Anti-Ableist Amherst: I’m So OCD

I need to check.

It echoes in my mind, again and again — I need to check, I need to check.

Sometimes, it manifests in locking the bathroom door behind me: usually in multiples of threes. I listen as the clicking sound reverberates behind me as I press down the small metallic circle lock, again and again (and again). Locking the door once or twice won’t do. It’s not safe — I need to make sure I’m not walked in on, my mind urges.

When I was hoping for acceptance into a leadership program, I copied the word “please” in my diary 27 times over the course of three days, my magical thinking insisting that this would do it, this would guarantee my acceptance, tipping the scales from a good interview to a great interview via the power of some type of scribbled sorcery.

These are the small symptoms of my affliction, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD)  — manageable, in my case, the kind of quotidian superstition that may be inconvenient but doesn’t deeply harm me. What lies beyond the smaller quirks of my disorder is something that feels far more unmanageable — namely, the sudden, staggering thoughts that I have about (often imagined) ethical transgressions, thoughts insisting that every minor blunder is something irrevocably awful I’ve done that I must repent for. As all-consuming as these thoughts are, I struggle to put them into words. But put succinctly: I’m “so OCD.”

Whenever I confess my supposed sin to a trusted friend (after much agonizing about how they’ll hate me if they learn what I’ve done, or who I am), I hear it on my tongue (or rather, read it through the text message) and I am aware of how small and inconsequential my wrongdoing is, and it often dissolves into nothingness. But that is, of course, if I can force it past my lips — most often, it stays in my head, circling around and around until I must rack my mind, checking and checking and checking, via mental rumination or swimming through online forums similarly pondering moral questions until I can allow myself some reprieve. (And then, of course, having remained unsaid, it stays in my brain, going into temporary hibernation, perhaps, but staying regardless, waiting until some minor insecurity arises to reawaken and torment me again.)

Even when I haven’t done something wrong, there is still the omnipresent fear that I will “lose control” — that one day, my best impulses will fall to the wayside and I will do something horrific. Intrusive thoughts representing the worst taboos regularly cloud my brain, suggesting nightmarish possibilities. I feel helpless as I do nothing but wave each one off, reassuring myself endlessly that my thoughts don’t characterize my actions.

I’d provide a specific example to illustrate the issue, but I can’t write so explicitly about my OCD like that — even still, as I lay it out on pen and paper (or rather, to the clack of the keyboard), I can’t list out my specific anxieties. I can, at least, lay out the more general facts of my condition: I suffer from moral scrupulosity, a subtype of OCD in which the afflicted is constantly concerned about acting in some way that deviates from their (often, highly strict) moral code. It’s not the type of OCD people mean when they talk about it in detached, joking terms, their voices light and unburdened.

Moral scrupulosity means, put simply, that there is a voice in my head constantly demanding the height of ethical purity, pointing out every ambiguous situation as a critical transgression that deems me wholly unworthy.

It feels a bit odd but necessary to assert my experience of OCD like this — to say, boldly, that it is not cleaning. There is a cleanliness element to my OCD, but the moral part, for me, is easily the worst: My primary concern is that I am someone who is kind to others, who leaves a positive impact on the world. The moral scrupulosity tells me that I am not — that I am constantly in a state of ethical catch-up, that I am stained with some sort of impurity that I cannot cleanse myself of. The worst dirtiness, in my mind, is not literal dirt, but my stained soul.

OCD that fixates exclusively on literal cleanliness is no less debilitating or deserving of treatment; however, it is often represented as the only type of OCD that exists. One of the most iconic images of OCD is, of course, the hand-washing, alongside a more general cleaning and sorting. This is interesting to me as it seems to give OCD a sort of “upside” — that OCD people are, despite being deeply mentally ill, at least rigorous in their commitment to staying clean, something most people can appreciate to some degree. “I’m so OCD,” people will drop, casually, upon being particularly (but not destructively) meticulous about some small thing. For me, being “so OCD” is about being curled up into a small ball in my bedroom, desperately mentally replaying (and scrutinizing) old scenarios to try to convince myself that I am not a horrific human being, again and again and again. Checking, checking, checking.

When you say you’re “so OCD,” or flippantly diagnose someone based on their organizational skills, I hope you will remember us: those of us with moral scrupulosity with monsters looming in our minds.

Our struggles go unnoticed in broad conversations about mental health that mischaracterize and generalize OCD as simply a “cleaning disorder,” prolonging the suffering of people who don’t recognize not only that they have OCD, but there are other people who share these experiences, and that help is available. Narrowing a condition down to its most stereotyped attribute paints an inaccurate picture of what OCD is, setting back meaningful advocacy and ultimately contributing to a caricature.

We are, doubtlessly, in your community: endlessly checking our morality, fighting to pass our own impossible “good person” tests as we push through the days. If you do nothing else for people with OCD, you can see us, and speak accordingly.