Counting: one, two, three

I think counting was my first manifestation of OCD. I practiced it mostly as a child. It was only as an adult that I recognized it as OCD. As a child, I thought I was being quite creative at keeping my mind busy while I waited somewhere.

I did a lot of waiting when I was a little girl. One of my brothers was sick a lot, and I spent a lot of time in hospital waiting rooms and doctors’ offices.

I must have been around seven or eight years old when I became obsessed with the number three, especially when it related to counting letters on signs, billboards, breakfast cereal boxes, anything.

Silently, never aloud, I counted every letter of a sign or whatever, hoping to make it turn out right. It was right if the letters ended up on the count of three with the last letter. In other words, the total number of letters was divisible by three.

Without thinking, I began to automatically break down sentences, phrases, or just words into threes, any time, anywhere.

I didn’t tell anyone about this game I played. I didn’t know that I was obsessively thinking of the number three and compulsively counting letters and punctuation marks. I didn’t know that I was compulsively counting to relieve the anxiety and fear I felt.

And it seems to be a practice that I still sometimes fall back on without thinking. Some months ago, I had an upsetting call on my cell phone while my husband and I were having lunch in a restaurant. After I got off the phone, I looked out the window and started counting the windows in a building across the street. It took me a minute to realize what I was doing.

It’s difficult to stop the racing thoughts, whether it’s numbers or something else. Meditation is hard for me, but I’m working on it.

I don’t know if it’s a good thing or a bad thing or in between—the way we sometimes develop compulsions to relieve our anxiety. We are trying to comfort ourselves. That seems to be a good thing. But the process goes haywire. What are you thoughts on this?

As an example, my counting ritual went something like this:

I am in the waiting room at the hospital. On the wall beside the swinging doors that lead to the real part of the hospital, there is a sign. It says, “No visitors under age 12 allowed past these doors.”

I am under twelve, so I’m sitting on one of the green leather sofas waiting for Mama and Daddy to come down from my brother’s room..

I look around. I don’t feel like reading my book anymore. I look at the sign by the swinging doors. Wonder if I can make it turn out?

I go through all the letters and numbers: N-o-v, i-s-i, t-o-r, s-u-n, d-e-r, a-g-e, 1-2-a, l-l-o, w-e-d, p-a-s, t-t-h, e-s-e, d-o-o, r-s. It doesn’t work. Two left over.

I include the spaces between the words and numbers: n-o-space, v-i-s, i-t-o, r-s-space, u-n-d, e-r-space, a-g-e, space-1-2, space-a-l, l-o-w, e-d-space, p-a-s, t-space-t, h-e-s, e space-d, o-o-o, r-s. One left over.

But, there’s that period at the end. If I add that to the r and s of “doors,” it works out. But the period is not the only dot on the sign. There are the dots over the letters “i” in visitors. Aren’t they part of it all? Do I have to count them?

If I do, how else can I make it turn out right? There aren’t any pictures on the sign. No lines underneath the words. No exclamation marks. No commas. Even if I change “12” to “twelve,” it doesn’t work.

I go over and over the sign, seeing if I made a mistake counting by three’s. No mistake. It will work out only if I count the period and not the dots over “visitors.”

Okay. That’s what I’ll do. I won’t count the dots over “visitors.” I’ll consider them to be part of the letter i. That makes sense. The letter i wouldn’t really be an i if it didn’t have that dot over it, unless it was a capital i.

Now I go over the sign a couple of more times. It works out perfectly. One-two-three, one-two-three. Kind of like a waltz. Perfect. I’m a little proud of myself. If there’s a way to make it work out, I can usually find it.

Can you imagine this kind of thinking in a child?

Tell me everything is going to be all right

It’s easier to give reassurance than to be the one who needs reassurance.

My husband is something of a checker. It happens mostly when he’s getting ready to leave the house. Even though he’s very careful and responsible, he sometimes has the need to recheck that he turned off the ceiling fan, the lights or the dryer. Even if he’s running late, he will take the time to check one more time, even unlocking the door he just locked to go back inside.

I’m glad he’s careful. I’m glad he cares enough about our home and family to check again.

