Obsessive Compulsive Disorder

It's not an enormous secret that I suffer from Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. My subtype, for anyone who wants to know, is "Symmetry and Exactness Compulsions". This means that to allay worry and anxiety and stress, I shift things, including my body, things near me and things relative to me. Frequently it involves symmetry, or at least the alignment of things to a specific structure.

I do it incredibly precisely; when struck by the urge to move my mouse in a specific line, my compulsion requires pixel accuracy, and while reading or watching something I require flawless attention, and symmetry requires precise alignment. Obviously the human body cannot support this level of precision full-time, which is fine, since I don't do it full time. "Whenever the mood strikes me" is an apt way to put it; when I feel the compulsion, I do it. I'm very habituated to just trying to execute whatever silly thing I feel I must do, since the alternative certainly feels much worse; it tends to be anything from specific consequences (usually silly and impossible or improbable, but negative and often scary) to generalized feelings of dread and worry.

I worry a lot. Any and all anxiety and worry is taken by OCD, an anxiety disorder, and multiplied manyfold over to reach a level totally out of proportion to what it is. It is frequently unrecognizable in the end, or adds to the obsession I have in my head at the time. To keep this down, compulsions are created and hopefully executed, though failures simply add to the anxiety and stress thanks to their usually negative consequences for failure (in my head, of course, but still negative nonetheless) and continue on with making more compulsions. This makes stopping the cycle devilishly tough to defeat and incredibly draining; the activities take up huge amounts of time as well, causing both problems with keeping a schedule up (try adding five to ten minutes of useless action to everything you do and see how much it piles up) and problems with energy, consuming surprisingly high amounts of calories (lose 5 pounds on the OCDiet!). Oh, and the exertion wears you down too. Good luck with those eyes straining themselves and those joints you'll be pushing every bit of precision out of to complete every compulsion!

But otherwise life is great.