March 3rd, 2019

Living with OCD isn’t really living at all. It’s wearing gloves to go to the gas station because you don’t want to touch the gas pump, and folding the gloves inside out when you take them off so you don’t touch the part that touched the gas pump. It’s putting hand sanitizer on your hands after you’ve touched the computer at work and rubbing and rubbing and rubbing until it lathers. It’s touching the sink while you wash your hands and getting frustrated because touching the sink means you’ll have to wash them again.

It’s dreading going to parties, or to family gatherings, or to work, because you know the things you’re afraid of will be there and you don’t want to be around them as much as you don’t want to embarrass yourself in front of your friends, family, and coworkers. It’s knowing that you won’t ever be able to trust anyone fully because you’re afraid they’ll use your irrational fears against you. It’s knowing that you won’t ever fall in love, or at least that no one will ever fall in love with you, because you can see him, whoever he is, getting frustrated with you and finding someone better, someone with fewer hang-ups. It’s telling yourself that you won’t have children because you don’t want to ruin their childhoods with your irrationality.

It’s crying yourself to sleep at night when you see your disorder burden someone you love. It’s wanting to die all the time because you know you’re unfit for the world. It’s wishing you had never been born in the first place. It’s knowing you hate yourself.

At least, that’s how it is for me.

I’ve been living with OCD for as long as I can remember. I can’t tell you when it started, and I can’t tell you how it started. I can’t tell you for certain if it’s gotten worse over the years, but I think it has.

I was hopeful for a long time that it would just go away one day. That one day, I would wake up and I would be Normal with a capital ‘N.’ It didn’t work out that way, but that sort of thinking got me through my twenties.

I can’t tell you how pathetic I feel, living as a 30-something year old grown woman with a career and a 401K and a mortgage who is afraid to walk without looking down because she’s afraid she’ll step on something that normal people step on all the time.

I won’t tell you what the ‘something’ is, and I won’t tell you everything that triggers my OCD. Partly, it’s because I’m paranoid that someone will find this journal and post their findings on the Internet, and I’ll get a lot of mail with the things I hate inside, and I’ll have to stay off the grid for the rest of my life. It’s also because OCD is irrational, and you wouldn’t believe me if I told you what I was afraid of, so, for now, I’ll tell you that I’m afraid of things that normal people touch, eat, and drink all the time, and that should be enough.

Though I can’t tell you about my triggers, I can tell you about my life, and how my life is affected by OCD. 

I’ll start with what happened tonight, which made me write in this journal in the first place. I was at my little brother’s engagement party, sitting in a corner by myself, watching everyone else talk and joke and play games and be normal, when my brother decided to try and bring me into the party. Into the present. Out of my own head.

Leo has always been that way – thoughtful, wanting everyone to feel included. I’d like to think that I had some part in that because he had no choice but to be gentle and understanding, growing up with an insane person like me in the house. I would feel bad for him, but he’s the one with the fiancé and the 1,200 friends on Facebook, so, really, he should be thanking me.

He asked me to join everyone at the table for a game of gin rummy. I said yes because I’ve learned that if you eat a plate of food or play a game or start a discussion at a gathering of any kind, people are less likely to call you antisocial.

I sat at the table and played a few hands with Leo, his fiancé, Vanessa, her family, and some of the bridesmaids and groomsmen. I was quiet the entire time, but I didn’t notice because I never notice that sort of thing. It always has to be pointed out to me. This time, it was done so subtly by Vanessa, who asked me about my job.

I’m a speechwriter for Senator Shanice Robinson, the Democratic senator from Louisiana. I love talking about my job, and I love talking about politics. For a solid 20 minutes, I engaged the entire table in discussion about policy, speechwriting, and the upcoming presidential election. I was in my zone, talking about the thing I loved in a space where the thing I hate wasn’t present, or at least not within my line of sight.

