get your dirty fingerprints off my face.

so you all know by now that i have postpartum depression, and that i’ve also had clinical depression, and that i love to talk about my mental illness like it’s the weather. i’m all about making it a no-shame topic, something that will one day be brought up in casual conversation and no one will bat a lash. that day isn’t here yet, but people like jia make me think it could be on the horizon.

jia of untypically jia has red hair, a wicked sense of humor, and ocd (among other things). i literally snorted when i read her guest post because reading about her experiences with ocd is just so refreshing. mental illness can be so devastating, but just like cowpile makes for the best fertilizer, the doodoo that is cuckoo-town makes for some great life lessons and general good times.

like they say, laugh so you don’t cry.

here was my question for jia (and remember, i am super politically correct):

having OCD probably sucks on many levels. but it’s saturday so I want to hear about the silver lining. what’s the funniest OCD-related thing that’s ever happened to you?

and here’s jia:

You think OCD is funny? I would be offended if I didn’t have to go wash my hands real quick!

Kidding.

I never knew that I had OCD until after I was married. I had what I called “quirks”. But as far as I knew, people with OCD were basically just germaphobes, right? Wrong. Well, actually, right, but right in the same way that people who drink a lot are basically just Irish, (I’m Irish, so I can say that.) What I mean is, some heavy drinkers are not Irish, and some Irish (like me) just don’t drink. In that same way, some people with OCD are germaphobes, though we like to use fancy OCD lingo and call them “washers and cleaners.” But not all OCD peeps have issues with germs.

I am one of those peeps.

OCD actually runs in my family. I have two hoarding aunts, several germaphobe cousins, and I even married a man who checks his alarm clock six times before he believes it’s really going to work. The rest of us discovered our own OCDness after the diagnosis of another member of our family. In an attempt to learn as much as we could about the disorder to help her, we discovered that we too were sufferers. This is proof that helping is contagious.

While the seriousness surrounding the pain of OCD is never funny, I do try to be light hearted about some of my stranger “quirks.” I didn’t even notice these quirks to begin with. My husband did. We were sitting at a restaurant and he reached across the table and he brushed something out of my face. My body responded and my hand came up, and followed his motion. Curious, he reached over and stuck his finger against my forehead. I reached up, and wiped it off. Test after test my husband concluded, that if he touched my face, in any given motion, I would immediately wipe it off, in the same direction. Lines, dots, circles, and squares. He has yet to successfully draw a star without me punching him in the gut.

It has nothing to do with germs though. It’s all about fingerprints. I don’t want your fingerprints on my face.

Get it? No? Well then congrats! You don’t have OCD!

A few other “quirks” have to do with temperature. I can’t allow my hands to get too hot. At least three times a day I rinse my hands in cold water. I also try my hardest not to say aloud the word “going” because for some reason, it never feels like I’m saying it properly, so it triggers something in my head that makes me want to say it repeatedly until I get it right. This is actually a common occurrence in OCDers known as “palilalia”.

OCD can be very serious. Like all anxiety disorders it consumes a lot of your life. OCD consumes mine. It’s something in your brain that constantly tells you, “What if?” It prepares you for the worst situation possible.

This makes it very difficult to argue.

Case in point? When in an argument with my husband, my brain tells me: “If he says ____ you should respond with ____” and then comes up with about 50 different responses that I can be well prepared for. If however, my husband (or any random stranger I’m yelling at) responds with something I’m not prepared for, then you get scenarios like this:

Husband: Don’t you think you’re being a little dramatic?
Me: You’re a drama queen!!

or

Husband: You’re right sweetheart, I’m sorry.
Me: You’re a whore!

It is hard to deal with OCD on a regular basis, but I try to find the silver lining in all clouds. Unless of course the clouds are not properly disinfected, and organized by shape instead of size and girth. They should also never rain diagonally. And must be alphabetized by cloud classifications.

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it’s alexis again. how AWESOME is she? she makes me laugh on an almost daily basis, from her comments to her emails to her own blog. and she wanted me to let you know that while ocd has its moments, it can also be awful, so it’s important to be educated. so read this post of hers that gives the lowdown on ocd and all its faces. educational yet still somehow hilarious. and if you’re more interested in boobs and why it might be bad to touch them too much, read this.

— Alexis