Keeping Score

 OCD is the master of keeping score; targeting doubt is like a heat seeking missile. OCD distorts reality and robs you of joy and happiness.  Every insecurity is magnified infinitely. You walk around repeating every single ugly thing you have every been told, or ever felt in your mind, beating yourself down and eroding yourself worth.  In the best scenario you keep it to yourself; in the worst you suck the air out of the room seeking reassurance that your existence isn't the hell you think it is. If I had a nickel for every time I asked someone if they thought I was bad or wrong in a situation I would be independently wealthy.  As a means of proof, the OCD scans looking for reasons it's right.  It keeps score. 

I wish I was better than this.  I wish I had known many many years ago that my comparisons and score keeping was OCD and not real. I have done a lot of damage in relationships with my repeated declaration that they had done XYZ for someone in the past but they didn't do that for me so that means they loved the other person more. Meanwhile, I completely dismiss everything they have done that is more, or better, or contradicts my assertion that I am unloved, uncared for, and being used.  It feels insane and it makes me sad. OCD latches on to everything you love. OCD is what is called a "ego-dystonic" which means it goes against your goals and values. It goes after the most important people in your life because those are the relationships capable of the most collateral damage and it undermines you out of protection. 

It's been almost a month since I started treatments.  I still struggle with the mind fuck.  Cat tells me that I need to practice "radical acceptance" and simply trust that what the messages in my mind are OCD tricking me and that this is what OCD does to you psychologically and emotionally with false narratives. It is really hard not to trust your own voice inside your head. It's even harder to forgive myself for the anger I have had towards people in my life that I should have trusted and didn't.  I have a lifetime of examples where I leaned into the bad and rejected the good. It is heart breaking waiting for something to happen as proof of commitment only to be disappointed and ignoring the deeper and better things because the score card didn't have a tick in the right magic box. 

Back when I was in my late twenties all of my friends were getting engaged.  My boyfriend moved in with me and I badgered him to take a bigger step.  He said he wasn't ready; we had been dating just shy of a year.  I told him I had read in some beauty magazine that if he didn't know by this point then he would never know.  He ended up breaking up with me; moving out while I was on a business trip.  I walked into our home after being gone for one day and he was completely gone.  The guy at uhaul knew my relationship was ending before I did. It wasn't the only time that I placed more importance on a piece of jewelry than on the quality of my relationship in order to reach some finish line that always seemed to elude me.  A decade later, when I did finally get one of those surprise airport proposals that make a girl swoon, I wasn't happy with that either.  I was so caught off guard that I barely had a reaction and I knocked the wind out of his sails.  I just never seem to be satisfied. After being together for years, he broke up with me on New Years Day while I made breakfast and he unloaded the washing machine. The invitations had only been mailed out a couple of weeks before.  While I scrambled eggs at the stove with my back to him he announced, "I can't do this anymore."   I turned around and asked, "What the laundry?" This is how completely unprepared and clueless I was that he wasn't happy. He told me, "No, all of this. This relationship, the wedding, our lives together, here." I cried, I begged, and I pleaded. I asked him what I needed to do to change his mind. I was prepared to contort myself into whatever version he needed me to be in order for him to stay. He told me that the things that needed to change weren't possible to change. Besides all the very detailed intimately personal reasons he ended things, one of which was not finding me attractive; he didn't want to marry my mother because she had put my father on an allowance, and he wasn't willing to live like that. He assumed that if my mother could do that to my father then that example would result in me doing it to him at some point. He had been planning the breakup for a while, but he still gave me all the names and addresses to mail the invitations and called my parents two weeks before to give them fair warning (and ruin their holiday waiting for me to call with the news). I learned only one month ago, from a friend, he had literally told every single person I knew, both professionally and personally, that he was breaking our engagement weeks before he did it (she held on to that nugget for almost 8 years).  I was the last to know my life was going to be turned upside down. 

Has all of this been OCD; the fixation, the dissatisfaction, the distorted point of view, and the oblivion to the things so obviously in front of me? Have I become so skilled at avoidance, in order to control my anxiety, I can create what is essentially a parallel universe?  It scares me to think about all the signs I have missed.  I am far too smart to be this dumb. My late husband used to call me "Bubble" because I would float around in my own little world. I like to think I have rich fantasy life because I am creative, but in reality, I have gone through the looking glass so not to deal with the fear of reality.  As a person that is incredibly grounded and values authenticity I am appalled at this realization. I have studied false memory while in college but, how could I have been so clueless about what was happening within my own mind. They say that when you're pregnant your brain protects you from the full realization of what giving birth entails and that once it's all over you forget a lot of it (I wouldn't know from experience as I have never had a child).  Has my brain been protecting me from the full realization of my reality in response to my fear?  If it has, how can I trust anything to be real?

-Alice