That all changed when Vanessa’s mother went into the kitchen and returned with the thing I hate. I can’t explain it, but I’ve been living with this hatred so long that I can tell when someone is going to do the thing I hate without them saying a word. I can tell they’re doing the thing that I hate from the smell, from the sight of it, from the sight of it in their mouths, from the sight of their mouths moving – it’s a specific movement that I know very well.

I don’t just hate it. I’m afraid of it. Irrationally speaking.

Vanessa was talking, asking the table their thoughts on different 2020 candidates. All I could focus on was her mother, and what she was about to do.

I decided that I’d stayed long enough. I decided that it was time for me to leave.

I’ve gotten really good at getting out of situations I’m uncomfortable in without upsetting anyone. This is mostly because I’ve learned to think fast over the years.

With one swift movement, I took my phone out of my jeans pocket – I’ll have to wash that later, I thought, because I’d been touching the cards and I hadn’t yet washed my hands. I set a timer for 15 seconds and the phone rang when it sounded. I pretended to look at the caller ID and my eyes went wide.

“I have to go,” I announced.

Everyone was more than understanding. I could tell they thought they were witnessing something really authentic and political — a senator getting into some sort of trouble and calling her speechwriter in to clean up the mess, however that would work. They didn’t know that the reality was much less intriguing, much less sexy. They didn’t know that I was leaving because someone had done something totally normal and I was triggered by it.

I came straight home and washed my hands a few times between touching doorknobs and fixing my food and turning on the television. I washed my pen and my hands in the sink, and I washed my notebook and my phone with a soapy rag. My hands felt like sandpaper, even more so after I finally showered and got into bed.

But I felt clean. That was all that mattered.

I tried to go to sleep because I have work in the morning, but then the thoughts came.

You’re going to be alone forever. I know. Leo’s about to get married I know And have kids I KNOW.

I would have ended up tormenting myself all night if I hadn’t sat up in bed, turned on my laptop, and pulled out my journal.

It’s now 3:05 AM. I’ll be tired at work tomorrow, but it’s better than the alternative.

#

Leo texted me around midnight. He didn’t mention what happened. He never does, probably because you can’t expect a rational explanation from a crazy person. He texted me the link to a NY Times article on PoliDate, a new political dating app, with the message “Love u sis. U need to find someone. Maybe this will help.”

I texted him back, saying, “Thanks for the concern, Leo, but I don’t need your help. Also, stop typing in shorthand. You’re a journalist now.” He works for the New York Times. He’s been there for a little over a year and hasn’t written his first big story yet, but he plans to soon. In the meantime, he’s been sending me articles his colleagues have written or pieces he’s co-written. The stories he sends me are mostly political, but once or twice a week, he’ll throw in an article on the economy or world news or lifestyle.

He’s sent me a dozen articles about love, and they’ve all included messages about how I need to find someone. He’s mostly joking, so I never take him seriously. I didn’t take him seriously this time. But I was feeling more self-aware than usual, and I wanted to improve my self-esteem from its abnormally low to its normally low levels. I don’t know of any better way to make yourself feel beautiful in the age of social media than to swipe on hundreds of random men, read their corny pickup lines, and watch your likes go up until they reach the limit.

I downloaded PoliDate in a moment of mental weakness, which isn’t saying much because I’m always in a moment of mental weakness. I set up my account the way I would for any other dating app, except I had to include my political preferences, which meant choosing my party affiliation, ranking potential 2020 candidates, and selecting positions on everything from social welfare to foreign policy. It was a lot of work for something that I expected to lead to nowhere, but I was desperate.

Once that was done, I started swiping. I swiped until I ran out of swipes, and I went to my matches tab to find all the guys who had swiped on me. There weren’t that many because it was 4 AM on a Monday morning. At least, that’s what I told myself.

I set my phone aside and read some articles online while my matches trickled in. I checked my messages a few times and found nothing there, and I decided it was time to go to bed.

I have to be up at 6:30 AM. I’m going to hate myself in the morning.