User blog:Darks Lanfear/Oh OCD, How I Love to Hate Thee! Let Me Count the Ways...

It seems like in any given interview, there always manages to be that one question about "What's your biggest weakness?" or "Tell me something that your co-workers would say is annoying about you". A good interviewee normally will have done some research on the company, and will have some kind of answer that boils down to "my biggest weakness is also my biggest strength when applied to the position I'm applying for", and I've found that overall, that is usually what companies want to hear. I, however, have a weakness that most people find very annoying yet fits any workplace well.

I have OCD.

Now, anyone out there who actually has OCD knows that it is much more than just "Oh, I have to finish everything". OCD actually encompasses people with obsessions and people with compulsions. Obsessions are thoughts that are so strong, or worries that are so strong, they start to interrupt daily life. Usually these thoughts will form into compulsions, such as an intense fear of germs leading to a ritual compulsion to use hand sanitizer three times after each time of washing your hands. It is not just a pet peeve, it is a thought so strong that if something should happen, like running out of hand sanitizer on use number two, the person will have to go get more and start from handwashing and application one again. The ritual doesn't make sense, since one application of hand sanitizer is fine, and more than that might actually be harmful, but it doesn't matter because it is a compulsion created based on the obsession with germs.

My obsession is cleanliness, and over time I have figured out some of my triggers, but not all of them. For instance, for some reason if salt and pepper shakers are mismatched, I have to clean the entire house top to bottom before I can fix it. And I mean deep clean, furniture polish, floor wax, move everything off of every shelf no clutter remains when I'm done clean, just to change out a salt or pepper shaker so the pair matches. I think this was started when I was younger, because one of the people I babysat for collected all kinds of salt and pepper shakers, and the girl I watched like to change them around all the time. Despite the fact that it's a simple salt and pepper shaker, and I logically know all I have to do is trade one out for the right one, I can't change it without cleaning everything. That is a sign of OCD.

The other trigger that I have found is when I write, it has to look clean. I don't necessarily mean that my handwriting has to be perfect, but everything has to flow smoothly, use propper grammar (to the best of my knowledge at least), have proper capitalization and punctuation. I get annoyed when I receive text messages that say "Heys me U speak 2 Cindy 2day? Shes mad IUKWIM" and I normally won't respond to them. It's bad enough that my friends know they have to use complete sentences if they want me to answer back, because I will sit there and correct them if I get anything like text-speech.

It seems like both of those triggers are dumb and easy to avoid, but I found out recently that they might not be as innocent as they seem. While fleshing out and adding to an extremely long wiki article, I had to shut down the computer due to storms (I live in a place that has a chance of tornados, so thunderstorms mean everything is disconnected if they are really bad). The storm passed with no issue, and instead of turning my computer back on, I decided I had done enough for the day and would go to bed, but as soon as I climbed into bed I thought about the article, sitting there with a "Work-in-Progress" tag and a whole bottom half that wasn't completed. I tried to ignore it and fell asleep, just to wake up 30 minutes later staring at the alarm clock. I needed to finish that article! Again, I talked myself out of it and tried to go back to sleep, but to no avail. I could not sleep longer than 30 minutes without waking up in a panic about the article, and it seemed to get worse the more I tried to put it off.

Overall, I consider myself a logical person. I will approach a task and figure out next steps and try to follow the flow, like any logical person would. Even as I type this I am thinking "this is the most illogical drivel I have every written about. It was just an article. It was tagged. No one was going to die because the last part of the article was still under construction." Yes, yes, I know that, and yes, that thought process was correct. The issue was that the last part of the article didn't look clean, wasn't structured or filled out like the rest, and therefore the entire article was wrong. I had to get it finished before I could move on.

I did end up finishing it, and now I can move on, but it definitely gave me insight into how my OCD works. If I run across articles that others have labeled "Work-in-Progress" or "Under Construction", it does not bother me in the slightest to move on if the subject matter isn't something I'm willing to tackle. Other people are allowed to handle articles however they want to, but when it comes to something that I write, it has to be as close to perfect as I can make it at that particular moment, or I will obsess over it until it is. Again, great for a job where perfection is needed, and not so great for home where time being sane is needed.

Darks Lanfear (talk) 11:24, August 2, 2014 (UTC)