This is part of a series of ongoing OCD episodes, which I will post as they happen. This is live, stream of consciousness. It happens. Often. Sometimes the subjects are different.

I don’t even know the right way, grammatically, to write “am” or “pm” in a sentence and we’re off to a terrible start. We’re not off to any start at all, this has been going on for two hours now. Not the grammatical debate, but the issue with me being wide awake at 12:30 AM, which is now 2:00 AM.

Stockholm Syndrome, you see. It has to be. It is Saturday, and a day I can turn off the abuse I get from work. By turn off I mean I can ignore it, it will be thrown my way come 9:00 AM, but I can make myself seem away in a more likely scenario on a weekend. No one respects the idea of… actually, let’s broaden this whole work thing: no one respects me. Zero. And I manage the place, I don’t technically have a boss and at the same time I have three bosses because everyone is gunning for my slice of the pie?

Oh, OCD? What does this have to do with OCD? I have a picture perfect work environment in my head. I know exactly how things should be done, but no one will follow it. It is as if I am moving all of the pieces on the chessboard and it turns out they’re off playing checkers drunk in another room. This fabricates an OCD episode—because I know how things should be. And because they are not how they should be—and everyone knows this—it all falls on me. I have the answers, they do not have the ears to receive such.

Oh, I don’t know everything, don’t get me wrong. I fuck up. But I have OCD and you know what? I put it to good use. Oh, I use it. It just goes nowhere. Chess vs. checkers.

I believe in relativity, I believe in it heavily. No, not just in the scientific sense. In the sense that for every black there is a white. For every bad a good. I believe that things do tend toward stasis, and have to even themselves out through force sometimes. Heck, it is why we have wind. And why I am awake.

You see this is a mania. I am not bipolar, but I exhibit mania as a relative reaction to the undue pressure from all of life during what most consider the work week. So a day comes that I can feel not guilty about blowing off work—Saturday—I am wide awake at 12:30 AM on four hours sleep, ready to go. Ready to be King of a World. A world, not The World.

Because of this, I have maybe six good hours of freedom and the rest of the day—day off—is hell because they will creep in with their problems, then I will eventually be doing nothing but fighting off sleep starting around 1:00 PM. And 2:00 PM. And 3:00 PM.

Note, I cannot nap. I just can’t. I’ve tried. All that happens is I sleep for however long I am experimenting for (oh, and with my OCD, even naps are a controlled and documented experiment ). Twenty minutes. Two hours. Everything in-between. And I wake up not tired but in a horrible mood. Terrible. From naps. Always. I am an asshole even to myself.

So I am stuck here with this way of living. Five days of hell, each with maybe an hour of numb “relaxation.” And then two days of mania.

Don’t get me wrong, I get stuff done. I get stuff done all the time because I work harder than anyone I know. Sorry, I have to say that because I know it to be true. That is for another discussion. We can leave it simple at: “I work extremely hard.”

I don’t want to be awake now. I want to be awake at 4:30 AM. That is the perfect time for me to wake up. I’ve studied it. Oh, my OCD had me wanting to rewind time forever when I was waking up at 8:30 AM. I would stomp across the room wondering why I bypassed 6:30 AM and 7:30 AM. Why I was such a lazy-ass. It was hell, it was before I understood Pure-O (Primarily Obsessional OCD.) I just thought I hated myself. But either way, I both understand that and can control my sleep enough to wake at 4:30 AM.

Except when I can’t.

Which is today. I am manic and I need to be up. I am free, no one can bother me because they are sleeping. They are at fault here when thinking about things relatively. This is both a positive and a negative, and because of that it is pretty much neither.

I hate you, 12:30 AM. I hate you.