All The Things I Didn't Know Were OCD

If you follow me, there's a decent chance you have OCD too.

Obligatory: my book, Will There Be Free Food? has launched as a Substack series, each true story of social ineptitude and neuroticism (including OCD) as a standalone paid article! The first chapter launched for free at the end of August, but the rest will be paid. Become a paid subscriber to read the rest! I will also release audio versions for those of you who prefer podcasts to books :) The next chapter, launching on Tuesday, is going to be about my worst therapist ever so stay tuned.

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The first time I remember having an OCD intrusive thought was when I was about nine or ten. I was getting lunch from my school cafeteria, and once I had gotten my burger, fries and milk, I realized I needed to pick a straw for my milk. The straws were all in the same repository, all of them identical. It didn’t matter which straw I picked. But for some reason, I had the thought: if you pick the wrong straw, your parents and brother will die. No, don’t pick the straw you saw first, that’s the death straw. Pick another straw. Uhhh..never mind, kinda getting a bad feeling about that straw too.

I picked what I believed to be the “right” straw and what do you know—my parents and brother didn’t die.

The fact that I had this thought at all told me something else: I had the power to foresee horrible things. This meant that next time I had a similar thought, I would need to listen to it and act accordingly to prevent disaster. I knew logically that there was no physical mechanism by which the selection of the “wrong” plastic straw would kill my family. But who cared? It was just one straw, just a few seconds of rumination. Surely, it would be a harmless superstition to do what my “gut” instructed me to do. Wasn’t I supposed to trust my gut, after all?

I didn’t share this information with my parents because it didn’t feel important. Also, I had never heard of OCD before.

The first time I actually heard about OCD I was fourteen, and unbeknownst to me, I was suffering from it pretty severely. My OCD at this age revolved around the fear that I would never get married or have children, along with the fear of my family dying because of something that I did. Because both of these things were technically possible, they didn’t seem irrational. The things I did to “prevent” them from happening also felt normal. For example, I prayed every night, often repetitively (I was brought up in a mixed faith household and not raised with any religion; my entrance into faith might have been fueled at least in part by my OCD.) I would also write in my diary about things I was afraid of happening—perfectly normal behavior for a teenage girl. And then there was my tendency toward hypochondria (especially related to illnesses that would impact my fertility), but that didn’t seem so weird—I just went to the school nurse more than most kids did, and there was nothing wrong with taking care of your health.

Anyway, I first heard about OCD when I watched the movie Matchstick Men, where Nicholas Cage’s character is borderline housebound with OCD. Leaving the house, or opening a window, causes him to have terrifying delusions of visible germs and spores floating toward him. I remember mentioning the movie to my friends at school, and one of them said that he didn’t find the movie funny because his father had OCD. I laughed to myself and thought his father’s OCD was probably pretty funny too.

Generally, that was how OCD was portrayed most of the time. This was before social media, so I wasn’t hearing from other people with OCD about all the various insidious forms it could take (on the bright side, I also wasn’t seeing TikTok users refer to their “intrusive thoughts” as the urge to eat a carrot salad for breakfast). All I had was movies and TV shows, which conveniently always displayed the OCD sufferer as a germaphobe.

Ironically, I wasn’t diagnosed with OCD until I developed a germaphobia obsession myself. The following comic illustrates the journey of how each obsession was replaced with another: