Do I have OCD? Why yes. Yes I do.

Guys, this is not okay. OCD is a mental disorder. This post has gotten over 68,000 notes by treating it as a joke. I know not a lot of people are familiar with what OCD actually is due to all of the stereotypes, so HERE I AM TO THE RESCUE! Consider this post your OCD 101.

OCD, as you may know, stands for obsessive-compulsive disorder. Obsessions are intrusive thoughts or worries that are unwanted and can’t be gotten rid of. They tend to repeat over and over again and won’t stop, like getting a song stuck in your head. You may have experienced obsessions about something like your crush not liking you back - no matter how hard you tried to forget about it, it wouldn’t go away.

Obsessions can be very specific, such as fearing you’ll look at your neighbor’s paper during your math test, or very vague, such as an unsettling feeling that something bad is going to happen on your birthday.

Compulsions are acts that you feel you must carry out, usually in response to the obsessive thoughts. Physical compulsions – those that are readily apparent to observers, like hand-washing and lock-checking – are known as overt compulsions, whereas those that are less-observable, like counting or praying, are referred to as covert compulsions. As with anything, there’s a lot of gray area in between the two, but generally these categories are enough.

Although everyone has a few obsessions and compulsions, OCD is by definition a disorder, and is much more severe and overwhelming than anything people without OCD have experienced. Specifically, OCD is an anxiety-related disorder, and as such, the primary emotion related to it is fear. In order to qualify as a symptom of OCD, obsessions and compulsions must be ego-dystonic, meaning they clash with the sufferer’s self-identity and cause distress. Color-coding your notes because you like them to look nice is not OCD. Color-coding your notes because you’re afraid that if you don’t your teacher will hate you or you will lose the ability to read is.

Here are some examples to help you understand! Some are things I experience, some I’ve heard about from others, and some I made up to illustrate the point. Note that the split between mild and severe OCD isn’t perfect, here or anywhere else, but I did my best.

Mild to Moderate OCD:

You feel safest when everything around you is symmetrical, but you’re naturally right-handed. This worries you enough that you always chew your food on the left side of your mouth, to balance it out.

You worry that your spoons have feelings that are hurt when you use them unequally, so you have a strict rotating spoon-use schedule to make sure none of them are left out.

You always eat colored things like M&Ms in rainbow order, because if you don’t, it’s “wrong”, and the rest of your day will also be “wrong”. One day you accidentally eat a purple Froot Loop before the blue ones for breakfast and for the rest of the day feel like you’re living a few minutes before a horror movie that can start at any time.

Whenever you wake up in the middle of the night, you’re afraid to move in case you leave your body and can’t get back in. This has never actually happened to you, but you read about it once, and now it takes a good deal of willpower for you to get out of bed to go to the bathroom at night. You have adjusted your pre-bedtime tea routine accordingly.

One day, you were walking along the way to work, minding your own business, when out of nowhere you were struck with the thought that if the 49ers win the Super Bowl this year, something awful is going to happen to your dad. You recognize that this has absolutely nothing to do with anything and is completely ridiculous, but still, your anxiety spikes with each game they win.

You have to do a short tap dance routine before you open a door. You originally started this as a way to practice a tricky step for your tap recital when you were little, but after it was over, you kept doing it, fearing that because you put so much time into it, it contained a part of your soul that would be lost if you stopped.

You take longer than your classmates to take tests because every five questions you have to go back and check to make sure that you didn’t skip a question or fill in the wrong bubble.

You’re afraid to leave your drinks unattended in case something contaminates it while you’re not looking. This originally started with just open containers that stuff could fall into, but then you started thinking about poison, so you extended it to all beverages. You know that no one has any reason to poison you, but still, whenever you catch yourself having not paid attention to your water bottle for a while, you empty it and fill it back up before you drink from it again, just in case.

When numbering a paper for class, you realize you wrote two fours. Rather than replace the second one with a five, you rip the paper up and start numbering a fresh sheet, because the thought of doing your homework on an eraser-marked paper makes you want to cry.

Orange is an unlucky color. Whenever you see it, you are filled with a feeling of dread. To make sure nothing horrible happens, whenever you see something orange, you have to think “blue thoughts”, because blue is the natural inverse of orange.

You’re scared of heights, because whenever you’re near a ledge, you can’t stop thinking about jumping off, even though you have no desire whatsoever to do so. If you absolutely can’t avoid being high up, you stay as far away from the edge as possible while mentally repeating I’m not gonna jump, I’m not gonna jump over and over again until you’re back in a safe place.

You have tape over the webcam and microphone on your laptop just in case someone is spying on you. You know it’s a stupid thing to think, so whenever someone asks, you tell them it’s broken.

Three is a magic number. Every time you say something, you have to repeat it in your head three more times or it won’t feel right. You have to flick the light switch three times and check the locks on your door three times, or else a burglar will get in.

You have a problem where your brain thinks “Fuck the environment!” to you all the time. It’s always in the same tone and doesn’t seem to actually correlate with you thinking or saying or listening to anything. You know it’s just your own thoughts being crazy, even if you’re not trying to think them, but it terrifies you because you’re a fairly outspoken environmental activist and the harder you try to make it stop, the louder it gets. You’re beginning to fear that you actually secretly don’t care about the environment - after all, if the thoughts didn’t mean anything, why would they keep coming back?

Moderate to Severe OCD:

Every time you drive, you’re terrified that you hit someone and didn’t realize it. You retrace your path three times every time you travel by car to make sure that hasn’t happened. But what if you hit someone while you were checking? You eventually stop driving altogether and lose your job.

You’re afraid of losing things. Everything you own has its own place and must stay in that exact spot when not being used. Because of this, you can only do your math homework at your desk in your room, because if you do it anywhere else, you have to run up and return your calculator to its spot every time you need to put it down.

Someone at school recently told you about “step on a crack, break your mother’s back”. You know it’s a joke, but what if it isn’t? You start refusing to step on cracks, and just to be safe, no longer touch, draw, or look at straight lines. You can no longer walk on tile and your handwriting becomes practically illegible. One day, you accidentally step on a crack. Your mother is next to you and she’s fine, but maybe it doesn’t happen right away? To prevent it, you begin drawing circles on your hand with a pen every time you see a straight line, just in case.

You watched a documentary about the fallibility of memory and are now terrified that your memories are false. To keep yourself from forgetting, you write down everything that happens to you as you are experiencing it. This takes up a ridiculous amount of your time.

You’re afraid things may be subtly changing size around you and you don’t notice. You wake up two hours early to measure all the furniture in your room every morning before you go to work, just to check. Then you become afraid that the tape measure’s changing size too, so you start measuring using your own body. But what if YOU’RE changing size?! You would never know! Within a week, you have sent panicked emails to every physicist you can Google, asking for reassurance that everything is just as big as it has always been.

You try really hard to be a good person, but sometimes you have impure thoughts. Every time this happens, you have to cancel the bad thought out with a good one. You confess every tiny sin to your priest once a week, and pray for half an hour before you sleep and wake up, but you still feel so guilty you almost can’t eat.

You’re scared of germs. You wash your hands for ten minutes every time you touch something anyone else even might have touched, and you bathe in bleach every night. Your hands are cracked, raw, and bleeding from the scrubbing. Your long, dark hair has gone white and brittle. You have chemical burns all over your body. You still don’t feel clean.

Whenever you’re around somebody for too long, you’re afraid their negative traits are going to rub off on you. To combat this, you constantly list their positive traits over and over in your head. You constantly feel on the edge of a panic attack because of this.

You’re a new father. The responsibility is overwhelming, and it occurs to you that you might be sexually attracted to your baby. Panicking, you refuse to change her diaper or bathe her anymore, making your already-swamped wife do it. It gets so bad that you fear being alone with the baby in the same room. You constantly check to make sure you aren’t aroused around her, but the more you try not to be, the more you start to worry that you are. (This is a really common obsession among men particularly, which has resulted in a few actually turning themselves in to the police and having their children temporarily taken away.)

You somehow have managed to get the idea that everything in your life has to be completely androgynous, or it will throw the whole universe off balance. You know it’s crazy, but just in case, you decide not to major in biology after you learn there are slightly more females than males in the program.

TW: self-harm You need everything to be exactly symmetrical to avoid something vague and menacing from happening to your family. One day, you badly slice your index finger open while cutting a tomato. You sit on the floor, crying, for twenty minutes, until you can get up the courage to cut the other one in the same spot. You need twice the stitches.

You need everything to be exactly symmetrical to avoid something vague and menacing from happening to your family. One day, you badly slice your index finger open while cutting a tomato. You sit on the floor, crying, for twenty minutes, until you can get up the courage to cut the other one in the same spot. You need twice the stitches. You hate odd numbers and try to avoid them. Whenever you happen to see one, you feel like the universe is sending you a message saying it doesn’t approve of what you’re doing. The last time it happened, you were kissing your boyfriend. Now you’re worried that you have to break up with him, even though you don’t want to. What if the universe was trying to tell you he’s not “the one”?

You’re afraid of the zombie apocalypse. You know it’s probably not going to happen, but you feel compelled to make plans for every conceivable way it could come about and stockpile supplies just in case. Every time you hear a noise, your first thought is zombies. You spend so much time thinking about it that it begins to feel inevitable.

