Symptoms of OCD, they are vast and inclusive of just about everything. I think everyone has a tendency towards OCD to a certain extent. Oh gosh, where's my car keys? Didn't I put them in the same spot that I put them every day so I wouldn't forget them? OCD is so controlling and I do wish people felt a whole lot different about it than they do because I'm not crazy. I'm just wired different and that's okay.
Those with obsessive-compulsive disorder, I have kind of a milder case of it, but it's just, you feel like you have to do something correctly. If you don't do it correctly, and you know what that means somehow, you have to do it again, or have to do it twice, or something like that. For me, it usually had to do with just, like, tapping things, touching things, hopping a certain number of times. There were certain numbers as well that I liked more than others. I liked 17, 11, 7, 3, things like that. And so that's, it's usually those numbers that I had to do something. So if I didn't do something correctly three times, I had to do it correctly five times, or seven times, or eleven times, that kind of thing. Kind of like in steps, or something. I don't have an explanation for that. It's so weird. It just feels right.
Some symptoms that I have seen in myself before I knew I had OCD at the beginning of my mission, I just had these intrusive thoughts all the time. Intrusive thoughts being thoughts that are kind of disturbing to you, like they go very against what you believe, against your values. So I had a lot of thoughts, like a lot of thoughts about harming other people, about harming myself, a lot of sexual thoughts, a lot of things where I was like, this is not what I want to be thinking ever, like I do not like this. And so that was hard because I didn't want to be thinking those things anyways, and let alone as a missionary, like a representative of Christ, I felt really bad about that. That was the first indicator that something was wrong was my thoughts. And then my compulsions, I started like obsessively, compulsively repenting over and over and over again. And I never felt like I could be forgiven in my sins, even like really little things. So just really looking for the obsessions in your thoughts and the compulsions is important.
My predominantly symptoms are intrusive thoughts regarding harm, religion, me harming others. I do have a preoccupation with symmetry and with exactness and with a strong sense and a need for completeness. I have a very rigid routine. If I am in any way knocked off of that routine, I have a tendency to get agitated or get aggravated or even have bouts of anxiety. Those are predominantly my symptoms, although there are many others in the spectrum of OCD.
One thing that I don't really think about much is that I do have some tics with my OCD, and they're not severe at all. They're very, very mild, but they do kind of make it annoying. Like, one of the ones I had for the longest time would just be, like, cracking my wrist just over and over again, both of them, and I couldn't really stop. And yeah, that was pretty difficult, and I don't really notice. There's so many things that I don't really notice because I just do it on the daily, do it so much. That's really interesting about my symptoms is some things do affect me, and I'm not really noticing it unless I consciously think about it. So it makes things kind of difficult to identify when they come up.
Symptoms of OCD can range from many manifestations, for example compulsive checking. Checking something is right until it feels right. That often means you waste so much time checking that the doors are shut, checking that the windows are shut because of the fear of something awful might happen if you don't. That it's a pattern, that it gets stuck like a loop going round and round and round and you feel you need to check it just one more time otherwise something terrible will happen and it can be completely illogical. It can be for example that a loved one might have a heart attack if you don't check that the fridge is closed. That the thought just pops into your head and you need to work so hard to try and not make that thought come true by doing the compulsion and it's completely illogical way of thinking but it's part of what OCD is about. It attacks that which you value most.
So for me one of the symptoms of OCD is having these thoughts that are intrusive that I feel like are telling me to do something specific and if I don't do that specific thing there will be like serious consequences or if I do that specific thing then something really good will happen and if I don't do it then I just really beat myself up about missing out on that. And a lot of the time it's like if I do this thing then something totally unconnected that's that's good will happen.