In which my life is still a volatile bundle of WTF.

I found this on a piece of paper in a file in my room. I've typed it up so you can see the difference between me now and me about two years ago, when it was written.

OCD is short for obsessive compulsive disorder (which is confusing because people with it like things to be very much IN order) and though it's a sort of mental illness, though not especially classified as one, I think it's rude to treat it as an illness even if it is one in your minds, because it's bad enough knowing that there's something wrong with your mind and the way you think... but for people to spot that you have OCD or when you are told you are "wired" incorrectly, it really hurts your feelings, it feels awful.

I didn't know that I had OCD until about two years ago. It has been getting worse lately because I am tired and stressed. It started with panic attacks, then I always felt the need to change my handwriting or type things because it wasn't ever neat enough no matter how much I practised, and I also colour code things like my planner and my school files so that I feel safer somewhat. It's maddening, sometimes you can tell you're doing it and you don't mind, sometimes you can tell you're doing it and it's embarrassing and you can't stop, and sometimes you don't realise and this would be okay except that other people point it out instead of you noticing it and you want to hit them, but in my case I'd have to hit them twice.

Today I was having a bit of an OCD moment in Maths and I closed my eyes and broke my favourite pen by accident on the table and then I was mad because it was my only colour coded pen, and then I opened my eyes and I was angry. Then I closed them again. I suddenly felt sick, because I was thinking, are all the tables straight? Oh god, they're not, and when I open my eyes I will see this and it will make me cry.

Then I went to break. I just lost control of my tear ducts for a while, to be honest. It wasn't fun to cry in front of everyone but I had to because friends try to help and that was what I needed.

An example of colour coding is that *with the pen I broke* I will colour in my planner timetable on child development the colour light brown. After that, all the homework I write in my planner for CD has to be light brown too, and when I make a slip for it in my file, that's coloured in the same light brown.
So, there you have it. OCD. It's so funny for those people who don't have it, really. I'm nowhere near that bad now. I still have little things. When I'm stressed I clean my room a lot. I throw a lot of things out. My timetables are colour coded, still, as is the colour I write in my planner in. I like things to be neat. I like writing essays because they're formuleic and once you have the right shell every essay's easy.
I like to make jokes that I have CDO, like OCD but in it's proper order- as it should be. It humanizes the condition somewhat.

Most of the time I'm pretty laidback, but stress and illness still bring out weird tendencies. I tend to become very clinical. I overanalyse things, searching for meanings. No matter if I'm ill or tired or stressed or not, I always wonder what other people are thinking. Not necessarily what they think of me, but just how their minds work in general. Some things I find very upsetting or moving or important, others think are completely trivial. The attributes and qualities that I search for in people (number one being that they're educated enough to hold a good, long, detailed conversation or argument) are basically shields for how finicky I am.

Now I'm older I live by very different rules to the rest of my family. If I want to eat a lot, I work it off. I sleep in the pitch black (the rest of the family are scared of the dark). I'm awfully critical of people, especially my friends. I apparently give this impression that if someone touches me, I'll hurt them. I don't mean to; it just happens. My personal space and my room are things, places, that I protect. They're mine. My domain. My terrain. My hiding place. I like being able to come home after sixth form and be silent for hours on end. I love being able to go for an impromptu walk that lasts for hours. I love havign time to think for myself and to mull things over. I consider myself a wholewheat person. Of course I have my off-days. Even robots and computers and saints must not be brilliant or good or even positive all the time.

Sometimes I feel like there are two people in my head- the functional one who gets me through the daytime, and the deranged and dangerous one who seems to take over in times of tiredness, anger, depression or confusion. The dangerous one is terrifying. That one makes me fly off the handle. The Hyde part of my consciousness, so to speak. The Jekyll part hides away late at night and I'm left as a bit of a strange version of myself. My mum notices it; "you're not right this evening, are you?"

Nope. No. I'm stressed and frustrated and there's all this shit at the back of my mind like graffiti, it's pinned to my brain and it won't come off. I want to get rid of it. Annoying circles of thought. Confusion. Darkness. Hours of bad memories that I dream through sometimes. There's nothing like jolting awake in the dark at three or four in the morning. There's not one experience I can think of that's quite as unsettling as being able to remember my nightmares. The worst thing is they're set in this house. When I'm walking around they play over the normal background, they seem real. Like the weird body thing that's covered in blood that lives behind my bathroom door. That is alive, suiposedly. It has no skin. It creeps me out. But more than the thing creeping me out, is the fact that my mind created it. My mind has created an image, a character so much worse than anything I've read about, any horror movie or book, any scary story, any bad memory (and some of them aren't nice, I mean it). I wake up sometimes, and I'm freezing.

The days where I'm cold are the bad days. They mean I have to put on three or four layers just to walk about. Sometimes I spend all day in bed, reading. Not because I can, but because it's necessary, as the warmest place I know of.

Right now I'm alright, but ill and tired, and that means I need to sleep before I go a bit doolallytap.