Spencer Knight opens up about his recent struggles with OCD
Spencer Knight opens up about his recent struggles with OCD
OCD can be a debilitating disease - Really glad to hear that he seems to have a handle on it!
For reasons he can’t explain, he started excessively washing his hands.
...
in Knight’s brain clicked, and he began to have thoughts of contracting diseases and getting sick.
These two parts stood out to me.
I have OCD, and I have been through exactly what is described here. It's terrifying. OCD is not like it is portrayed when joking with your friends about wanting your pencils parallel with the edge of your desk. It is a debilitating disorder that prevents you from living a normal life.
For me, the "click" moment was also when I was in college. As a sidenote, I think the fact that this manifests in college for a lot of people is not a coincidence. I think the high stress of college is a huge contributing factor (Obligatory not a doctor. Just a pattern I have observed.). Anyway, back to the story. So I was taking a piano class in college as a fun, personal-enrichment, filler class. I took the class at night time. It was the last thing I did before driving home and going to bed. The pianos were visibly dirty. Like grime caked on. So I would always just think to myself that I should wash my hands before I go to bed, because I touch my face a lot when I'm in bed. Then one time I touched my phone and I thought, "oh I should.clean my phone before bed, because I touch that in bed and then touch my face." And then I once touched my elbow to the piano and thought the same thing. And then I started thinking that every time I touched a door handle. Or sat on a chair. Or brushed up against a wall. Suddenly the world was filthy and every time I touched anything, I immediately had to clean myself. Over the next year, I spiraled HARD. It got to the point where I couldn't open doors. I would get trapped places and need to wait for someone to open the door for me. Eventually I started seeing therapy because that obviously wasn't a sustainable lifestyle. That helped me soooo much. I can have a normal life now. I still have a few weird quirks, but I can live with those.
Wow, thanks for sharing your experience! Someone I'm very close with has OCD, and she also recently explained it to me in a way that really made me (a non-haver of OCD) understand how she experienced it, and this helped me understand it better, too. Thanks, and hope you're doing better now!
My OCD started in college as well. My two biggest obsessions are security and food contamination. My click moment was when I had to call off work because I kept worrying my apartment was going to be broken into again. I would lock up the place and then get halfway to work and have to turn around to check on everything.
The food contamination just felt normal because my mom was like that too. To this day I still can't share drinks or food with anyone without feeling like I'm gonna have a panic attack. Like I can share a pizza, but I can't take a bite off your plate or vice versa.