Who am I? Who are any of us, for that matter? Centuries old philosophical questions aside, why did I choose to write a blog? I wanted to get some of my ramblings down on virtual paper I guess. I do have a lot to say, but no real forum to express these thoughts. Of course I have a shitload of thoughts because I am in my head all the time. I have trouble engaging in the moment due to my overly obsessive mind. Which brings me to why my blog is titled "An Obsessive Compulsive's Guide to Clean Living." I have Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and Generalized Anxiety Disorder, along with a wry sense of humor. Humor has always been my defense mechanism when dealing with just about any stress in my life. I thinks it's actually the least neurotic of all my attributes. I have had these "disorders" since early childhood, but only within the last five or six years knew they had a name, which I discovered while in college as a psychology major ( yeah I know.) My abnormal psych book even had a warning in it, that a tendency existed for most students to feel like that had the symptoms of the neuroses they were studying and to not self-diagnose, but a nagging feeling remained. I was professionally diagnosed a year later.
Sometimes OCD and anxiety rule my life, but others times I can quell them (with and without medication, but that is another blog post.) I do struggle with it on a daily basis, which really is misleading because it's more like a secondly basis, especially when it is bad. I know other people must struggle with these issues too, but I feel like mental illness is still a little swept under the rug in our society. I do feel with the current media attention from television shows like The OCD Project or Obsessed sheds some light on the disorder, but at the same time it exploits people living with OCD like a turn of the last century, traveling freak show. They only put on the absolute worst cases, otherwise it wouldn't really be entertaining, as if OCD in any capacity should entertain. I know some people may not like the term "disorder", but I feel it ironically fitting for an obsessive compulsive. We try so hard to order our immediate world with our compulsive cleaning, organizing, and straightening, but all it really leads to is dis-order.
This blog is not going to just be about functioning with OCD and anxiety, but a myriad of other topics that I find myself obsessing over, personal experiences, news stories, politics, society at large. Hopefully by writing about them, I can lessen my compulsions, find some humor in all of this nonsense, and maybe even relate to others in some miniscule way.
No comments:
Post a Comment