No! I am not a lycanthrope!
Now that that is out of the way…
Here is an example of the source of all my problems, as well as the source of happiness in my life. You’ll probably be confused by that statement, but if you lived with it for a while, you’d understand.
So today I went out back to water my rows of tobacco plants. I did that methodically, one at a time, from left to right. I checked on the progress of my seedlings, watered those, then I took a walk around the yard and inspected the other individual plants growing there; I looked at the Boston ivy on the oak tree, and got annoyed that it’s throwing out feeler arms, so I pulled out my pocket knife and pruned them back a bit (I don’t like feeler arms – makes the vine less aesthetically pleasing). Then I went to look at the rose bush, to check on whether my efforts are still paying off to get rid of the stupid fungus that attacked it earlier this year. It looked great, so I moved on to the patch of milkweed at the side of the yard. The seedpods are starting to open under the summer sun, and I have to pick them one at a time so I can disperse the seeds in the right spots in that section of the yard, or they’ll start growing all over the place and it’ll all be chaos! Chaos! Yeah. After that, I gathered up the fallen branches that were scattered around and piled them up next to my compost-heap/raised bed at the far end of the property.
Feeling good about the condition of the yard, I went back inside. Just as I walked through the door, something caught my eye, so I stopped and looked at the side of the house. There was a brand-new schwinn bike sitting right behind my tobacco plants – I have no freaking idea how it got there, or who it belongs to, nor do I have any idea how I managed to water all of the tobacco plants and not even notice it. So now I’m irritable about it. I wish I knew why.
This mechanism, and this reaction is largely the source of my OCD and if it happens a lot during the day, I’ll go into spirals of anxiety. I know why; growing up, I never knew what small variable I might miss which would result in a berating, a beating, a loss of privilege. Then, ten years ago*, I lived with the girl I was seeing at the time, and a friend of mine offered to let us move in with him – he got me a job at the place he was working at, so it made practical sense to take him up on the offer. Not one week after moving in with him, my girlfriend at the time was sleeping with my best friend, and I was oblivious to it for over three months. When the truth was revealed, I went into a dissociative fugue of sorts and almost a week’s worth of time is blacked out of my memory. All I know is that I packed all my things and moved to my grandparent’s house and dropped all contact with my girlfriend and my friend. I only know this because, when my memory resumes, that’s where I was. Yes,I managed to work things out with my friend, although it took several years for me to talk to him again. Seeing as he’s been the only friend I’ve had since grade-school, it’s hard to imagine doing otherwise. Strangely, I don’t have any issues trusting him. I still haven’t talked to the girl I was involved with, though, and that was the last romantic entanglement I’ve had. Ten years ago.
And that’s my story.
I wish my brain didn’t work this way sometimes. It can get aggravating. This is “overfocused ADHD” at its finest. A blessed curse. Such is life, though, is it not? This is also why I’m not sure whether I actually have OCD, or if it’s just the product of my ADHD. When I focus on something, everything else around me is blocked out of my mind. Even when I recall something, it’s as if what I was looking at in the memory is surrounded by a black haze. I have an image-based thinking process, and I rarely think in words unless I’m writing, which is itself extremely perplexing if I stop to think about it. Because how on earth does that work? Thinking about how I’m thinking about things in images and yet translating images into words, without using words? That was a random subject transition. Ha.
*Ten years is an estimate. I have a superbly horrid sense of the passage of time. It may have been anywhere between 6 and 12 years ago.
2 comments
The part that you so unsure about the time period is scary, the mind could be so complex and amazing but when its start to develop some abnormal way of working that always freaks me out unless someone hit their head and develop positive skills, there was a guy who never played the piano and hit his head and then he would see the music notes like cubes and was force to stop what he was doing and play it or his nerves would get really bad.
That really sucks about ex girl and friend, I got mad reading that I erase what I typed next like 3 times because my thoughts and anger should be kept to myself, and If you moved on that is all that matters.
Silentblue; Thanks for the kind words — I have move on and accepted what happened, and have made amends with the responsible parties – or one of them, anyway- which helps reduce the damage the event caused. It’s like an echo, though, where all those points align (treatment growing up, loss of trust in people I should have been able to trust, etc..) in every day situations. It’s hard to get rid of the feeling of frustration it causes. I snap back pretty quickly so long as it doesn’t happen repeatedly throughout the day.
And on time…. I don’t think it’s unusual, but I might be wrong. I don’t look at clocks/calendars when I’m not working, so my perception of time just gets really fuzzy. Once I start working again, it’ll most likely go back to normal. On the other hand, you have no idea how long it took me to get used to writing 2012 rather than 2011, and I often forget how old I am. lol, d’oh.