Time Blindness
I have dealt with pretty severe OCD since I was around 8 years old. A primary trait of this fairly debilitating mental condition is the mind's desire that everything is the fate of the world. I realize that's not real, but that's why it's a mental illness. Anxiety is not my friend. Anxiety tells me that if I leave the house, I might not die but locusts... perhaps the carbon emissions from my car will cause a hole in the ozone layer therefore storms, perhaps a tornado. I might get in a horrific car accident and leave my cats to starve. I'm tempted, constantly, to tell friends that I may seem collected and calm to you. I assure you that is not true.
As a volunteer at the National Suicide Hotline, I was teased by the others that I was the only person working that night who had never been shot. These volunteers had been victims to gun violence and survived. I have lost several people to gun violence which they did not know and those are all very different experiences.
I read Ann Rule's book 'A Stranger Beside Me' about Ted Bundy. Fun fact - she met him working at the National Suicide Hotline. Ann Rule talking about how many lives this serial killer likely saved made me think, oddly, that if a serial killer who brutally murdered a lot of women can be useful and compassionate, then what was I doing with my free time? It made me more vocal with my boundaries and FYI, there are a lot of former friends who really liked boundaries, just not me having them for them.
I was grateful at getting diagnosed. There is a lot of information online but a key fundamental which it took a professional to point out to me repeatedly was that the illness is self blame.
I recently heard two very profound things. The first went something like, "Do not exhaust yourself explaining things to someone determined to not hear what you are saying." The second is that a Monk once said: "Imagine being bitten by a snake and instead of focusing on healing from the poison, you chase the snake to understand why it bit you and to prove that you didn't deserve it."
The best way I can think of to explain OCD is that my mind is constantly filled with spinning plates. Did you ever see a circus performer with a pole that he would set a ceramic plate on, giving it a spin. They would set up multiple poles with spinning plates on each. The momentum would slow on some and the performer would rush back to each plate, giving it a fresh spin while also adding new plates on poles creating an entire field of spinning plates. It's a lot to manage and to keep from breaking any you have to constantly monitor the whole field. If you lose a plate, you just replace it with a new one. As I age, I feel like each plate is much larger so I can manage less plates but each one is more difficult to get it to start spinning. It is also more difficult to keep spinning.
To combat different OCD tics or navigate around them as well as I can I try to face them. From Psychology Today: OCD time blindness is a distortion in perceiving or managing time, often caused by becoming hyper fixated on obsessions or trapped in time-consuming compulsions. It results in losing track of time, difficulty estimating task duration, and chronic lateness, creating significant anxiety. It is a brain-based challenge where time feels fluid or disappears.
Remember to be good or be good at it.
