me & Howard
I saw The Aviator this weekend (the one in which Leonardo DiCaprio plays Howard Hughes). The film was pretty good, but its greatest effect on me was that it forced me to finally stop and consider Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, which apparently Hughes suffered from. (Should I have known that?) I have always thought that I had touches of OCD, but I figured it more for a personality quirk than a diagnosable condition.
I was still kind of “whatever” about OCD after the movie, but then I put in the special features disc and found myself heading straight for the two OCD features, and then heading upstairs to take an online test. :o) I still don’t think I have anything severe (and I’m obviously not embarrassed about it), but I definitely saw a lot of me in the test -- and many of the traits were things I hadn’t thought to connect to a possible OCD, like having a specified order for certain tasks (isn’t that just efficiency?) or unnecessarily re-reading and re-writing (that's just me being thorough, right?) or checking and re-checking things like locks, the stove, etc. (it's just common sense, isn't it?). And to an extent I do still consider these things harmless and normal personality quirks (which, nonetheless, ought not to be thoughtlessly indulged), but the number of hits I had on the test makes me think that something might actually be going on. At any rate, whatever is going on is minor and mostly changeable, I believe, so I’m not too worried.
So in short: I have always kind-of-sort-of thought I was obsessive-compulsive, and now I kind-of-sort-of think I am. Hmm.
posted by Kate @ 11:22 AM
4 Comments:
Is it part of OCD to tell your sister about the online test, like, 30 times? :o)
I dunno, Kate. When I think of "re-reading" something a lot, I think of Mel Gibson in Conspiracy Theory, with all of his copies of Catcher in the Rye. (Wait, was his thing buying and reading or just buying?) And when I think of "checking and re-checking the locks," I think of Jack Nicholson's character in As Good as it Gets when he locks-unlocks-locks-unlocks-locks his door whenever he comes home.
OCD and you are different, in my opinion.
I heartily agree. We all have touches of OCD-like behavior, but full blown OCD is some sort of chemical imbalance, isn't it? I guess I should ask you, you're the one who watched those scholarly DVD extras.
Well, I have to get going and start folding all my t-shirts and underwear into neat 6 inch rolls and display them with the tags facing down and to the left...
not OCD, A-R-M-Y
Sam G.
No, I do not think I have OCD. No, I do not think I have OCD. No, I do not think I have OCD.
(heh, heh)
I’m sorry if the picture I painted was too unsure on that point, but I was just doing a little exploration. Honestly, in part it was "attractive"(!) to have a way to explain away my quirks, but I’m hardly pretending to make any diagnoses.
[And let me just say that I appreciate that neither of you thinks of my eccentricities as a “disorder”. Aww!]
But I do have these definite OCD tendencies, and while I hear what you two are saying about them being minor offenses, I'm going to go ahead and compare your comments to Marie's in The Bourne Identity when she says, "I see the exit signs too. I'm not worried," and then Jason goes off, explaining about how he knows the license plate numbers of the cars outside, which car to check for a gun, and who in the diner would give him trouble if a fight broke out. I say that I read & re-read and write & re-write, but what I mean is that I'm embarrassed at how long those processes take me and that it's inexplicable how I can't really force myself to move on when I get lost in those activities.
To level with y’all (“y’all” -- 5% Dixie!), the unofficial test I took gave me the results of 8/20 on part A and 11/20 on part B, which one could hardly interpret as cause for alarm. (The test itself doesn’t do the service of interpreting your scores at all).
More than the scores I was interested in how much I identified with the things mentioned in the test, which was about half of the stuff. Granted, most people probably deal with some of those things to some degree or another. And let me just say that for the most part it's not the activities themselves that concern me, but the emotional energy and time invested in them – paired with the compulsiveness to do them/the difficulty to avoid them altogether. The most alarming things, really, were realizing that 1) my habits cost me real time throughout the day, 2) they cause me minor, occasional distress and to avoid certain situations, and 3) that I think it will take more than me just “trying” to change my patterns for them to actually change.
Let me re-state that I am not trying to put myself in a box or hide behind the label of a "disorder", but rather, am trying on a pair of glasses to see if they help me make better sense of my world -- and they kind of do. In any event, I’m unconcerned enough that I doubt I'll pursue it any further than I did by writing this entry -- so there. :oP
Oh, and to answer your question, Sam, I think it might have something to do with chemical imbalance stuff, but they more often talked about it in terms of the “wiring” of your brain, and about behavior modification as a means to re-routing your brain’s circuitry. Yeah, I don’t really know.
They also said that it’s possible to have it and not know it, to have mild forms of it, and for those with less severe forms to get over it without clinical diagnosis or treatment. It doesn’t have to look like Hughes or JN’s character in As Good As It Gets. There are degrees, of course.
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