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.

My parents were high school sweethearts in Woburn Massachusetts, just outside of Boston. At 17, my dad (lied about his age, in the era you could get away with that) joined the Air Force and lived in the Sahara Desert. By the time he came back, my mom married someone else and moved to the West Coast. My dad then also married someone else. My mom had two sons and a daughter with her husband. My dad had 3 sons and a daughter with his wife. Both marriages ended, sending both my dad and mom home to Boston Massachusetts. They got back together and had me, their one and only child together. Out of all my siblings, Bobby was closest to my age and he was ten years older than me when he died June 4, 1984.

My history of journals and their destruction which brings me here, to try that mess again. Why not do it in a public forum. I was inspired to start with a crazed story from my life leading to permanent PTSD around dating. It just kept going and going...

The picture is of my bedroom when I was in my early 20's. I had a wrought iron sleigh bed my mom gifted me when I was in high school. It held a futon mattress. I loved that bed and had it for nearly ten years though when I moved into an apartment, I discovered putting it together solo was the pits. My bedding was also pretty great. I was in two decorating 'worlds'. In high school and then college, I loved black and white - my high school bedroom was gun metal grey exterior paint with black and white artwork in black gloss frames. Most of my furniture was black with touches of white and also red. I saved up money to buy an insanely large black and white photograph for my college apartment which had been sold by the time I had the money. I HAD to buy something. I looked in the bins of this shop and found a equally large scale print of Idyll by Gustav Klimt from 1884. This completely changed my style, slowly. In this photo was some of the artwork I loved. I still have that M.C. Escher print ('Drawing Hands, 1948) which is now set in a much better black mat wood frame behind the most beautiful burgundy mating with black core and prominently featured in one of my hallways. I hang it incorrectly, according to the experts but I approve. This photo also features a print I forgot I had long ago and gifted to a friend who probably destroyed it. Betty Boop herself as an Obsession, Calvin Klein perfume ad. It was pretty perfect in the bedroom of a gal in her 20's I feel.