The annual OCD-related post
Every once in a while I do one of these posts for the newbies, or to set down for myself what I've been able to observe about my behavior vis a vis my mental illness and how I handle it. Or, as in this case, both.
This is not, please, to be seen as a passive-aggressive comment to anyone. I've been thinking on this a while. I'm just working some things out.
I believe most know I have obsessive-compulsive disorder and an improving but still operative panic disorder. It is probably less known that there are particular things that exacerbate it: general life disasters, financial stress and exhaustion are some standard ones, but the biggest are matters involving illness and death. The last extends to those which affect people I care about, even if I don't know the ill or deceased individual in question. In the past two weeks I have experienced all three: work disasters, a cracked radiator, a coworker whose sister went into congestive heart failure followed by massive bleeding, and an anniversary of a death. The last is worst of all, because I mourn not just a friend, but the faith I once had in my own mind. I learned the hard way that no matter how determined, logical or objective you strive to be, some things cannot be controlled.
Aside from the compulsive aspects, fortunately not obvious online, a flare in my OCD has a number of consequences. Socially I become irritable and fatalistic, and with no patience for personal or policy conflict. Not knowing how to detach my personal issues from interaction, I prefer to isolate -- not just to avoid hurting feelings or killing someone else's mood, but to avoid the inevitable guilt that results from doing so. During this phase I'm prone to anger or panic if people make overtures in the form of involving me in anything. It's an overreaction that generally runs along the lines of "I'm trying to hang onto my sanity by my fingernails, and now you want something?". The mindset isn't fair, it's not productive, and I would rather cut contact altogether than take it out on people who are, more often than not, either ignorant of what's happening or actively trying to help me out of it. As well, it prevents me from absorbing and adding outside stress (and I'm a hell of a sponge even on my good days).
I do not plot and rarely log during these periods, and I will try to explain why. My obsessive spells are primarily characterized by looping thoughts. There's your standard OCD junk, like bizarre nonsense phrases and the sort of anxieties which have kept everyone up until 4 am at some point in their lives, but there's also thoughts and ideas. I suppose you could call it over-stimulation, a too-active mind. When I'm bad, I will be caught in compulsions for an hour or more before I can even attempt sleep, and thereafter spend the next three to five lost to obsession. About anything.
Many people know what it's like to wait a disproportionately long time for a relatively simple pose from me. This is either because I'm looping, unable to stop rewriting the response, or because the anxiety has resulted in a panic attack. The latter is less common these days, but in extreme cases I cannot proceed without medication. I don't like the reaction and I don't like the dependency it causes, which is why I prefer to avoid the situation entirely. However, even "passive" participation like plotting (or even just waiting for a pose to arrive) can spark obsessive thinking. At the computer or lying sleepless, I write and rewrite poses. I replay ideas, scenes and scenarios, regardless of whether they're actually active or merely potential. I miss sleep, and this makes me even more susceptible to what I think of as another day of "bad signal": those times my brain feels like a detuned radio and I can barely make out the sole coherent thought against the background noise.
I should point out it's not only the game that does this, but unlike my solo-work it's not something I can scrape out of my head by getting up at 3 am to work on (re: the timestamp on this post). In the case of logging, the more I loop and the longer the log persists the more anxious I become -- that I can't just let it go, that the quality of my work isn't good, that the other party is unhappy with what I'm doing, and so on. This can be offset to a degree by communication, but not always, and as with the aforementioned 3 am period this is occasionally not feasible. If allowed to build too long, the obsession and anxiety can become a panic attack. Collaboration means you need at least one other person to make any progress, and the impulse is to stay away from things that leave my sanity in the hands of an outside party.
There are certain things I do to combat these periods, the biggest of which is to ground myself in the physical world. Leaving the house at times other than strictly necessary, things to keep my hands busy, taking more walks, using physical books rather than the internet, reducing stimuli an hour at least before attempting sleep, etc. I initiate contact if I feel I need it, delay replies for hours or even days if I feel anxiety is corrupting my initial reaction. Take medication if there's no other way. Mostly I just try not to be stupid and avoid things that might set me off -- though of course some stress is unavoidable.
It comes and goes. Soon I will begin the familiar process of pushing the fallen boulder back up the hill, hopefully not to have it roll back on me again for some time. For now, I'm going to continue to lay low.
