Right now I should be doing yoga. In order to get an "A+" for the day or to make my husband or my Dad or the universe proud of me I should be doing my 30 minute yoga routine, but I'm not. Instead I'm sitting at my kitchen table pants-less and writing about myself like the callow self obsessed millennial I am.
I live and breathe by "to-do" lists. Admitting that feels embarrassing and boring of me but I do. I make lists of tasks because they make me feel purposed and less cosmically accidental. I go to battle every day with the voice in my head that questions my role in the universe and I use lists of menial tasks as my armor, my sword, my steed and my trophy. I misguidedly believe that by accomplishing these lists that it will make those whose opinions of me matter most superbly proud.
Really, these lists are just a compulsion stimulated by my obsessive compulsive disorder.
I know this may not seem funny to anyone else but having been formally diagnosed with a psychological disorder by a real therapist after spending a lifetime lying about fake diagnosis and being an absolute hypochondriac is the funniest form of karma I've yet received. By being medicated for OCD I have learned why it is such selfish fuckerry to self diagnose.
Because it is exceedingly difficult to garner the sympathy as someone as insecure as myself needs, for a problem that everyone apparently already has. "oooohh yeah I'm totally OCD too. Like if my shoes don't match my belt when I leave the house I will just FREAK out".
I've missed class and lied about being sick because I couldn't find the right scarf before.
I pick at the hair on my body or the acne on my face or my husbands hair and face so often that I've gotten bacterial infections and made him cry from the pain.
If I don't pray for every ambulance I hear or dead animal on the side of the road I convince myself that I should just pull the steering wheel since I will probably die in some horrific accident soon anyway and at least this way I get to choose when it happens.
I can't listen to music or people talking or even my own internal monologue too closely because at any moment something will dig itself so deep into my skull on a constant loop that it will drown out all other noise causing me to appear rude or disinterested when in reality I just want to get that fucking T-pain song I heard 4 hours ago out of my head.
I qualify all of this however with an admission of guilt. I am one hundred percent guilty of feeling self righteous about my OCD; as though somehow because other people are lucky enough not to have OCD that I am a better more self actualized woman of the world than they. And had I never gotten medicated I likely would have never known how completely idiotic that notion is.
I am of course currently un-medicated which is why I'm sitting here dripping ass sweat onto a communal dining chair like an insane person writing an E-mail to myself LIKE AN INSANE PERSON because technically and clinically I am insane.
I used to think OCD was so posh before I really started suffering from it. It seemed like the most respectable mental health disorder; a real resume highlight. OCD was the tool fortune 500 company CEOs and Monica Geller used to be more productive than the average citizen.
The true face of my disorder is actually far less polished. It's stained by the amalgamation of mascara and tears and swollen from compulsive trichotillomania. It's embarrassing as hell and makes me feel like the pathologically co-dependent child of my closest friends. It doesn't feel motivated or en vogue, it feels like a war between every neuron in my brain. I feel it physically take hold of me and collapse me from the inside out at the most inopportune times.
I say inopportune because yes there are indeed times when I wish to be treated like a baby and showered with sympathy and praise and to have my ego massaged gently while eating too much cake but thats not when the urges come. They come when I most need to be a responsibly self sufficient person.
And so I perpetuate and I wage this cerebral war and sometimes I lose and end up scarring myself or others in a nauseatingly harmful manner. But occasionally, I win by stabbing my cycle of compulsions in the heart with an unexpected action.
Today instead of doing yoga I wrote this E-mail to myself. Today I won a little battle.
