So you have your quirks and oddities, but it's always seemed that your "childhood OCD" - the one that required you to buy the same shoes every time and resulted in every single one of your stuffed animals being named Lily - had all but vanished. And aside from the occasional nervous tick you hardly noticed any remnants of it at all.
What do you do when you wake up one day and realized that it never went away at all?
It was recently brought to my attention that a big source of my anxiety(which is a large factor in my depression) was my constant worrying and my inability to let go of things that didn't deserve a second thought. and the more i thought about it, the more it became clear that my thoughts seemed like obsessions....and that maybe that ocd hadn't gone away - it just was in my thoughts. The continuous worry about a conversation i had 5 hours ago, one that had probably been forgotten now. My day being ruined by someone snapping at me, even if the mistake i made wasn't that bad. The constant worry of something that might potentially happen, but wasn't actually an issue yet. Things that normal people can forget about, things i should be able to get over or at least put out of my mind for a while. But I can't.
I started thinking about it and how to try and break the cycle of obsessive thought. And then i started to think about if the OCD popped up in other ways that i might not having noticed. And i realized... i almost always wash my hands twice. And i wash them if they ever feel slightly dirty. I always take my shower in a particular order, washing my hair last. Messing with the order can really confuse things. It bothers me to see someone wash dishes improperly - and when i say bothers me, i mean i have to REMOVE myself from the room to keep from grabbing the dish out of their hands. And that's not even counting my unconscious need to create equality when something brushes against my hand a certain way and i have to replicate the feeling on the other hand. And all that just made me realize that all these little quirks are little obsessions. It's not even remotely near to they way OCD is usually portrayed, like having to flip the light switch 30 times or Monk style, where it's almost impossible to have a normal social interaction. Even my art if effected by it. Do you know why i used to sketch but i rarely do it anymore? I spend forever trying to draw something, but i can never get it quite right. I have all this stuff pictured in my head, but i can't get it on the paper, and then i get so frustrated that i give up and just rip the whole thing up or put it away forever.
And yet i still create art. I now draw with charcoal mostly, and i only recently realized why. With charcoal you can never get things quite perfect because even if you are quite careful, it will always, ALWAYS smudge, and you can never fully erase it. The possibility of perfection isn't even there, so there's no point in trying. Only when i put this into words did i realize that it was almost a perfect metaphor for my life. Surely if i can find a way to get around that in art, i can figure out some way to stop the anxiety ridden cycle of obsessive worrying. I just need to find it.
But today I'm having a good day. Somehow, after working 8 days in a row, my brain just decided "fuck it, I'm taking a day off." I woke up late, set up dinner to cook, returned a long overdue package, made a healthy lunch, got some exercise, walked to the local bakery for a cupcake, gave some friends some cookies, and now I'm sitting in a coffee shop on a beautiful day with a live jam band playing, and I'm having a pretty good day. Maybe it's because I'm mentally right here, right now, enjoy the moment for what it is. That's something i can rarely capture, but obviously i need to work on it. Cuz this feels pretty damn good :)
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