Save The Date: OCD

I want a post for today... but it will be past midnight soon and must post this now in order to preserve the "real" date of May 20. It will profoundly bother me otherwise.

12:05 am... Technically May 21, but to me it is May 20th and so I had to actually post this before midnight and then come back to edit it when I have time.. like now. I didn't have anything planned to write about today so I guess this will suffice: my detail obsession. The reason I can't have this post be on May 21st is.. actually, two reasons: first off, to me, this post belongs on the 20th so it has to say the 20th; secondly, if it makes it on the 21st and then on the real 21st I want to post another blog post, it will mean I have two posts on the 21st which is not how I want it to be. One blog post on a day. I'm very particular when it comes to stuff like that.

In my old (and first) blog I used to manually time stamp EVERYTHING. Beginning of post had to be time stamped, if I went afk for a while I had to time stamp my leave and return, once in a while randomly I'd time stamp, then at the very end I'd time stamp. Why? I have no clue. For some reason it felt really important for me to mark down at which time I wrote the post and how long it took me and at what various times I wrote certain things or did certain things. Of course looking back and reading them now it makes no difference to me and I do not care one bit. But those details and jotting them down was like an obsession for me. To not do it felt really awkward.Then there's my real life journals: the ones done in actual hand. The date must be written down in a certain order: Day of the week, Month, Day, Year, Time. Then at the end must be the time. It annoys me so much because I often forget this order and have to check it from the last entry again. Sometimes it's not even that I forgot.. it's that I remember and have written it down correctly but STILL have to check that it's correct because it MUST NOT BE INCORRECT. Why? I don't know. It just can't. It'll feel wrong and tear at my chest if it is wrong.

Then there's other things beyond time keeping that I'm particular and meticulous about. Dashes vs colons. You know like when you take notes lots of people do definitions and after the word being defined is either a dash or a colon (for me anyways... it's never anything else). In long notes that have other stuff in between the definitions though I some times forget what I used before... dash or colon? If I use the wrong one I HAVE to fix it when I notice or it will nag at me... as well as when I get to the next one I will have a fierce indecision about which one to use.

I have a bad habit when reading a fast paced section of a book to kind of skimming over and picking out the important parts and dialogue. But while most people would just read on after that if they did such a thing, I cannot. I MUST go back and read the words that I missed. I don't really know how I keep track of which individual words I did or did not read but I will pick out the words/sentences that I did not read and read those in order to move on. It doesn't matter how trivial the word. I even have to read stupid things like "and she replied" or even "the" or "and." If I do not do this, moving on in the book will feel WRONG. I will feel rather uneasy or even stressed if I do not do this.

On a visit to a psychologist I asked her about my peculiar behaviour and she remarked that it sounds like OCD: Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. She said from what she can tell I have a minor case of it and that if it bothers me so then I should consciously try to fight it. Which is why you don't see time stamps on this blog other than the one at the top of this one which isn't really there as a time stamp but as a part of the sentence it's in.

OCD can be pretty serious and it makes life hard for some people. I'm pretty glad that I only have a minor case. However, it seems to be some what of a trend these days for people to say they have OCD. Whether they really do or not, I don't know. But I hear way too many people casually throwing around phrases like "my OCD just kicked in" or "I can't do that cause of my OCD." Some how it seems to be teenagers who say this sort of stuff a lot too. I think some kids are getting rather confused between OCD and a strong preference for doing things a certain way. Being self-righteous does not equal OCD. Being a bossy know-it-all does not equal OCD. Being a picky ass bastard does not equal OCD. I even had someone tell me once about a movie they saw where this girl is really OCD and has to pick up all the bread crumbs on the table and how he thought that was so cool and how he was going to do that from now on. What? That's ridiculous and stupid. OCD is not cool. It's a mental illness.

The question just asks itself though: WHY? Why are there some people who think OCD is cool? If you're scratching your head wondering who in the world thinks OCD is cool or that you've never heard of this phenomenon before, just google "OCD is cool." I just did it and I'm glad to see though that there are other people out there who are rather "raise brow" at the OCD-is-cool trend.