Everyone knows the basic meaning of what it is to be OCD. But if there are any under-a-rockers reading this, obsessive compulsive disorder is a blanket term to describe an ailment that causes a person to do weird things for no apparent reason.
If my own personal experience is any indicator, I would say that the majority of us can relate with this to a certain extent. It seems we all have our own little quirks, as I’m sure either you, or someone you know, likes to set their car radio volume to a particular increment; say a multiple of five, for instance. Or, as Ducky from Land Before Time would approve, perhaps you try to avoid stepping on the little lines separating individual tiles in your favorite grocery store.
At first glance, this is somewhat of a silly “haha you do that too” idiosyncrasy. But for the people who are *really* plagued by these kinds of behaviors, it can dominate a significant portion of their everyday lives.
I know this because I happen to be one of those very individuals. For as long as I can remember, my mind has made me think and/or do the strangest things for no reason whatsoever. The aforementioned things hardly even scratch the surface, because yes, I have to set my volume in increments of five. And not only do I hate stepping on lines, I put forth an unreasonable amount of effort to ascertain I step over them with my right foot, specifically. And if the store has square tiles? God help me, because I’ll do my damndest to make sure my foot steps in between them without breaching their perimeter.
I could probably write an entire book on how many little things like that go through my mind on a day to day basis, but to summarize it with one more example, here’s one of the weirder things just so you’re fully acquainted with how annoying it is to live like this (I picked this one because its actually kind of funny).
My mom always taught me to be nice to people, and I adored her. So, when I was a kid, I developed this bizarre idea after watching an X-Men cartoon that if I were to ever have laser beams emitted from my eyes, I would kill someone by looking at them directly. Which, of course, would disappoint her, as that wouldn’t be very nice. So when I would finish interacting with someone, be it a conversation, listening to my baseball coach, a date, what have you…I would always end it by looking at something on their person that wouldn’t laser beam them to death. The last thing I would look at would be something like a piece of hair, a shirt collar, bill of a hat, whatever. Anything as long as my beams wouldn’t penetrate their body.
Over time, I began to realize more and more how strange I probably came off to people by doing stuff like this. It would make the other person think I’m subtly acknowledging an imperfection or something. Messed up hair, wrinkled shirt, whatever. Which wasn’t at all what I was doing, but it probably appeared that way nonetheless.
As time has passed, I’ve tried to make myself more aware of these things, because as dumb as it sounds, it actually does affect the way people perceive me. If they don’t know I have OCD, it’s very likely that they’re thinking I’m weird when I touch the volume button with my right hand without actually changing the level, just so my left hand isn’t the last one that touched it (like I said, I could go on for days with these examples).
Fortunately, I know there’s a lot of people out there who share these kinds of quirks. It’s good to know I’m not the only one, and that plenty of others probably get weird looks when they do this kind of thing in front of normal people (sure, laser beams are probably on the more severe side of things but you get my point). That said, please feel free to share your own if you have any.
If nothing else, at least we can laugh at ourselves for being weirdos, right? (Not left).
How the World Should Work 