Shawn Hopkins
08-26-2008, 10:36 AM
So, I was just reading David Sedaris' Naked and laughing at "A Plague of Tics," an essay in which he describes in hilarious detail the obsessive behavior that governed his life when he was a child, from his compulsion to lick lightswitches to his need to constantly shake his head, roll his eyes and make strange high pitched noises. It reminded me of a little of an excerpt I saw of a comic called "Fun Home" by Alison Bechdel, which also contains a girl whose life is ruled by compulsive rituals.
These things really strike a chord with me because I grew up doing something similar. I don't believe in diagnosing one's self with a psychiactric disorder so I'm not going to claim to have had OCD because I never went to a doctor, but there was definitely something wrong in my head.
It didn't really mainifest itself in touching things. I mean, I did have to compulsively touch things sometimes and you would have noticed if you watched me, but it wasn't that extreme. And you might see me check the stove or something a few more times than normal once in a while and I got briefly obsessed with cleaning my ears, but otherwise there weren't a lot of outward symptoms. Well, I did insist on dressing oddly, only wearing IIRC black slacks and not jeans.
But inside my head, it was a living hell. I simply couldn't think straight because of an overwhelming sense that something terrible would happen and the only way to stave it off was a series of increasingly more complex mental rituals, which I thought of as "my words," to ward away everything from something bad happening to a member of my family to me accidentally slipping up and selling my soul. Sometimes these would play on a constant loop in my head and sometimes I would be forced to whisper them sometimes or they would be ineffective.
I loved to read, but even that became a nightmare eventually, because I found that I always had to go back and read and reread every sentence several times, sounding out the punctuation. Sometimes I thought I was going crazy.
I didn't even know other people did things like this until I read an article in a magazine about an OCD girl who flipped out on her parents because she had to have a movie rewound to see a name in the credits. That was one of my things. Finding out that people would consider what was wrong with me a psychiatric disease scared me more than comforted me, though, and I didn't tell anybody about it for fear of being put on medication.
I don't know why I stopped doing it. I think my innate and overpowering laziness played a big role, because the litany was so time consuming that eventually I was able to consolidate it down into shorter and shorter phrases until I didn't need to think/say them at all anymore. I still do have the odd compulsion, but I find I can choose not to act on them and it won't kill me. And I do think some of my behavior is compulsive. The way I watch DVDs involves a lot of rewinding and listening to certain phrases over and over again and no tolerance for missing even the tiniest bit of dialogue, which I admit is kind of weird.
So did anyone else have to grapple with compulsive behaviors, either growing up or later in life? Describe them and the impact they had on your life, in detail if you can because that makes for a more interesting story.
These things really strike a chord with me because I grew up doing something similar. I don't believe in diagnosing one's self with a psychiactric disorder so I'm not going to claim to have had OCD because I never went to a doctor, but there was definitely something wrong in my head.
It didn't really mainifest itself in touching things. I mean, I did have to compulsively touch things sometimes and you would have noticed if you watched me, but it wasn't that extreme. And you might see me check the stove or something a few more times than normal once in a while and I got briefly obsessed with cleaning my ears, but otherwise there weren't a lot of outward symptoms. Well, I did insist on dressing oddly, only wearing IIRC black slacks and not jeans.
But inside my head, it was a living hell. I simply couldn't think straight because of an overwhelming sense that something terrible would happen and the only way to stave it off was a series of increasingly more complex mental rituals, which I thought of as "my words," to ward away everything from something bad happening to a member of my family to me accidentally slipping up and selling my soul. Sometimes these would play on a constant loop in my head and sometimes I would be forced to whisper them sometimes or they would be ineffective.
I loved to read, but even that became a nightmare eventually, because I found that I always had to go back and read and reread every sentence several times, sounding out the punctuation. Sometimes I thought I was going crazy.
I didn't even know other people did things like this until I read an article in a magazine about an OCD girl who flipped out on her parents because she had to have a movie rewound to see a name in the credits. That was one of my things. Finding out that people would consider what was wrong with me a psychiatric disease scared me more than comforted me, though, and I didn't tell anybody about it for fear of being put on medication.
I don't know why I stopped doing it. I think my innate and overpowering laziness played a big role, because the litany was so time consuming that eventually I was able to consolidate it down into shorter and shorter phrases until I didn't need to think/say them at all anymore. I still do have the odd compulsion, but I find I can choose not to act on them and it won't kill me. And I do think some of my behavior is compulsive. The way I watch DVDs involves a lot of rewinding and listening to certain phrases over and over again and no tolerance for missing even the tiniest bit of dialogue, which I admit is kind of weird.
So did anyone else have to grapple with compulsive behaviors, either growing up or later in life? Describe them and the impact they had on your life, in detail if you can because that makes for a more interesting story.