Ebb & Flora

I should write a blog post. I should work on my novel. I should read to my kid. I should read. I should drink water. I should exercise.

But I can’t.

The problem, however, isn’t the pressure of mounting shoulds. We all have those, parent or not, neurodiverse or not. Changes in semantics, such as replacing should with could, don’t really work for me. My personal paralysis has been deep and wide and mostly insurmountable for over twenty years. I know when it started. I know the trauma that started it. I don’t yet know the solution.

But I’m getting there.

My therapist clued in on something key recently: I need things to feel “just right” in order to do them. I knew this. What I didn’t know was that this obsessive seeking out of a “just right” feeling is a symptom of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. For me, I need this feeling before I can get unstuck and do something, anything.

I don’t have an OCD diagnosis (in fact, I have never undergone the rigours of a full psych work up) and know very little about OCD. So this is the beginning of my quest to understand how this just right feeling affects my day-to-day. I need to understand it further, and then start to figure out how to function when things don’t feel right. I also want to explore how depressive self-sabotage might be affecting me but that topic isn’t right for this post.

This identification of obsessive seeking of a feeling feels, well, just right.