Saturday, April 19, 2008

Me & OCD

I've always told people that I'm pretty confident that I'm borderline obsessive compulsive. I thought that I'd gained control of it in the last couple of years, but I can feel it creeping back up. I love the movie As Good As It Gets because I totally get Jack Nicholson's character. Now obviously that's someone who has full-on OCD, and I'm not anywhere near that extreme. I'm not a germaphobe who obsessively washes my hands or anything like that. I'm just all about evenness and not stepping on the cracks! For instance, when I was walking home from the gym just now, my left heel hit a crack in the sidewalk on accident. Now for most people, this is absolutely no problem. But for me, it sends this shiver up my spine and I have to naturally hit a crack in the exact spot on my right heel. Like I said evenness! Used to, when I would accidentally brush up against a wall or something on one side, I absolutely had to do it on the other side. And everything had to be neatly stacked and arranged on my desk or I couldn't sleep at night. It's things like that that I gained control of in the last few years. But the crack thing really threw me for a loop tonight, so I'm gonna have to work on this some more. The only thing I can't seem to shake is my obsession with even numbers. Odd numbers make me feel weird. I can't lock the door once. Nope, it has to be two times. I can't set my alarm clock once, it has to be two or four times. And I count like nobody's business. I'm constantly counting in my head - the number of steps I take, the number of stairs I climb, so on and so forth. Sometimes it's the total number of whatever I'm counting, but more often than not it's just obsessively counting from 1-6 and starting over. I wonder what exactly causes this? Luckily for me, it doesn't really affect my life too terribly much, so I don't feel the need to seek any mental help. Hopefully it won't spin out of control any further and I'll just remain borderline. That I can handle.

1 comment:

Greg, Kristy, and John Lleyton said...

Terri, I will forever remain borderline OCD with you. I feel your pain. We can be OCD sistas!