You can’t throw away junk mail because no matter how many times you check, you’re afraid you may have missed something that actually isn’t junk. Letters sit in gigantic piles on the floor of your closet. You’re not exactly sure what you’re looking for - no one ever sends you anything important via snail mail.

You see something out of the corner of your eye one night and are instantly terrified that you’re developing schizophrenia. Now every time you hear voices out of view, you panic that maybe you’re hallucinating them. You spend the next few months obsessively looking up information on schizophrenia, in order to reassure yourself you don’t have it. Your psychiatrist says it’s just part of your already-diagnosed OCD, but what if he made a mistake? You ask him every time you see him just in case.

TW: violence, suicidal thoughts Ever since a well-publicized mass shooting, every time you look at someone, you automatically imagine graphically murdering them. You’re terrified that sometime you’re just going to snap and kill everyone. You withdraw from your friends and family in order to keep them safe from you, but you still worry - you’re beginning to think the only way you can guarantee you won’t hurt anyone is by killing yourself. (This is also an unfortunately common obsession.)

Ever since a well-publicized mass shooting, every time you look at someone, you automatically imagine graphically murdering them. You’re terrified that sometime you’re just going to snap and kill everyone. You withdraw from your friends and family in order to keep them safe from you, but you still worry - you’re beginning to think the only way you can guarantee you won’t hurt anyone is by killing yourself. (This is also an unfortunately common obsession.) You’re afraid that if you kiss someone, they’ll turn into a frog. You know this is absolutely ridiculous, but you can’t shake the dread. You’re 21 and have refused every single one of the many kisses you’ve been offered.

You’re a transman. Every time you meet someone, you’re afraid they think you’re a woman, even if they use the right pronouns. You’ve taken to going up to strangers and asking them what gender they think you are, even though most people who answer female are joking.

See? These are not cute quirks. They’re symptoms of mental illness. While these people may seem psychotic, most actually are completely able to tell that their fears are irrational - it’s just that they have a pathological intolerance of uncertainty. Because of this, OCD is often referred to as the doubting disorder.

For comparison, here’s an extensive list of things that are NOT OCD:

You like keeping your room neat and organized. It makes it feel more spacious, and helps you study.

You look forward to taking a nice, warm shower every day after school, always at the same time. The routine helps you unwind from the stress of your AP classes.

You always check the locks on all the doors and windows once before going to bed.

You collect antique coins and are a member of a few different coin-collecting groups. Your heart swells with happiness every time you look at your cache.

You like to separate your Skittles by color and eat them in a particular order. They taste better that way. One time, your brother wrecks your arrangement. You get upset at him because you know he did it just to be a jerk.

You wash your hands before you eat and after you use the bathroom, no matter what. You brush and floss your teeth twice a day, and wash your hair once a day.

You see a line of pencils, but one is facing the opposite way from the others. This irritates you until you fix it.

Your friends make fun of you because of all the time you spend perfecting your house in Minecraft. It’s your favorite part of the game.

You hate it when people take huge bites out of Bubble Tape. That’s not how it’s supposed to be eaten.

You always make sure your club lists all of its expenses, items needed, and to-do list in a Google Drive spreadsheet accessible to all the members.

Whenever you meet someone, you like to think about which Hogwarts House they’d be in. Borderline cases bug you.

You cover up the unsightly spot on the left side of your family photograph with the frame. It looks much better now.

You spend a single afternoon alphabetizing your DVD collection.

You wake up fifteen minutes earlier than is strictly necessary every weekday in order to lie in bed and write out your schedule for the day. It helps you feel prepared.

You have to stay off of TVTropes because you always open all of the links in one article in new tabs and it quickly becomes overwhelming. They’re just so interesting, though!

You run a blog that consists entirely of Nicolas Cage photoshopped into the background of famous pictures of historical events. You have a standardized set of tags to make everything easy to find, and a regular queue of user submissions to keep your followers happy.

While putting off an essay you’re dreading, you spend entirely too much time fooling with your blog theme in order to make it match the EXACT color scheme of The Avengers.

I repeat: these are NOT indicative of OCD, because they are not compulsions done out of irrational fear - in fact, most of them are perfectly normal. Any of these compulsions could be OCD, if they were in response to an upsetting obsession, but they are not. The human mind finds pleasure in patterns by nature. It’s only when it starts causing distress that it becomes an issue.

In summary: OCD is a serious mental illness. Please don’t treat it as a joke.

(I’d really appreciate it if you’d reblog to spread this information!)

(EDIT: Click here to go to my OCD masterpost, which includes more detailed information, plus an article about why you shouldn’t use the phrase “so OCD”.)

