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taking the "do i have ocd" quiz online over and over
Do you think the soap addictions in the False Realm are the strange manifestation of Charles’ hand washing compulsion? Because most everything in the False real does have its roots in Charles’ life in the True Realm.
that thrilling ocd&adhd moment when u get the something's not done something's not finished you need to check something you need to check it nothing's gonna feel right til you do check it NOW anxiety but you've forgotten what it IS
had my first kin memory in for-fuckin-ever and it was of having a cleanliness compulsion in one of my canons :( why r all my kin memories Sad
(#💌🧷)(#compulsions tw)
Ironically enough, anxiety is pretty amazing impulse control
That, my friend, depends entirely on what the anxiety is yelling at you about
world in my eyes
AN: this was @matsvda‘s fic for the giveaway (the prompt being a halle/kiyomi date)! alas, i can’t do anything ooc or pwp, so here we go!
the BU that’s referenced is boston university, which is pretty much non-ivy league, ivy league. for clarity reasons, when lidner is listing off binary numbers, it’s based on how i do mental math to calm down - not a compulsion.
warnings for references to sex, depictions of OCD and compulsions, food references.
hhh okay I need a few moments to yell about This Scene:
What strikes me the most about this particular exchange is just how much Aziraphale’s response reads like my own dysfunctional, OCD-driven thoughts when I’m having an episode. It’s actually so scarily similar to how my OCD manifests that the first time I read Good Omens -- several months before I was diagnosed and in therapy -- I nearly put it down again because that particular description was so triggering.
I’ll elaborate. Obviously OCD appears in a variety of different forms and symptoms, and it’s not the same for everyone. But one symptom that can appear in OCD is all-or-nothing thinking. Basically it becomes impossible to look at the “in-betweens” of a subject -- there are Only Two Sides of Right and Wrong and Nothing Else (sound familiar?) Maybe the one logical part of you can recognize that this kind of thinking is not quite right, but that part is drowned out by the brain gremlins yelling that it can only be one or the other and you’re evil and wrong for ever daring to think outside that box.
Now, as to how this applies to Good Omens, and this scene in particular. Aziraphale has his world divided neatly into Good and Evil. If something is said to be Good, then it is Good, and anything that is not considered Good must therefore be Evil, with no room for exceptions or error.
Crowley here is the voice of logic, the one that some part of Aziraphale secretly knows has a solid point. But Aziraphale is unable to accept it. One part of him wishes to, but another part of him so deathly fears that he would be sympathizing with “Evil” if he agrees that he immediately retreats into denial as a safety net. It must be bad. Even if he doesn’t understand why it’s bad precisely, this is what he knows to be true, so he shouldn’t argue against it because otherwise that means he’s Evil too, and God knows he doesn’t want to be Evil.
When it comes to OCD subtypes like scrupulosity (c’est moi), this kind of thinking can be so overwhelming that you basically get caught up in a perpetual moral argument with yourself, trying to find one “right” answer or condition that doesn’t exist. Eventually you retreat to the “safety” of extremes; if you just stick to the Good side, then you won’t be Evil. Of course, that also means that any questioning of the Good side whatsoever automatically = evil, and the fear that that causes makes it difficult to break out of these harmful patterns of thinking (and that fear is very strong, and the guilt of thinking you have done “evil” is even stronger).
I always felt that Aziraphale’s struggles with Heaven and the ineffable plan throughout the book mirrored OCD’s distorted lines of thinking in a way that was painfully familiar. He makes mistakes based off these thoughts -- making excuses for Heaven’s conduct (because questioning it otherwise must mean he is allowing Evil to happen, or else committing Evil himself), retreating behind the safety net of extremes when his firmly drawn lines are threatened.
But at the same time, let’s consider incidents like the flaming sword. For all of Aziraphale’s internal debate over whether the banishment of Adam and Eve was the right thing to do, he still gives them the sword to keep them safe, then lies to God about it afterwards. Then, of course, we come to the Apocalypse-that-wasn’t, in which Aziraphale finally shakes himself free of the tangled web of all-or-nothing, good-or-unforgiveable ‘logic’ that has kept him trapped for millennia, steps forward, and dares to say, “This Great Plan... this would be the ineffable plan, would it?”
There’s a lot more I can say here, and I’m not even sure if what I wrote makes sense or not. I’m just... emotional at how he manages to break himself free of that futile cyclical way of thinking and forge his own path. At a time when so much seemed hopeless with my own mental health and no help was forthcoming, and I was breaking down over believing I was a fundamentally unforgivable person, Good Omens was such an anchoring story.
Many thanks to @goodm-omen-ts for their wonderful post here that finally motivated me to write this meta.
Now for some miscellaneous Aziraphale with OCD headcanons: