My Main Theme: Just Right OCD

I cant remember a time in which I haven't experienced Just Right OCD. From the time I could walk, my Just Right OCD shined through. In fact, it is what led to my OCD diagnosis at 10 years old.

It started by my mother noticing how I would line up my My Little Ponies on the piano from tallest to largest, and NO ONE under any circumstances could move them. Adding to this, my OCD started to demand that I line my dinner plate with my My Little Ponies when the family would sit down for dinner. It was sssential that no one could touch their plate before all of the ponies were lined up perfectly so they could eat too. Like saying grace before a meal, no one was allowed to eat until this was accomplished.

As soon as I got alitle older, keeping my room in order became important to me. Don't get me wrong, my room wasn't always clean, but when I would clean, EVERYTHING had to be symmetrically perfect. Everything that I owned needed to be "just right" in my space. This spread to any areas in the house that my brain thought I "owned". For example, my bathroom drawer had to be perfect and symmetrical, with my toothbrush, hairbrush, scrunchies, and products perfectly organized, cleaned, and symmetrical. My desk at school had to be so perfect, I would worry that someone may bump my desk and the perfectly aligned pencils inside would move while we were out for winter break.

As I got older, this theme of "just right" never left. I felt like I would try so hard in therapy to get rid of this theme and I could never shake it. In a way, I loved the feeling of everything in my life looking and feeling like it was out of a magazine. It made me feel so safe and secure that everything was perfect in its place.

When I turned 16 and got my fist car, I started perfecting that. If I would drive anywhere, I felt the intense need to fill the gas tank up every time because it wasn't perfect unless it was full. I had to wash my car weekly because if it was dirty it wasn't perfect. I had to "shake out" the mats every time I drove somewhere or used my car. Don't get me started on the panic I would feel if I had to drive a family member or a friend.

My locker at school was perfect, my backback, my bathroom, my room, my car, my closet, my locker at the gym, even down to the shampoo bottle caps on my shelf in the shower. EVERYTHING I owned needed to be in order.

It got to the point where I started to not use certain spaces because I didn't want to mess them up. I would do my best to not sleep in my perfectly made bed, so I would sleep on the couch or on the floor in my parents room. I would try not to drive anywhere. I had a SECOND toothbrush that I put in my parents bathroom so I wouldn't have to dirty mine or mess up the drawer in my bathroom. I would do anything I could to cut time off of trying to keep up with making everything perfect, so I would avoid using certain things.

I am unsure of what sparked this obsession. I feel like in a way I was just born with this theme inatley in me because to this day, I have never been able to truly let go of my Just Right OCD. I now am able to drive my car without filling the gas tank everytime, use my toothbrush and sleep in my own bed, but sadly when cleaning day comes around, I still clean everything to perfection. I struggle with not taking everything out of the cabinets and wiping out the "dust" that may have collected inside in the last week. I find it hard to not clean every corner of my house, my car, and my workspace. Even my electronics aren't safe. I have to make sure that my electionrics don't have emails overflowing, text messages that are just taking up valuable space, or files that are not needed. To this day, I like to do my homework on the couch so that the next weekend during cleaning day, I don't have to clean it since no one used it. I hate to say that I love my perfectly clean space, but the drive to keep it perfect has left me tired, exhausted, late to events/appointments, taken so much time out of my life, and is honestly just a huge inconvenience.

Out of all of the themes that I have expereinced, this is just one of those themes that doesn't bother me as much as the others. Which is why it probably has never gone away. I haven't given much energy into getting rid of it through ERP and therapy. That is until now.

Throughout school, I prided myself in my accademics. I wanted to have the 4.0, get the best grades, wanted to be liked by all of my teachers, and wanted to do my best. I felt like school came easy to me the older I got. After getting my bachelors degree in Psychology in 2022, I took a break from continuing my education due to my OCD becoming the worst it had ever been (started expereincing intrusive thoughts and pure O themes). Just recently, decided I was in a good head space to apply to graduate schools and continue my education in counseling. I started writing my personal statements, essays, and my resume for these programs, and I started to notice how no matter how many times I checked my resume or papers, I had this feeling that they just weren't good enough. That something was mispelled, or I didn't have all the questions answered in my personal statement, or my argument for my essay wasn't strong enough. I found myself wanting to rewrite my essay. So I did, and the same feeling popped up. Its still not right. Something is off with it. By my third rewrite and 15th time checking my resume for grammatical errors, I realized what was wrong.

I started noticing how I did this with most written things in my life. The note that I wrote to my fiance wasn't written well enough and had a typo. Now I have to rewrite it. The post I wanted to make on this blog wasn't good enough, now I have to redo it.

It has occured to me that my just right ocd, a theme that I have always loved and hated equally, is seeping into an area of my life that holds great importance to me. It has been the first time in my life that I see it heavily impacting me in my relationship, my overall wellbeing, and my work.

I guess the moral of this post is that OCD is a life long journey and it's difficult to see sometimes where OCD spreads in your life until it gets bad enough for you to notice it. Sometimes it takes it getting to the worst place possible for you to get fed up enough with the theme. I have run away from working on this theme for too long, living in a place of ignorance by saying that it makes me better or is good for me. I feel as if I can only run for so long before I need to turn around and face the theme so that is what I am going to do in this post. As I write this post, I want to restart and rewrite it so badly. "Theres too many little paragraphs." "Too many typos." "People don't care to read about this stuff. Write something different." I know that this is my OCD, and so for my exposure, I am going to post this article. No matter how many typos or little paragraphs there are.