The Hundreds of Invisible Rules OCD Created for Me

Most people can’t see them. I can’t always ignore them.

Photo by Glenn Carstens-Peters on Unsplash

I’ve been living with OCD for much of my adult life. And in that time, it has not made me more organised, more careful, or more detail-oriented. It has not given me a superpower or a competitive edge or any of the other things people sometimes project onto it when they find out. And unlike what I’ve seen on a lot of shows, it hasn’t given me the ability to spot the tiniest details about people and spot which one’s the killer before the episode’s introduction can even begin.

What it has given me is a collection of rules I never asked for. Rules that make no logical sense. Rules that I know make no logical sense. And rules that I follow anyway, because not following them costs more than following them does. At least it feels like that in the moment.

You see, this is not a piece about overcoming OCD. Because I haven’t overcome it. I manage it, some days better than others, and I’ve learned to live around it like it’s a leak in the ceiling. I’ve placed the bucket, and I don’t pretend that the ceiling isn’t leaking.

These are some of the rules. And what living under them has actually been like.

Image by Free.gr from Pixabay

The shower has a sequence.

Shampoo first. Then body wash. Then face wash. Then conditioner.

One morning, in a hurry to get to a meeting, I accidentally washed my face before washing my hair. Most people would shrug, finish their shower, and get on with their day.

I started the shower again from the beginning.

I didn’t want to, of course. But my OCD had decided there was a correct sequence, and I had broken it. I knew the order didn’t matter. I knew washing my face before my hair wouldn’t create a rip in spacetime. I knew I was standing in a bathroom arguing with a rule that made no logical sense.

I also knew that if I continued without restarting, the discomfort would follow me for the rest of the day. I’d crack my knuckles too many times, drink too much coffee, and not be fully present at work.

So what should have been a ten-minute shower stretched towards half an hour. And I was late for the important meeting.

Image by Roland from Pixabay

Before bed, I check the gas.

The main line twice. Each hob knob three times. Once is never enough. My brain rarely accepts once.

I pull hard on the front door latch to make sure it’s shut, even though I know it was shut the first time I checked it, and the second time, and the time before that. The checking rarely ever produces certainty. What it does give me is a few seconds of quiet. But then the doubt starts again, and I’m back at the hob knobs and the latches and the gas lines.

This is the thing people misunderstand about OCD. They assume it’s about cleanliness, or organisation, or simply wanting things a certain way. A personality trait taken to an extreme. A quirk, maybe.

For me, it has never felt like that. It has felt like living under a growing collection of invisible rules. Rules that nobody else can see. Rules that nobody else would ever think to create. Rules that somehow feel incredibly important in the moment. And rules that feel completely absurd the moment the urgency passes.

Image by Tomasz Mikołajczyk from Pixabay

The television volume cannot stop on certain numbers.

Twelve is unacceptable. Thirteen is worse. Seventeen is never allowed in the house.

Ask me why and I’ll struggle to give you a reason. I suspect that’s because there isn’t a reason to give you. The numbers just carry a weight they shouldn’t, and stopping on them leaves me with a feeling I’d rather avoid. So I adjust. Eleven. Fourteen. Eighteen. The television functions identically. My brain accepts one and rejects the other.

When I hang clothes out to dry, they go from largest to smallest. The dishes in the drying rack sit in a particular order. My right shoe goes on before my left.

Nobody sat me down and said, “This is how the dishes must be arranged, son!” My brain created the rules and upgraded them to become laws. And then expected me to follow them on every ordinary Tuesday for the rest of my life.

One of the most frustrating parts of OCD is that insight doesn’t protect you from it.

People sometimes assume that if you know a behaviour is irrational, you’ll stop doing it. That awareness is the antidote.

I wish that were true.

I know perfectly well that the clothes don’t care what order they’re hanging in. I know the television functions the same at volume 12 as it does at volume 11. I know the shower is the same shower regardless of sequence.

Knowledge isn’t the problem for me, you see. The problem is the feeling that accompanies breaking the rule.

It’s difficult to describe to someone who hasn’t experienced it. Imagine a song stuck completely in your head. You know it’s there. You know you don’t want it there. It keeps repeating anyway. OCD can feel a little like that. A thought arrives. A rule forms around it. The rule refuses to leave. And you can either follow the rule and get a few minutes of quiet, or resist the rule and carry the noise.

Neither option is good. One is just more immediately bearable than the other.

I count constantly.

While filling bottles from the water purifier. (1 litre is 42 seconds) While watering plants. (45 seconds for a large plant, no more than 15 for the indoor small ones) While doing things that require no counting whatsoever. Sometimes I notice I’m doing it. Sometimes I only realise I’ve been counting when I catch myself mid-sequence and have no idea when I started.

Photo by Anuja Rajput: https://www.pexels.com/photo/empty-sidewalk-near-trees-in-town-11751036/

One of the clearest examples happened years ago, walking on footpaths.

In many parts of India, footpaths are built with alternating red and yellow paving stones. Somewhere along the way, my OCD decided that my right foot belonged on the red stones and my left foot belonged on the yellow ones.

Walking stopped being automatic.

Every stretch of pavement became a puzzle I hadn’t signed up to solve. I knew it was absurd. That wasn’t the issue. The issue was that stepping incorrectly felt wrong in a way that was genuinely difficult to ignore. In that moment, in those moments, ignoring it took effort that I would have preferred to spend on literally anything else.

What people see from the outside is small.

A knob being checked. A volume setting being adjusted. A shower that runs a little long.

What they don’t see is the negotiation happening underneath. The argument. The doubt. The effort it takes to resist the rule. The effort it takes to follow it. The mental accounting that happens before, during, and after even the most ordinary tasks.

Most of these rituals don’t consume huge amounts of time individually. A few seconds here. A minute there. But they accumulate. And more than the time, they occupy mental space, attention, energy. Every rule demands a little of all three, all day, every day, whether I’m in the middle of something important or standing in my own kitchen filling a water bottle.

What I’ve come to understand, after years of living with this, is that OCD isn’t really interested in helping me do things correctly.

It’s interested in certainty.

The gas must be checked again because certainty hasn’t arrived yet. The latch must be pulled one more time because certainty hasn’t arrived yet. The shower must restart because certainty hasn’t arrived yet.

The problem is that certainty rarely stays. It arrives for a moment, then slips away, and leaves a question in its place. So the checking continues. The counting continues. The rules accumulate. And ordinary life becomes something that requires considerably more effort than it should.

I’m not writing this because I’ve found a way through it that I’d like to share. I haven’t, not fully. Therapy has helped. Medication has helped.

But the rules are still there. Some of them I’ve loosened. Some of them I haven’t. Some of them I follow because the cost of resisting them on a given day is just higher than I want to pay.

If you’re reading this while living with OCD, or trying to understand someone who does, here’s the thing I’d love for you to keep with you: the gap between knowing something is irrational and being able to act on that knowledge is a real one. The rules aren’t a choice. What you do next, on a good day, sometimes is.

Thank you for reading this piece. If you liked this story, do consider following my Medium account for more on mental health, on cooking, and on living with a difficult mind.