I can only speak for my own brand of #OCD. I'm not #HowieMandel who has come clean (metamorphically and literally) regarding his #ObsessiveCompulsiveDisorder, and right now I can't think of any other celebs who have been tortured by this anxiety disorder. You may think it's all about checking doors and stoves or counting the number of times you must touch a wall. Or you may think it's a clean-freak disorder in which you must wash your hands a certain number of times or take a shower five times a day until you feel the ugly nervous gnawing in your throat disappear.
Well, my type of #OCD was like none of the above. It's probably not unique in psychiatric circles, but I have never met anyone who behaved in a manner similar to mine. Of course, few people would telegraph this #disorder since it's nothing you'll ever win awards for. First off, as far as I can figure, my OCD came as the direct result of way too much #anxiety. Some of the #anxiety was genetic, and some I inhaled by osmosis from the wackadoodle household I grew up in. The OCD preceded my chronic #depression by a good five to ten years.
It worked like this. I would be plugging along like a normal person until I either thought I made a mistake or actually did make a mistake. It didn't matter whether the mistake was big or little or true or false. In my mind I had to neutralize the mistake in some way as soon as possible. So, for instance, if I was driving and doing so in an automatic way like so many people do when they're repeating the same route to work or school five days a week, I might get anxious when I realized I couldn't really remember making this turn or getting onto this highway. The fact I couldn't remember this would exacerbate my #anxiety to such a degree that I would have to do something about it ASAP. It didn't matter if I was involved in another activity, such as teaching a class or having a conversation with a colleague. I still would have to simultaneously re-experience in my mind that driving behavior I felt I did poorly; I would have to recall it and correct it. And I couldn't just single out one or two mistakes. I'd have to begin from the start, see myself in the driver's seat backing out of the driveway and making all the moves that took me to my destination. I would have to do this from the top of the driving experience to make certain in my mind that I hadn't run over anyone, caused a collision, or broken any laws.
Trying to do two things simultaneously isn't easy. It's not like talking on the phone and eating a package of oreos at the same time. My sandwich like thinking would increase my tension, not decrease it, so even though reducing my anxiety was the end goal, obsessing over a drive to work or the exact words a professor used when teaching a lesson (while my broken brain was thinking about something else) never really worked in the longterm. It would work only in the shortterm by keeping me sane, but in general the OCD was counterproductive, depleted my energy and my productivity, and isolated me from others. How did it isolate me? Well, you try making intelligent conversation when your mind is spewing out a non-stop internal dialogue of mistakes, retakes, mistakes, retakes.
I wish I could say there was a funny part to OCD, but although touching your nose 20 times might sound goofy and something to laugh about at the local pizza bistro, obsessing about a possible mistake is hardcore nutso. It is not a voluntary activity; it's based on a need to quell anxiety.
And that's how I lived life for a number of years until one day or one month, I suddenly (it seemed that way) outgrew it. The shrink at the time told me this wasn't unusual--it wasn't a miracle that had been answered by a benevolent deity. My explanation for it (although far from scientific) is that my short-term memory was starting to decline. This subtle deterioration was a good thing for someone like me because it meant that my recall of possible mistakes became too numerous for me to keep up with. When my brain gave up this defense mechanism, it was like a breath of fresh air for me for the five seconds before depression crept into the corner of my grey matter.
Some psychologists believe that depression is anxiety turned inward, and for a negative person like me who sees risks and dangers around every corner, there may be a solid basis for this explanation.
Of course depression comes with its own nifty bag of tricks and torments: guilt, melancholy, exaggeration, low self esteem, just to name a few. The best way to beat it is to laugh at it because so much of depression sprouts from seeds of blindness. #Depression usually blinds people to their assets and their capabilities. So when I get the gloomies and everything looks bleak, I have to remind myself to remove the darkened lenses from my eyes or else those lies will hide the truth.
The best way to remove that ugly lens is to grab onto any subject and tell a funny story about it. So, for example, when the gloomies got to me recently, I watched my two "therapy" cats until I saw them stealing a toy from the dogs--a fake banana. Pretty soon in my mind I began to invent the story of The Monkey-Cat from the Jungles of Borneo. Next time it may be how the two cats wrestle with one another.
If you can tell yourself a humorous story, that's great! If you can't and need help, come to this blog and check out my stories. They'll remind you that we all are dysfunctional to some degree. Heal those hurts with humor.
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