But I still get impatient with him sometimes for the amount of time he takes to double check. You turned off the fan, I say. I know you turned off everything.

I can say those things because I don’t doubt that he did what he was supposed to do.

It’s easy for me to reassure him.

And yet I understand his doubts. I have doubts like that. I doubt myself very often and to an intense degree. I doubt that I turned off the stove. I doubt that I turned off the lights in the bathroom. I doubt that I heard the dryer shut off.

I cannot offer myself the same reassurance that I give my husband. I tell myself over and over that the light fixture is dark, there’s no light shining. But that doesn’t reassure me. Rather, the frenzy of my thoughts and the repetitiveness of my words make me anxious.

I can reassure others, but not myself. How can I learn to do for myself what I can do for others?

A couple of notes:

In my first post, I said I planned to post on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. That’s three times a week. This week I posted Monday, Wednesday and late Thursday. I think I’ll be writing every other day.

Also, please comment on the blog. I really want to hear from you. Thank you!

Update later: Technorati claim token FP8HHWMWZSNK

Waddles

I didn’t plan to write about this tonight. But I’ve cried a lot today and felt like I needed to tell you what is heavy on my heart.

My cat died five weeks ago today. Waddles was 21 years old, a black and white half-Persian beauty. I was blessed to have her for eleven-and-a-half years.

I still cannot write much about her. I can’t express in words how much I miss her.

For the last year or so, when her health was gradually worsening, I tried to be very deliberate about being mindful of and grateful for her presence.

When she lay down beside me with her head on my arm, I tried to memorize the feeling of having her close to me and listening to her breathing.

Waddles lifted me into a new perspective on life. With OCD, I was always afraid to be responsible for taking care of any creature, because I feared doing something wrong or forgetting something important.

I feared that I would begin to have new and even worse obsessions about hurting someone, and that would trigger more compulsions.

And then there were the concerns about germs and dirt in the house from another creature.

She was my mother’s cat first. After my father died, my niece encouraged her to get a cat to keep her company. My mother didn’t like cats much, but a dog was too much for her physically to take care of. So she adopted Waddles, whose original person had died.

The first time I met Waddles was when I visited my mother, and she walked into the living room where we were sitting. She looked at me, then jumped up on my mother’s long couch. I was sitting on the other end.

Waddles made her way to me, placed her front paws on my leg and began to purr.

I said, “I’m sorry, but I don’t like cats.”

That didn’t stop her. She kept purring.

The man who is now my husband said she picked me because she knew I would love her and take care of her.

I soon moved in with my mother for nine months, and I grew very close to Waddles. I loved her so much, but it was still reassuring to me that I was not fully responsible for her.

That changed when my mother gave her up for adoption about 18 months later, after I had moved out.

I went to the shelter and adopted her myself. I was afraid to do it, but my husband encouraged me. When I worried aloud that I didn’t know how to take care of cats, he said, “She’ll teach you.”

The first night with her at home, she hid a lot. But in the middle of the night, I woke up hearing her crunching her dry food in the kitchen. It didn’t freak me out. I didn’t jump up to make sure there was no food on the floor. I just smiled and went back to sleep.

Taking care of Waddles showed me how wonderful it can be to be responsible for a creature that you love. Any worries were just part of the relationship.

I loved taking care of her, watching over her and making sure she had good food to eat. I loved trying to find fun toys for her and creating comfortable spaces around the house for her. I loved holding her and talking to her and just being with her.

And cleaning up after her didn’t trouble me like I had feared. It was part of taking care of her.

Loving her, and then my husband’s cats, Thunder Cat and Sam, broadened my views about animals, turning me into an advocate for them.

I am so thankful for her. I thank God for her every day, for the wonderful cat she was and for what she meant to me and did for me.

I am grieving now, and I will never “get over” the loss. But I would not have missed having her for anything.

My OCD looks like this

I want to tell you how obsessive-compulsive disorder has manifested in my life.

I go through periods when certain symptoms rear their ugly heads and I have to deal with them again. Then they change. But vestiges of all of them remain even as I grow older.