And anyway, I see my psychiatrist soon and if I don't he's going to kick my ass.
This is not, please, to be seen as a passive-aggressive comment to anyone. I've been thinking on this a while. I'm just working some things out.
I believe most know I have obsessive-compulsive disorder and an improving but still operative panic disorder. It is probably less known that there are particular things that exacerbate it: general life disasters, financial stress and exhaustion are some standard ones, but the biggest are matters involving illness and death. The last extends to those which affect people I care about, even if I don't know the ill or deceased individual in question. In the past two weeks I have experienced all three: work disasters, a cracked radiator, a coworker whose sister went into congestive heart failure followed by massive bleeding, and an anniversary of a death. The last is worst of all, because I mourn not just a friend, but the faith I once had in my own mind. I learned the hard way that no matter how determined, logical or objective you strive to be, some things cannot be controlled.
Aside from the compulsive aspects, fortunately not obvious online, a flare in my OCD has a number of consequences. Socially I become irritable and fatalistic, and with no patience for personal or policy conflict. Not knowing how to detach my personal issues from interaction, I prefer to isolate -- not just to avoid hurting feelings or killing someone else's mood, but to avoid the inevitable guilt that results from doing so. During this phase I'm prone to anger or panic if people make overtures in the form of involving me in anything. It's an overreaction that generally runs along the lines of "I'm trying to hang onto my sanity by my fingernails, and now you want something?". The mindset isn't fair, it's not productive, and I would rather cut contact altogether than take it out on people who are, more often than not, either ignorant of what's happening or actively trying to help me out of it. As well, it prevents me from absorbing and adding outside stress (and I'm a hell of a sponge even on my good days).
I do not plot and rarely log during these periods, and I will try to explain why. My obsessive spells are primarily characterized by looping thoughts. There's your standard OCD junk, like bizarre nonsense phrases and the sort of anxieties which have kept everyone up until 4 am at some point in their lives, but there's also thoughts and ideas. I suppose you could call it over-stimulation, a too-active mind. When I'm bad, I will be caught in compulsions for an hour or more before I can even attempt sleep, and thereafter spend the next three to five lost to obsession. About anything.
Many people know what it's like to wait a disproportionately long time for a relatively simple pose from me. This is either because I'm looping, unable to stop rewriting the response, or because the anxiety has resulted in a panic attack. The latter is less common these days, but in extreme cases I cannot proceed without medication. I don't like the reaction and I don't like the dependency it causes, which is why I prefer to avoid the situation entirely. However, even "passive" participation like plotting (or even just waiting for a pose to arrive) can spark obsessive thinking. At the computer or lying sleepless, I write and rewrite poses. I replay ideas, scenes and scenarios, regardless of whether they're actually active or merely potential. I miss sleep, and this makes me even more susceptible to what I think of as another day of "bad signal": those times my brain feels like a detuned radio and I can barely make out the sole coherent thought against the background noise.
I should point out it's not only the game that does this, but unlike my solo-work it's not something I can scrape out of my head by getting up at 3 am to work on (re: the timestamp on this post). In the case of logging, the more I loop and the longer the log persists the more anxious I become -- that I can't just let it go, that the quality of my work isn't good, that the other party is unhappy with what I'm doing, and so on. This can be offset to a degree by communication, but not always, and as with the aforementioned 3 am period this is occasionally not feasible. If allowed to build too long, the obsession and anxiety can become a panic attack. Collaboration means you need at least one other person to make any progress, and the impulse is to stay away from things that leave my sanity in the hands of an outside party.
There are certain things I do to combat these periods, the biggest of which is to ground myself in the physical world. Leaving the house at times other than strictly necessary, things to keep my hands busy, taking more walks, using physical books rather than the internet, reducing stimuli an hour at least before attempting sleep, etc. I initiate contact if I feel I need it, delay replies for hours or even days if I feel anxiety is corrupting my initial reaction. Take medication if there's no other way. Mostly I just try not to be stupid and avoid things that might set me off -- though of course some stress is unavoidable.
It comes and goes. Soon I will begin the familiar process of pushing the fallen boulder back up the hill, hopefully not to have it roll back on me again for some time. For now, I'm going to continue to lay low.
And anyway, I see my psychiatrist soon and if I don't he's going to kick my ass.