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The First Signs

It wasn’t until I was in my 20s that I even had a hint I had OCD – or what OCD even was. But then, just by chance, I came across Judith L. Rapoport’s groundbreaking OCD book “The Boy Who Couldn’t Stop Washing.” Even the title resonated with me. It sounded like my story.

Up until then I just thought I was quirky, maybe weird. But looking back, the signs were there at least dating back to my early teens.

My first memory of an OCD compulsion was when I used to line up my shoes on the floor. To my OCD brain, they couldn’t be crooked, one couldn’t point right and the other left. They had to be parallel or it just didn’t feel right, something would be off. Truth is, that compulsion stuck with me until I was probably well into my 30s, when I forced myself to just toss my shoes into my closet and whatever happened, happened. I guess I’ve drifted back toward keeping them parallel, now that I think of it.

Next, I recall picking up clumps of dust in the hallway leading up to my grandparents’ bedroom, where my grandmother was was often ill in bed. I remember the anxiety of the compulsion, the absolute need to pick up all dust. Looking back, my way of trying to fix her cancer was to pick up the dust. I was no 13-year-old doctor, but my OCD told me she’d be worse if I didn’t pick up that dust.

Then it was on to folding towels. The design on the towel had to be to the right of center when folded. Not in the center, not to the left, but definitely to the right. However many times it took for me to fold it so that happened, I’d do it til it was “correct” in my head. Why? OCD was telling me that my mother, the car driver in the family, would get into an accident if I didn’t do it “just right.”

I also used to have “bad thoughts” -- still do. That’s what I would call them when I “confessed” to my mother, time and time again, each day, that I had one. I didn’t learn until much later that others with OCD also have “bad thoughts.”

“Bad” was the only way I could describe them as a kid, but really, they were strange, upsetting, and could be just about anything. They would flash in and out of my brain and I’d really have no control over them. But their power stayed with me and made me feel like a terrible person. They could be curse words, they could be negative images, they could be sacrilegious thoughts that I didn’t connect with at all, except that they made me feel like a terrible person. My mother, when I would tell her I had a bad thought, would try to ease my mind saying thoughts are not actions. She had no idea what those thoughts were, and I couldn’t tell her, but she tried to calm my brain.

One other OCD compulsion that stands out from my childhood: I had to feel like I completely, totally understood everything I read in a book. If my OCD brain told me I didn’t, I’d have to re-read the line, the paragraph, the page, over and over again until my brain told me I got it. My mother told me later that as a child I even asked her once what the word “the” meant.

I remember my jaw in pain from clenching my teeth as I tried to read books for school.
Reading for pleasure? Not as a child – it caused too much anxiety. And in my OCD brain, the fate of others depended on me reading “the right way,” whatever that was.

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