OCD, take my hand and come with me

I really love my therapist, Cassandra, but she has this annoying habit of wanting me to work on myself.

Eye roll, am I right?

If it’s not one thing, it’s another. When I first started working with her it was working on my anxiety which was a thing I actually wanted to do. Anxiety sucks. Learning how to make it better does not suck. So I was okay with her insistence on my self improvement in that area.

Then somehow all the mean things I said about myself and non-existent self confidence made her think that I should work on my self-esteem. UGH what a cringe-fest that was (and is, as I continue to avoid it).

She has asked me to talk through past traumas, forcing me to face reality in areas where I was perfectly fine living in delusion, thank you.

At my last appointment a conversation about routines led to a deeper conversation about my OCD, a charming little sidecar that often comes attached to anxiety disorder. She asked me how invasive the OCD was to my life and I said, “Not really that bad.” I then proceeded to talk for about thirty minutes describing just a handful of the various rituals I do on a daily basis.

“I think we should work on this,” she said.

“That makes me very nervous,” I said.

“I can tell, you’ve been nervous the whole time you’ve been talking about it.”

It’s annoying how well she can read me. Eye roll again.

On my way home from the appointment I thought I should maybe start a list on my phone of all of the rituals I do, just to have them all in one place for the next session. But when I realized that as I parked the car, walked in the apartment, fed the cat, went to the bathroom, signed on my computer, and laid down to watch a show I performed at least eight different OCD based rituals in as many minutes, I figured she was probably right. It’s time to deal with this thing.

Let me start by saying I DON’T WANT TO. I DON’T WANT TO FIX MY OCD. I FIND COMFORT IN MY LITTLE RITUALS, THEY MAKE ME FEEL BETTER, WHY CAN’T I KEEP DOING THEM, WHO CARES???

Cassandra cares, that’s who. And damn it if she’s not going to come up with a plan for me to kick these little habits even though they bring me peace and calm and let me sleep at night. UGH SO MUCH EYE ROLLING.

My OCD rituals are all related to safety for me, or at least what I perceive as safety. A lot of them are related to keeping myself from throwing up, i.e. “if the last thing I see in the mirror is my pinkie finger than anything that goes wrong in my body will be with my pinkie finger and not my stomach and I will not throw up.” Others are connected to things I really care about. For instance, when I was dating my first boyfriend I had a whole bunch of rituals that, in my mind, ensured that we would not break up. I got it into my head that on our nightly phone calls we had to say good night exactly the same way every night. I forced him to start over many a time until we got it exactly right, at which point we could hang up the phone and go to sleep. It’s amazing we dated as long as we did, to be honest.

Over time the rituals change as my stress and anxiety levels shift, as major events happen in life, as the things I care deeply about change. Right now one of the things I care deeply about is my cat, so I have little rituals around feeding him. When I put food in his bowl I set it down in front of him on the floor. While he starts inhaling the food, I have to pet him with both hands straight down his back eleven times, the last time ending with my left hand running all the way down to the tip of his tail. Then I can leave him to eat in peace. If he squirms away when I’m on pet number eight, I have to follow him and start over again from one. (Thankfully he’s focused when he eats so he rarely squirms.) Why eleven times? Because eleven is a lucky number. Why all the way down the tail with the left hand specifically? Can’t really say, but I can tell you that at one point I had a reason. The reason is long gone, but the ritual remains. And for some reason the ritual makes me feel safe, like I have done everything I can to care for my cat and that nothing bad will happen to either one of us.

That is how it is with my OCD. If I skip a ritual or cannot do it “right” for some reason, I am unsettled. I have to repeat it until I get it right. Sometimes this means standing in the kitchen at the end of the night being so exhausted and ready for sleep, but I can’t go to bed yet because I haven’t hit exactly the right stride walking past the kitchen table. Or sometimes I’m late for work because in my sleepiness I can’t seem to get the pattern right for walking out of the bathroom so I have to do it three times. Sometimes it means I spend more time than I want to reading because I cannot stop in the middle of a chapter and the last chapter ended on a “bad” number page, so I have to get to the end of the next chapter.

It’s keeping my pills in the same paper bag from the pharmacy that I got three years ago, even though it is falling apart and can hardly be called a bag anymore.

It’s always parking in the second or the fifth parking spot from the end of the row.

It’s ritualistically setting my alarms using Siri every night.

It’s the direction that my shoes have to point when I take them off.

It’s the last capital letters I have to see on any road signs I pass.

None of it makes any sense except to me. I have my reasons, even if I cannot remember what they are anymore. I know these things make me feel safe, make me feel like I have some control over the uncontrollable.

Which I don’t. I know I don’t actually have control. But that makes me nervous, and so we cycle back to the rituals, maybe adding a new one here or there.

I am actually quite lucky in that my OCD is shy. It doesn’t always come out in front of people. Or, more accurately, when I have the compulsions in front of people I either excuse myself to take care of them or tell myself that I can do the behavior later when I am alone. I think that is why I told Cassandra that my OCD doesn’t really influence my daily life too much; it honestly doesn’t feel like it most of the time. I’m so used to living like this that it really only bothers me sometimes.

And cue the Cassandra voice in my head: “Sometimes can quickly become all the time.” “You don’t deserve to be bothered by your own compulsive behavior.” “You can do this!” “It will be tough, but you will feel better in the long run.”

UGHHH how dare she be so supportive and believe in me and shit? How is it possible that this person I pay to listen to my basic nonsense every two weeks actually cares and wants me to feel better purely for myself? And, worst of all, how rude of her to be absolutely right about the whole thing!

Begrudgingly I admit that this is a thing I should work on. And so, once more unto the breach. I will follow the plan to fight the OCD. And just like with everything else since I’ve started working with Cassandra, I won’t believe that it will work. I will remain a reluctant participant and skeptic in my own treatment until she pushes me enough and I eventually prove myself wrong.