Growing up dealing with what I suppose you’d call “mild-to-moderate” obsessive-compulsive disorder was a hell of a thing. You might never think that’s what I contend with, if you saw the unorganized state of my bedroom or my bills, but that’s the problem with all the “functioning” neuroses and disorders in our culture, misunderstandings about them tend to proliferate wildly.
It is similar to how the television makes it look like everyone who suffers with Tourette’s must swear like a drunk sailor being eaten by a garbage disposal but really the vast majority of them maybe just have a twitch in their neck or hands you’d never notice unless you knew to look for them. Or how very few on the autism spectrum act like prissy drama queens. as they do on that feculent “Big Bang Theory”. They’re mostly just shy, maybe know a lot about passenger trains.
So too for OCD. The neat freaks exist, sure, but it is only one manifestation of repetitive action for the purposes of centering your reality. As a child, I went through a period where I needed to touch certain objects four times or in multiples of that to feel like something wasn’t about to go deeply cosmically wrong. Even as an adult, if I work the closing shift at a job, I double or triple all the door before I leave. I bite my fingernails so badly, I don’t even need to stick myself with needles to test my diabetes anymore, I just dip a test strip into a hangnail and instantly know if my blood sugar’s too much sugar and not enough blood. We don’t all dualwield featherdusters.
Never mind that I used the prescription-drug advertising lingo “mild-to-moderate” to describe this experience? No one says things like that in real life. You never hear anyone say they have “mild-to-moderate” flu or a “mild-to-moderate” partially-barfed-up heart, they just say what they have. But advertising flimflam speak is so dominant, it may as well be an official dialect.
Still, I think about it a lot. Half the point of OCD is that you overthink certain things so much your world would end without the overthinkening. I like to imagine my OCD might as part of some grander universal plan that I am just too short-lived and small to understand in fullness.
I like to pretend the universe is trying to nudge all humanity toward some gesturally-focused manifestation of magic and we’re all just the guinea pigs. The hundred billion monkeys atop typewriters, awaiting the accidental generation of a “Hamlet” script. Someday one of us will accidentally jiggle the correct doorlock or touch the screen with the right pattern of tappings, maybe we’ll suddenly pull a rabbit out of a hat. Transmute a rolled-up newspaper into a rose bouquet. And suddenly there will be practical magic for us all to share, just because all of us weirdos put in time with our crazy little handwaves? I sort of hope that is how reality works.
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