Did you ever think your dad was a robot?

OCD loves to mess about

Apologies, this is later than I hoped to send, but our roof sprung several leaks last night and I’ve been busy picking up dehumidifiers and panicking. 

I thought I’d write a little bit about OCD - or obsessive compulsive disorder - because despite the term being bandied about a lot, I think there’s still a real lack of understanding about what the illness actually is. To be fair, that’s partly because it’s a slippery, everchanging bastard of an illness. Bastard. 

The usual misconception about OCD is that it’s an obsession with tidiness and order. While it’s true that some sufferers have a “just right” fixation, most people with OCD aren’t making sure that every tin of beans in their cupboard is lined up neatly with the label facing out. More recently there was a TikTok trend where videos showed the strap line “when the intrusive thoughts win” accompanied by a jokey post about dying your hair blue or painting your living room purple. While everyone has intrusive thoughts (that weird thing where you’re standing on a tube platform and suddenly imagine jumping in front of a train), a person with OCD will react to them with extreme distress, and attempt to neutralise them in any way they can. That might be with physical actions - tapping, blinking, swallowing, counting or turning a light switch on and off a certain number of times - or it might be by ruminating on the thought for hours, days or weeks. 

The first memories I have of OCD were as a 10 year old. I developed weird tics which I thought protected me and my family like swallowing a certain number of times, counting cars which passed me, even spitting if I had a ‘bad’ thought. Nobody but me ever noticed these things, but they consumed my days. If I swallowed the wrong number of times (4 was perfect, 3 abominable) then the fear would rise up in my chest and I’d have to start again. It was exhausting, but if I didn’t do all of these things, I knew my family would die so I had no choice.