Hello,
I’m hoping someone can help me figure out what is wrong with me. I’ll start first by saying what I do know - which is that when I was a teenager, I was diagnosed with depression and OCD. As I got older, I also developed anxiety, especially when it came to my health and those around me. I’ve seen many therapists throughout the years, who all have agreed that the way I am is most definitely because I lost my dad to cancer when I was 8. I got on with it, accepted the diagnosis, and throughout my twenties I dealt with it via CBT, various phycologists, and a lot of antidepressants. I’m now 38, with a lovely husband and two little boys. I have lovely friends and family, and - it would seem - a nice life. But there’s always been something about my behaviour that made me think that there was more to this than just OCD. There are so many things that I do that have never really fallen under the classic OCD symptoms. I know that each person suffers in their own way, and so I always thought these were just my ‘quirks’. But recently, when I met a perinatal therapist after having my second child, and gave him my history (which I have done so many times before), he kind of raised his eyebrows when I said ‘but that’s just my OCD’. And it made me think, is it? And I’ve been thinking about it ever since, and wondering if all those years ago, I should have had some other diagnosis that was missed.
So here, below, I am going to write some of the things that I do. I have never, ever said these thing out loud - not to a therapist, and not to my mum and sister who I tell everything to. I hope someone can help me because I just want to know what’s wrong with me. Here goes:
* I am always itching. Itchy feet, back, legs. I often have to stop when I’m walking to have a good itch, which my husband has noticed many times over the years and finds it very annoying. I find this sort of itching extremely annoying too, however, there’s more to it than that. I basically, in general, enjoy itching a lot, to the point where sometimes at night I lie in bed and think about it. I picture my foot itching, for example, and how enjoyable it would be to scratch it with a sharp nail. Years ago, my nephew had a nasty cut on his foot, and as it heeled, it became really itchy. I was there one night and he asked me to itch it with his nails. I still think about that now, years later, about how satisfying that must of been. I sometimes imagine that it’s my own toe that is itchy. And sometimes, my husband has hayfever and whenever he has itchy eyes I say to him, ‘you’re so lucky, I wish I had an itchy eye.’ He laughs, but he doesn’t realise that I actually mean it!
* Sometimes I can’t process time properly. When I say sometimes, I mean every night before I get into bed. It doesn’t seem to ever happen in the day. I get into bed, look at the clock and see that it’s 23:19 (for example) and I don’t seem to be able to process it or take it in. I end up having to pretend it’s something else, like my old house number or two ages, which will sometimes help it to sink in. Other times, I have to take a screenshot of the time, and then go into my photos to look at it, and sometimes this also helps. Sometimes, I only have to do this once a night, but other times I do it about twenty times before I go to sleep. When I wake up in the night and check the time, I never have an issue processing it; it is ONLY ever when I get into bed. The same sort of thing also happens when I read a book sometimes. I’ll be reading just fine and then all of a sudden I’ll suddenly be unable to get past a certain sentence, as if I can’t process it properly, and in order to do so I have to point at each word with my finger in order to take it in. No surprises, this ruins the book and I often don’t read (which I love) because of it.
* I pick at my skin all the time. I’ve done it for as long as I can remember, and even as a child I remember sitting in my room and picking the skin around my fingers for ages with a pair of tweezers. I still do it now, and I also pick my nose, spots, any ingrown hairs, dry skin, and basically anything I can on my body. I often sit in the bathroom and pick for ages - if I could, I honestly think I could do it for hours. Sometimes my husband asks what I have been doing in the bathroom all this time, and I have to make something up.
* When I used to work for a big company in my twenties, I remember a few times (not often) I got this sudden urge to type a swearword into the subject line of an email, and then use the ‘send to all button’ which would reach every other person in the company. I would then hover my finger over the mouse button, daring myself to send it. I knew I would never send it (no question), but just hovering my finger over the button was very distressing and used to make me feel sick. I was so scared I would press send by accident. This only happened a handful of times, but I remember finding it very, very upsetting. I would go to the toilets and cry after.
* I often have an issue with eye contact, although many people would find that hard to believe because I disguise it well. With people I know well (family, close friends), I am usually OK, but with people I have just met, (especially 1-1), I am always aware of the eye contact thing. I often feel like too much direct eye contact is too much, and if I look away that too looks dodgy - theres that bit in between, with a combination of the too, that’s what I struggle with. Sometimes I think about this so much that I end up losing the conversation completely.
