OCD Me (and Everybody Else)

There are days when I live with a song on loop and one hand on Colin's Spray. My head spins; my back aches. I feel like a detailed epiphany-less copy of all the romantic qualities I would like to possess. I mutter under my breath all day (even as one part of brain offers, wise and impatient, 'why are you whispering to yourself, idiot!'). On days like these, it strikes me, how my longstanding lament about my missing faculty of Passion has been made doubly poignant by my fresh discovery of its warped copy, which I do possess in whale-like proportions: Obsessiveness.


I like ticking off my OCDs silently, secretly, and (pliz excuse rather imaginative choice of adjective), obsessively. The warped thing about Obsessive Compulsive Disorders is that they make you feel rather special. Something to do with the Dysfunctional becoming some kind of cocky, dirty-gleeful functional mode of being in my world (I mean, just the way those three words look in title case - there's a small pleasure even in that). An OCD tag is capable of making my most mundane actions into quirks deserving of a fictional character. Like (okay, I confess), I am this obsessive kitchen-slab-cleaner. I watch my hand doing rapid, mathematically precise, rhythmic actions of damp-cloth-on-granite-slab, and think, 'ooh I feel a Facebook note coming up'. What I should be thinking instead, is 'whaddafuck IT'S CLEAN, why am I still at it?'.


I remember when I'd heard about OCDs for the first time. Sometime in my late teens (I was quite certain then that it was invented to describe my mother). But soon enough, I realised that it had a fashionable alt life as well; people were using it as keystones in detective thrillers, as evidence in property scams, as :O-inducing moments while discussing Things That Happen to Other People, and as the final proof of the advent of Kalyug. Alas, now OCDs have none of that delicious shock value. I like to think they have become exercises in doing what is now the Ultimate Mundane Act: finding meaning in life. Looking for Meaning in Life has become something of an OCD by itself. An OCD is now, I realise as I type this note, something to confess, like a secret. Or to hide, like "a little-known fact". Something to note; to observe; and to pat back for doing so. There was a time when recognising an OCD made me feel a horrible shudder; like a ripping tear on my shiny-new-dress picture of myself. Now it feels like the opposite, something solid though ugly - a little object that allows me to stand apart from myself and look at myself, which is kinda thrilling and pathetic all at once.


I obsess; oh yes I do. And I love-hate it (I do it so often, I have begun using the phrase as a verb). It’s threatening to become the exalted Sisyphean boredom of my life; it’s mixing up all the genres, so my life doesn’t fit into any. I like Romance; all I get is Absurd. I want to be High Melodrama; alas, I am Neo-Realism. Like a hero on a quest, I want to will things into being; I want to feel that elusive thing called Passion and chase it and love it and suffuse my life with it in some kind of perpetual love dance. Instead, I constantly feel like I'm being put on a helpless, whooshing, auto-pilot mode; I obsess about too many singular things and cannot stop doing them, like they're chasing me instead.


I want to be fiction; I am repeatedly, life in all its weirdness. I want to experience a mad joy outside the space-time fabric, but I am hooked to the little squirts of satisfied joy I keep getting from doing tiny obsessive things. And so I live in the maddeningly infinite no man's land between life and meta-life. The great thing about this place is that I can indulge in converting an illness like OCD into hyperbole, confess to the crime, and get away with it :P