A Little Quirky

I have a little bit of OCD. I don’t think that’s news to most of you if you’ve been reading for any length of time. Mine presents itself in subtle and bizarre ways.

For the most part, I attach human emotions to inanimate objects. pennies, leaves, sticks, rocks, all sorts of objects I may come across at any given moment.

For instance, I may be at the grocery store and notice that someone has decided they didn’t want that can of soup after all,  and just dropped it on a shelf in the cereal aisles. On a good day I may not even see it. On a particularly bad day I can’t let it be. It doesn’t want to be there. It want’s to be with it’s friends back in the soup aisles. I have to grab it and bring it back to where it belongs.

Some might say that’s not OCD. But it is. It’s an obsessive need to have something a certain way, I become slightly anxious until I carry out the task. Once done I feel calmer and I can move forward.  That’s pretty much the definition of OCD.

The above example is not a frequent occurrence, most days I can just pretend I didn’t see it. What I have come to avoid is touching items I don’t intend to buy. If I am picking out apples for instance, once I’ve touched the apple, I’ve somehow formed a connection with it. I’ve given it hope. It’s gotten itself all excited that I will take it home with me. I can’t put it back, I just can’t hurt it’s feelings. By now you might be laughing. I know, it’s silly. But it’s harmless, unless you considered the number of times I’ve had to pay for less than perfect produce.

Another example occurs when I go for walks along the Ganatchio Trail, or any trail for that matter.  If something is out of place, for instance someone has pluck a flower from a field and then just dropped it on the path, I can’t leave it there. It doesn’t want to be there. It didn’t particularly want to be picked and die, but I can’t fix that. All I can do is try to give it a better death. Being left on a path to be trampled repeatedly by other uncaring humans just will not do. It wants to be back in the field where it can die peacefully amongst other natural things. This one can be tricky because I often have to enlist Kelly’s help to pick things up for me. Luckily I have a very understanding partner. It’s gotten to be that I can just stop and look at a crushed flower and she says “Oh, it doesn’t want to be there does it?”

Those examples are what I consider harmless manifestations of my OCD tendencies. I don’t really try all that hard to quell these because I don’t really see the harm in performing these little tasks.

On the other hand, attaching such emotions to items can make it very difficult to get rid of stuff. And that is where I have been working to improve. I can not be a hoarder. Kelly would likely suggest that I am, and certainly I am more of a hoarder than she is, but so are you. I can guarantee that anyone reading this is more of a hoarder than Kelly. So if her and I are to cohabitate, I need to get this monkey off my back.

Things with a face are the hardest to get rid off. Stuffed animals in particular, or little ceramic figurines and souvenirs, like the ceramic bear I got ten years ago at a cottage resort in Muskoka. I want to throw it in the trash. I really do. But it’s looking at me. It doesn’t want to die. It’s happy in my basement.

Luckily, I have been in a ruthless mood lately. Not every day, but on days where I recognize it, I take advantage of the mood to dump stuff that I’ve been holding onto for years without good reason. Once it’s done, it feels good. It’s a weight off, a lightening of my life. That’s certainly something to build on.

But every now and then the universe decides to have some fun with me. It takes something with a face, and plops it somewhere where it doesn’t want to be. Just to see if my head will explode I suppose.  I was leaving a store a few days ago, and this little guy was staring at me from the side of the parking lot.

Only two things enabled me to walk away from this. First, I had no idea what to do with it to make its “life” better.  But mostly, I convinced myself on that 95F day, with the blistering sun beating down on us, cooling off in a nice big puddle of water was EXACTLY where it wanted to be.