OCD is a bitch

OCD is a bitch. No other way around it. I fancy myself pretty organized, in a completely dysfunctional and slightly half-cocked way. OCD assures there’s a place for everything and everything in its place, even if that means last year’s Christmas receipts in a No. 10 envelope stuck in a jewelry box.  Or having enough soap to last until the apocalypse, but ‘saving’ it because each bar elicits an emotional story about its provenance. ‘This soap I bought in Austin, TX last year on vacation’. ‘This soap is only made in Baltimore and only sold in one store in one tiny neighborhood and I got into it with the owner so I’ll never go back there, hence I’ll never find THIS soap again’.  This causes me to create a hierarchy of soap in the linen closet, bars stacked according to importance and usefulness.

One immediate and telling sign of OCD is the accumulation of receipts. Piles upon piles of receipts. Some are important, I might return that bike if it proves unsteady. Some, not so much. I’m pretty sure Target will not take back the veggie burgers I bought 6 months ago. Gas receipts, food receipts, bar receipts (did I really drink THAT much on January 12, 2012?), grocery receipts, gift receipts, the list goes on.  This wouldn’t bother me so much, besides being a safety hazard as a fire accelerant, if each receipt didn’t hold a cutting reminder of who I was and where I was on that particular day. 

I target a particular drawer or box or envelope each weekend, to expel its inhabitants and let myself free. Without fail, there is the constant reminder of my ex.  OCD provides you a one-way ticket to Nostalgia because no matter how many things I throw away, shred, pack in boxes with her name in bold black ink – still there is a wayward birthday card mixed in with take-out menus from two apartments ago. Today I cleaned out my car (also a receipt receptacle) and pulled a U-Store-It receipt from FOUR years ago when all our belongings lived in a cold dark closet at the end of a long road. Sometimes I think she taunts me, stabbing blindly with these random reminders. Her credit card bills, her student loan paperwork from 2002, Easter cards from her mom, menus from our favorite restaurants two states away, even a copy of her father’s death certificate.  All these tangible reminders of her enormous presence in my life. OCD makes you hold on to avoid the anxiety of letting go – but what of the anxiety of being tethered?

I smile at my own inconsistencies, because even as I tear up and throw away this weekend’s pile of ancient receipts, I am starting a new one on the kitchen table – Target and Giant and the coffee shop and maybe a movie ticket stub. OCD is a welcome friend – without it I wouldn’t know the right way to sit the dish sponge or that a spoon has to rest on a plate or paper towel, never direct contact with the counter, or that my keys will never be lost because I check and recheck and recheck their presence in my pocket 20 times a day. I wonder if there will be a day when I stare down OCD, purge the past completely, and never have to find her old running shoes buried at the bottom of my old suitcase.