Living with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder
A very brief summary
Originally published
I was around nine years old when I first encountered OCD. I was playing kick-the-can with my older brother. We lived in our parents' guest house, 'The Sea Urchin', overlooking Porthkidney Sands, in what was, and still is, the most beautiful part of West Cornwall (it is now six luxury flats!). After the final kick, we walked quite some way down the lane, and then, for whatever reason, my brother suggested that something bad might happen if I didn't go back and kick the can one more time. At first I just shrugged this off. But when I thought a bit more deeply about it, my ten-year-old logic was: what if something bad really did happen? Could I take the risk? I walked back up the lane and kicked the can one more time, just to be safe. And so my OCD was born! Of course, in 1969 nobody in my hometown had heard of OCD, but nevertheless, from that day on my life was changed forever.
None of my family ever realised (or acknowledged) that I had a problem, though I suspect that my brother had a rough idea!
In later life, my OCD showed itself in 'rituals' such as jumping up in the air so that both my feet were off the ground whilst turning off the light switch; ruining the neck of my beloved red electric guitar because there was just one dent, so I had to make it three, then six, then nine, and so on; and pulling several components out of the circuit board of my rechargeable two-channel remote-control aeroplane transmitter (quite rare in those days).
When I was 19, I started my first proper band, 'Axe'. We played many 500-seat venues (mostly schools and town halls) in the North West of England. When I took a guitar solo, I had to turn the guitar's volume control up as far as possible without hitting the stop. If I hit it, I had to turn the control fully off and try again! And so it went on, with literally hundreds of similar invented rules and rituals, nearly all of them involving the numbers 3, 4 and 9.
But for me, OCD is at its most disruptive not necessarily when it shows itself physically, but rather mentally. My personal experience is that as one matures, so does the illness, with a distinct tendency to turn inwards and for the 'rituals' to become more frequent: obsessive counting, reading sentences several times (making it almost impossible to read a book), repeating thoughts, and even decidedly dangerous blinking rituals whilst driving the car! Even now, at the ripish old age of 54, I can fairly accurately say that my OCD 'mental bouts' occur approximately once every five minutes, and they even occur whilst I'm asleep, in the form of dreams.
Overall, it's quite amazing that I still have any social life at all, even though it is now quite small. And to this day, none of my family and few of my friends realise that I have OCD.