This is part our of a series of things I have noticed about the way I carry on a normal life that can be traced back to OCD—but in a much less serious sense as other situations written about on this site. “The moral inhibitions fall, and then there needs to be a threat, then it’s fun.”

• When you’re overcome by the overwhelming sickness that the world around you has, how wrong it is… this visceral feeling of putrid, years-dead existences all around you. And your brain is not doing much better, but at least you know you’re not wrong in this. This is a feeling of wrong all around you, and you cannot shake it. It is not meant to be selfish—it is not meant to be anything, it just is. Much like opening a jar of food you didn’t realize was rotten until you were hit with its smell, everything around you just… is wrong. Not right by any means. Yeah, OCD¹.

• I’ve gained an obsession with weight. No, not my weight. Well, ok, my weight is an obsession too because I do not want to buy new shorts or shirts. No, I mean the concepts of measuring weight. It started when I worked in a grocery store for six years during high school and college. I was always holding things of a certain weight as I stocked shelves. For no good reason, I taught myself to be able to weigh pretty much anything from a few ounces to around five to ten pounds by hand without a scale. I can still do this today, I am rarely off by an ounce. This is useless. Yeah, OCD.

• When you always have to be the same temperature at all times, and any slight variation is an affront to your bodily being. And to accomplish this you have a set of sweaters, hoodies of different thicknesses, thermal shirts, and sweatpants that you constantly put on and take off, flipping between combinations to keep your sense of the temperature around you the same. Because adapting to change is not good. Yeah, OCD.

• When you’ve programmed your budget to take into account how many months you can live if zero money was coming in (meaning you’ve lost three businesses all at once) and that fear is boiled down to a number which is updated every four to six hours. And that number is put in months… with three digits after the decimal place. What does 12.849² months even mean? Oh, you’ve also handily calculated that into rational years, months and days. Yeah, OCD.

• I’m in the middle of a crisis that has lasted over four hours. I’ve taken, after decades not trusting it, to trying to shop online for clothes. Shopping with me is a well known… adventure. But I am alone in this crisis. I need new shorts. They must be brown. Brown is one of the worst colors for someone with OCD—as it can present itself as a beautiful dark chocolate but easily shade its way into, well, diarrhea. So I purchased a pair of shorts, and it is awfully close to diarrhea brown, but not quite. Certainly not the chocolate brown I saw on the website. Well, I find another pair that comes a week later and is indeed the chocolate brown color I’ve always wanted. But the fabric is too thin, compared to the one with the worse color. And thus, a dichotomy. Or, the possibility of trying a third time to get everything perfect. Money—of which I don’t have a lot for shorts—is no object when it comes to this mental state. Yeah, OCD