OCD Poetry

Entry 1

I kind of thought she was joking at first, or that she made a mistake with the diagnoses. Maybe I hadn't described my symptoms well enough. She seemed pretty confident in her decision, however, presenting it as if it was the answer I was looking for.

It was not.

I'll admit. I'm fucked up. I know I'm one slip up from being sent to a mental hospital. I've just been craving a label.
It's such a superficial thing, I know. I'm a person, not an object needing to be classified.
But this feeling of having all these scrambled symptoms spiraling around my head with no name to call them by. No villain to curse out for causing me such misfortune. It's unsatisfying.

It is also unsatisfying to hear the villain has some stupid name. That they are someone who is known more as a joke than a villain. That having them as your "nemeses" is actually more helpful than harmful sometimes.

That's about what it's like to get diagnosed with OCD.

I can't count how many times I've been asked why my room isn't so clean if I have it.
I've heard "I have CDO, it's like OCD but in alphabetical order" at least a million times.
But the bottom line is

I'm not taken seriously.

I do weird things. It's hard for me to stop once I've started. When others are there to see it happen they can easily snap me out of it, but I hate having people see me like that.
I'll shake my mechanical pencil up to my head just to hear the lead rattle for minutes on end.
Stupid right?
What's worse is when it starts to hurt me physically.

Oh what's that? My eye itches a bit. Must be a stray eyelash. There's one. There's two. There's four. Look in the mirror. One of your eyes is bald, psycho.

I can't survive with scabs. I'll pick them and pick them until there are holes in my skin. I don't even feel the pain there anymore, or at least I stopped caring 5 minutes ago.

In middle school I successfully picked a bald spot in part of my hair.

But hey, I'm just a neat freak, right?

That's what I say to myself sometimes. Especially at three in the morning when I can't sleep until I've finished cleaning the kitchen entirely.
Or when I'm begging my art teacher to let me sweep his classroom because I couldn't stand the mess anymore.

I'm constantly terrified of how people are thinking when they see me. Just how much they notice. I notice a lot, but clearly I'm not the prime example.

Are they looking at my eye? Do they think I'm annoying because I sat there shaking my pencil for thirty seconds before realizing I was in public? Do they think I'm a freak who likes to sweep floors?
Do they think I'm an attention seeking writer posting fake stories for votes?

I don't know how they feel or if I should care. I can't control them, I can't control me.