How To Be Part-Time Obsessive-Compulsive
You’ve always been compulsive about symmetry. When you were a child, if something brushed against the right side of your body, the world felt utterly unbalanced if you didn’t brush something against the other side.
You had to have both of your shoes tied at the exact same tightness: a trait you later learned you inherited from your uncle. Unfortunately, this is something that’s stuck with you. When you go for a run, you stop to retie your shoes several times before you’re finished.
You wonder if anyone else gets an uncontrollable itch to like a Facebook status in order to set the number of likes at an even number. You don’t particularly care about the first time your high school classmate’s baby laughed, but there’s 17 current likes, and 18 is only a click away…
It’s the reason you exercise. It’s a never-ending strive to make everything even and symmetrical: your muscles and your photos and the pillows on your bed.
Sometimes you’re more afraid that something will bother you than it actually bothers you. You’re filing folders and one of the tabs is sticking out a little bit at the top. You don’t adjust it. Instead, you think about how it might bother you later. Maybe you’ll think of that one little tab while you’re trying to fall asleep and lose a little bit of your sanity.
You watch that episode of GIRLS: the one where Hannah’s OCD returns. She can’t stop counting to 8, and measuring, and chanting to herself. You relate heavily to a condition that fluctuates as life stressors ebb and flow.
You have to keep the volume in even numbers or multiples of fives. It’s not something you’ll lose your mind over, but it’s something you do. It’s something you can’t stop doing.
You get older and have a conversation with your mother about your compulsiveness. She mentions something about owning it, instead of letting it own you. She says that these are the qualities that keep you organized. They make a you a good employee, a good partner, and they help you keep your home clean.
So you attempt to own it. You stay fit and you keep things tidy. You adjust, and you itch, and you embrace the things you have control over. You’re not a 6-year-old having your shoes tied for you. You’re a grown woman who’s in charge of the tightness, the volume, and the order.