You may see yourself in this list. It still blows my mind that other people have had the same obsessions and compulsions that I have had. I used to think I was uniquely weird and wrong.

You will also see that the underlying anxiety in a lot of these symptoms is a need to get things right. Not perfect, but right. And only a feeling of rightness will alleviate the anxiety and the compulsive actions.

Here are some of the symptoms I have experienced at some point in my life since I was a little girl. There are more, but this is an overview to give you a picture of what my OCD looks like.

• Obsessed with sins I committed and the need for forgiveness from God. Along with that, obsessed about being “saved” in the fundamentalist Christian way. Compulsively prayed over and over to be forgiven and saved, then doubted that I got the prayer right.
• Obsessed with germs that might be on me and with the chance that I could spread them to others and hurt them. Compulsively washed my hands until they were red and raw, not wanting to touch doorknobs, not wanting my lips to touch a fork or spoon that someone else had washed.
• Obsessed with counting. Compulsively counted the letters on signs, the steps on staircases, other objects, trying to make the count come out in threes.
• Obsessed with the cleanliness of bathrooms. Compulsively cleaned, taking hours sometimes to clean a small bathroom. I didn’t want anyone else to use my bathroom.
• Obsessed that I hadn’t read, with attention, the whole page in a book. Compulsively read and reread the page before I could turn to another page.
• Obsessed that I had hit someone with my car. Compulsively drove back and forth on the street, looking for a possible body.
• Obsessed that the stove was still on after cooking something. Compulsively turned the knobs on and off and stared at them, for hours, until I felt right about them being off.
• Obsessed with objects I saw lying on the ground that might harm someone else walking by. Compulsively picked up bent wires, sticks, paper clips, rocks, etc. as I walked along.
• Obsessed with responsibilities I had and the fear that I could cause harm if I didn’t do things right. Compulsively steered clear of responsibilities to others.
• Obsessed that I left the lights on in the closet or bathroom, that they might get too hot and cause a fire. Compulsively checked, staring at light bulbs and lampshades until I knew they were dark, not lit.

Does any of this sound familiar?

Welcome to my blog!

I am 48 years old and have been living with obsessive-compulsive disorder since I was a child. I was officially diagnosed when I was 27 and have run the gamut of medications for not only OCD, but anxiety and depression too. I’m under the care of a doctor for all three.

I live in a small town in Virginia with my husband and cats. I have degrees in English, and I work as a newspaper reporter for a weekly paper.

When I was first diagnosed with OCD, my doctor told me that I would probably be on medication the rest of my life, but the symptoms should become milder as I aged into my 40s.

My symptoms are nowhere near as bad as they were when I was first diagnosed. But I’m in my late 40s and still struggle daily with OCD.

I am currently going through a phase of checking, but I also have issues with germs, especially regarding bathrooms. I obsess about things I may or may not have done that could cause harm to others. I still try to assuage my anxiety with certain repeated words and prayers.

OCD is exhausting, as I am sure anyone who suffers with it knows. But the older I get, the more demoralized with OCD I become. I wonder what my life would have been like without it. I think about what I may have accomplished if I hadn’t had OCD, or if I had not allowed OCD to affect my life so much.

I have never talked a lot to others about my OCD, at least not specifically. With this blog, I hope to finally be truthful about the effects of OCD on me and on those around me.

I also want to use this blog to consider the questions I ask myself about OCD. I hope by writing and especially by receiving comments from you, I will gain some understanding.

I plan to write about my past and my present struggles and triumphs with OCD, anxiety and depression. I will share news I learn about the conditions.

My posts will include references to my husband, who is supportive of me even though he doesn’t fully grasp the frenzies I experience when I am deeply into an OCD episode. He has seen me at my worst and still loves me.

My cats will also be present in my posts. They have been instrumental in making my OCD, and my life, better, and they are very dear to me.

My plans are to write three times a week, on Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

I am not an expert on OCD, depression or anxiety. I just know what it’s like to suffer from them. I urge you to seek the help of doctors if you suffer symptoms of these conditions.

I hope you will comment, because I definitely want to hear from you. I ask that you not use insulting or vulgar language.

So here I go! I hope you enjoy the blog and will share your insights.