future might be able to see surrounding my digital footprint. What I would do is I would avoid liking posts on social platforms like Instagram and TikTok unless they already had likes above a couple thousand, I would rapidly refresh my liked feed to make sure I hadn't accidentally liked a post without knowing, And I wouldn't comment or share posts either to avoid my phone knowing what I was watching as if I was some kind of criminal. I stopped talking to online friends and would go weeks without interacting with anyone because I was afraid of texting and would often delete pages of text conversations afterwards to make sure it was "all gone" and would also ask the receiver on the other end to delete their side of the conversations as well. Similar to the Behind the Blinds chapter thank you to those online friends who would agree to delete and help me through those episodes, you mean a lot to me. It was only in the last year or two that things with my anxiety and habits of deleting posts, not interacting online has lessened slightly after talking and working through it in therapy. Although mostly resolved, I still find situations like internet strangers and interacting online in forums to be daunting and with this post in particular i hope to work through these worries even more. 

A+ or Nothing At All

In my country its mandatory in your second year of highschool to attend a class that prepares you for your further education, budgeting, light finances, schooling and scholarships. This class was the true transition for me from middle school expectations to highschool expectations in terms of grades and my work ethics. Similar to how someone told me about how I shouldn't sleep in bed with my phone on charge and how sometimes electrical fires can happen internally, I didn't take the information taught in this class as lightly as I probably should have. I planned the classes I would take the rest of highschool, I planned when and where I would apply to university, I planned my career and any further education, I made plans to organize my finances, and even set a pretty set in stone standard for myself when it came to the type of grades i was "allowed" to get. I became extremely obsessive about what kind of work i was submitting to teachers, how long I would study, and how much extra work I would do to make sure I had some peak grades and of course this doesn't sound bad but when it gets to a point where its A+ or crying and or destructive ideas over a high B, its something to be concerned about. Truthfully my grades look great on my final transcripts and im sure thats the reason that I got into the schools I did but planning life so far in advance really was a detrimental move, and really shot me down in the long run when things fell off my vision board due to life's unexpected events. Although the latter years of highschool i curved these obsessive behaviours around school i still held the pressure to myself regarding anything academic. 

Midnight Flood

This is the last major time in my life that im gonna cover before I move onto the conclusion. This has been the last big Obsessive Compulsive behavioural episode of sorts that lasted around half a year and I was able to curve it around a year ago now. What im referring to is a time in my life where my nightly routine consisted of checking over the bathroom to make sure everything was "in order". I would check everything starting from the sink to the door. I would make sure the tap was off by tapping the handle three times or six times depending on whether i felt like the three taps counted that day, before drying off the under side of the tap and standing there for a few minutes and wait for any leak. I would then take a photo of the tap close up to triple confirm that it was off before moving on. I would make sure the blinds were closed, fix the towels on the rack, close the shower curtain to make sure no mold grew in the curtains, make sure the toilet seat was down and check the litter box to make sure it was clean before exiting the room backwards and making sure i turned the light off and made sure that the door was open just enough for the cat to get in during the night before finally going to sleep. If I forgot about or didn't finish all of the things down my check list i would convince myself that the bathroom would flood in the night and that i would be in major trouble. I would force myself up out of bed if i forgot and myself do the whole thing over again if i forgot to take pictures of the tap which i currently have hundreds of in my camera roll. Im not sure how I stopped doing this habit but since then i have opened up about these past worries with my mother so hopefully if one day start rapidly checking taps ill be able to get her support. 

What Now

If you are actually reading this i congratulate you for reading my 2,407 word essay! and your work will be rewarded by this conclusion; At the current time of posting I have truly been able to think back on the past year revolving around my OCD and I would like to say im quite proud of how ive changed over the last 5 years and I hope i continue to get even better. I hope someone out there reads this and can relate in a strange way, because i know it would have done me a world of difference to feel some sort of hope that i wasn't alone in my feelings and actions. If that happens to be you right now, keep going because there is always a light out there even if you cant quite see it. 

-Clayton.