Okay, I admit that I’m a bit of a perfectionist. The OCD is not completely to blame for this – I am incredibly competitive and I’ve always liked things to be ‘just right’, but it certainly makes it a little more difficult and time consuming.
One of the initial manifestations of my OCD appeared when I was in my second to last year of school. In French lycées, you have at least two to four hours of tests a week. Having always been academic and just a little determined, this didn’t bother me in the slightest and I took it as a weekly challenge. Although I had always been neat, it started to get over the top and I would copy out my Maths tests over and over again until they were neat enough to hand in. Strangely enough, I never managed to finish, and my marks plummeted. Nobody ever asked me why.
Around this time, I also developed an intrusive thought about my family being killed in an accident, and one of the compulsions related to this obsession was symmetry. Everything needed to be straight, parallel, perpendicular. I would spend hours rearranging my pencil case so that every pen was pointing the same way, that the lid was at the right angle… and one of my peers’ favourite games was to tip it out on the floor and watch me scramble around, or to subtly turn one pen around.
I knew that my symmetry and neatness compulsions are irrational. I could see that making sure that my books are in alphabetical order, or that my bed is perfectly made would not stop these horrible things from happening, and that desisting from doing so would not induce catastrophe, but as the OCD tightened its grip on me, I fell into these routines and they became harder and harder to stop.
Three years on and I still have these obsessions and compulsions, but I am now ready to fight them. Tonight I will mess my shoes up before I go to bed and I will not (hopefully) tidy them until morning. I know that I am just postponing the inevitable, but surely that makes a difference and I have to start somewhere.
Wish me luck.
Obsessively compulsively yours,
Bellsie
Urghh. This all sounds so frighteningly familiar. OCD and anorexia are bed fellows, those routines bind horribly and it's torturous to wean yourself out of comfort. Starting anywhere is good, and I wish you luck. You sound really determined.
ReplyDeleteLola x
I think that's a really interesting point - I've thought that whilst reading your blog. It's all about control and rituals in the end.
ReplyDeleteCymbalta helped me immensely. I am still orderly but I do not need a measuring tape to order pictures on the wall or items on a coffee table!!
ReplyDelete