* I have aways felt like I can feel all the pain and suffering in the would very deeply, but instead of hiding from it, I often seek it out. When I see on the news that something awful has been captured on video, like a beheading, or something happing to an animal (like those horrible dog eating festivals in China), I often feel distressed because I know that at some point, I am going to try and find that video and watch it, even though I don’t want to more than anything in the world. When I do, my heart races and I feel physically sick, often crying because of the awful thing I’ve seen. Sometimes, if the video can’t be found (i.e it’s been deleted), I feel such tremendous relief. Because I don’t want to look at these images, but I MAKE myself. And then after, I think about these awful things happening to my family. This is usually when I get into bed and I end up crying myself to sleep. I can only describe it as a kind of self harm.
* I go red in the face. It’s a lot to go into, but so much that I have sought therapy over it. It was enough to stop me from going onto the trading floor where I worked in my twenties. I literally would do anything - risk looking bad at my job - then go onto the trading floor where it was busy, and risk going red when anyone talked to me.
* My need for perfection and attention to detail can often make the creative things that I enjoy very difficult. Whilst it’s alway been a bonus at work, and enabled me to do my job very well, when it comes to doing ‘hobbie’s, it quite often ruins the enjoyment. For example, I wanted to make a picture for my friend’s new baby, which was this picture of these three little clay ducks in a row. Because I didn’t think it was perfect, I ended up spending weeks on it, (something which should have taken a few hours) and made over 30 identical ducks in the end. I even pretended to my husband that I had posted it (because he could see how distressed I was getting over it) by wrapping up a ‘fake frame’ and pretending that I had taken it to the post office! But then I continued to work on the real picture early each morning, while he was still in bed. I even became so hysterical about the whole thing in the end that I called my sister in a state. I was crying so much that all she could understand was ‘ducks’. I have many examples of this, this is just one.
* I have always had a problem controlling my emotions. I get so sad sometimes that I cry myself to sleep because I think of all the sad things that are going on in the world. Or things that are not going on, but that I just make up in my mind, like losing my husband or children. I know a lot of people do this, but my thoughts take me to such dark places and I cannot escape them. Like, sometimes I imagine my 3 years old son being kidnapped by a paeodphile ring. I imagine in detail the things that they would do to him, until I am so distraught that I am pulling at my hair and crying into my pillow. I also suffer from rage. Rage at everything - but mostly me. I am so angry at myself for being this way. Sometimes, I catch a reflection of myself, like in the window of the tube, and the think ‘urgh”. That’s all I think, just ‘urgh’.
* I think most people don’t like me. I have always thought this, throughout my teens and twenties, and accepted it. If I could count now all the people I’ve met in my life who I was convinced didn’t like me, it would probably be about 100. But I also know that I’m a nice person who doesn’t do anything to make people not like me (I don’t think), therefore part of me does know that this probably can’t be true. Of all the people I can think of that don’t like me, I couldn’t give you a single reason why.
* When my two babies were born, I was the happiest have ever been in my life. I loved them so much that it made me cry. And then, when I was changing their nappies, I would make myself say out loud ‘I wish you were dead’. I said these things because it was was I did not want more than anything in the world. I made myself say it because it made me so upset, almost as thought I wanted my lovely world to be ruined. This, out of all the things I have listed above, has been the hardest to put down in writing.
* I can’t listen to music normally. I cannot just listen to a song and enjoy it, I have to imagine that there’s a scenario going on in the background, like I am in a film or something. Sometimes I have to keep going back to the beginning of the song so it times just perfectly with the start of my ‘thoughts’.
* I find people very irritating, and I have to disguise it a lot. I prefer my own company to most people, and I have always liked being alone.
So that’s just some of the ‘weird’ stuff. Now, I’ll just round this email up by telling you about the more ‘normal me’, which is the me that my friends and family see. I am reasonably outgoing. I am funny and I know that I make people laugh. I wear my heart on my sleeve and am happy to talk about myself, but I am also a good listener. I love to try to help my friends out with their problems. I am kind, and I am a good mum and wife. I know, without a doubt, that if I told my friends the things that I have said in this email, they would not know who I was talking about. I have worn this mask for so long, and got used to behaving a certain way, that there are many people that would be surprised to know about the real me. But it’s important for me to stress; I am very aware that the things that I do are not right. I do not think that any of things I do above are OK.
I appreciate this is a long email. If you’re still awake, I would love to hear your thoughts on what could be going on inside this head of mine. Is it just OCD? Or traits of ASD? Please don’t be mean. I just want to know what’s going on so I can think about seeking proper help.
Thank you
xxx
