Slightly OCD

One of my best friends proudly announces to any new group, “Hello. My name is Mitch and I am OCD.” No he doesn’t. I made that up. What he does say, however, is that he’s glad he’s OCD because it gives him the perfect skill set to be an accomplished banker and accountant. He’s right. We should really examine this trendy term—Obsessive Compulsive Disorder— in its separate and distinct components. It’s important because I have recently and reluctantly been forced to admit being a tad under the influences myself. You can stop laughing now. Let’s start with Obsessive. I equate that with “I can’t let go until I get the world spinning the way I want.” For example, my husband and I decided to buy new audio equipment. These were in the days when you needed a big box for every undertaking: a tuner, cassette player, CD player, amplifiers, and other assorted heavy components we thought, well, I thought were necessary to listen to music which we never played because we mostly just turned on the radio. It was quickly born out to me that before we bought components, we needed to buy an entertainment center the size of one living room wall. Literally. Side to side. Floor to ceiling. In pine. It took three men to haul it into the house. Once in place, we were ready to fill its cubicles with audio equipment. The term still has a magical quality, doesn’t it? Audio equipment. The equipment has changed but the lust remains. My Indian son recently decided I need a sound bar attached to my TV. I have no idea what a sound bar is or why I need one, but he assures me I must have it as soon as I buy a new television, which I never intend to do. I don’t care if my television is so old it won’t support a sound bar. I sit four feet away from it and read the subtitles. Clearly, I digress. My point was/is that once I’d decide something needed to be acquired or accomplished, I pursued it with a determined quality that my husband privately admitted to others frightened him. He was old school and thought “we might buy something” meant shopping next month if we found time on a Saturday and felt like it. He was not prepared for, “Never mind dinner. We can eat later. Put your coat back on. Best Buy is having a sale tonight!” See, I thought I was being efficient. Want a thing. Track down a thing today. Bring it home and plug it in. I never saw that quality as being on the slightly obsessive scale. No. I was engaged in the same efficient search and kill tactics that led me to success in the workplace. These methodologies applied to weekend schedules. His went like this: “We have a list of ten things to do on Saturday. We’ll start with number one and then see how the day goes.” My schedule went thus: “We have a list of ten things to do on Saturday. Factoring in departure, meal, and travel times, this leaves us with twenty minutes per item, no dawdling, and GO!” If you’d have suggested that was slightly obsessive behavior at the time, I would have told you to get out of my way. I had things to do and places to go and all of them ranked number one in priority. Nothing got eliminated and no one got left behind. I would have made such a good drill sergeant! Now I kind of understand why out of all the paintings of beautiful women in the art gallery, the one my husband and youngish son said looked just like me was the frontierswoman standing on her porch pointing a rifle at an unseen annoyance that happened to be pissing her off. Okay. So maybe I score fair to middling on the obsessive scale. I still prefer to think of it as a necessary quality if you’re going to be a collector of artifacts, a balancer of checking accounts, or a finisher of house redecoration. But what about compulsive behavior? What’s that all about? Apparently if you’re so ill you can’t function but on the way back to bed you spot a speck of lint on the carpet and have to bend down to pick it up, even if it means crawling back to bed on all fours, I’m told that may be an example of compulsive behavior. Compulsive is when you can’t not do it. Compulsively disordered people vary in the things they can’t not do. Jack Nicholson defined the quality in his classic film “As Good As It Gets.” Now, you don’t have to be as obnoxious as Melvin Udall just because you happen to suffer from compulsive disorders to a greater or lesser degree. You can be sweet as honey while you bid guests goodbye, silently praying for them to leave so you can put all the chairs back where they belong. The question is, if you’re on the OCD spectrum can you be cured? I choose to say yes, given the right therapy, mantras, training, journaling, and drugs…I mean medications. It takes practice, years and years of practice, but you can shave the edges off by huge chunks. I am now able to leave dirty dishes in the sink overnight, knowing without a worry that I will be able to first wash them and then put them in the dishwasher the next morning. I trained for that and now I don’t give it a thought, other than to tell myself every night I’ll deal with the one bowl and one spoon in the morning. Also, I am able to wait until the handyman gets around to fixing things in my house. I do confess to climbing out of bed last week to replace the bathroom ceiling fixture lightbulb I’d just replaced hours earlier because I didn’t like the blue cast of the bulb. I wanted warm yellow. But that one exception aside, I think I’m making real progress. I just told the handyman to take the busted halogen light fixture transformer home with him and bring me a working one whenever he gets around to it. And I truly meant it. If he doesn’t return in a month I’ll probably survive. On the other hand, when placed in stressful situations, I may relapse just a tad. We had an earthquake not long ago, which is nothing new in the land where I live. This one, however, really unnerved me. It lasted too long and tossed me off my feet too many times as I made my way to the kitchen door to seek shelter on the back steps, which is really stupid in terms of earthquake safety, but I was not at my best. As I said, this one really unnerved me. Returning to the kitchen, I watched the window blind wands to see if they were still swaying. That’s my clue to whether the house is moving or I’m just falling off my slippers. A little sway might mean a truck drove by. Big swaying means the house is rolling. Looking more closely at the wands, I noticed a layer of dirt running about three inches from bottom up, right where you hold it to open or close the blinds. How is this possible? All the other window wands are clean. Why are the kitchen wands dirty? So here I am, so terrified that I can’t stand up straight. I’m hunched over like the old man in the Notre Dame belfry, absolutely certain I’m having a heart attack because my chest hurts. Should I try to reach the ER? No, it’s the Indian food I just ate. The shaking gave me heartburn. But I still can’t stand up straight; my hands are trembling so badly I can hardly hold my phone and my glass of water. (It seemed like a good idea to take a glass of water with me as I sat on the back steps, riding out successive aftershocks. It made sense at the time.) I need a sweater because it’s getting cold outside, so I teeter to the closet, grab something, and ricochet back to the kitchen door. However, before I leave the premises, there’s just one more thing I need to do: wash the window blind wands. Sad. It’s just so sad. I’m bent in half, shaking so much I can hardly hold onto the scrubbing pad and the wand at the same time. We are all swaying back and forth, the house, the wands, the cleanser, and yours truly. I finished two out of three windows before fright drove me out into the night again, telling myself I will finish cleaning the last one in the morning. That’s a little progress, right? Leaving one dirty wand in the ultimate pursuit of survival? I’m calling it a win for the home team. We’ll have to think of which colors our team should have so I can crochet a sports scarf in time for the next earthquake. Yay, Team! Go, OCD’ers, Go!