How I Write with OCD
And what it can teach you
Writing is one tough job. Or passion. Or calling. Whatever it is to you, you know that rarely is it ever sitting down and waiting for celestial melody to fill the air as you pour forth the sweet susurrous of angel wings upon the page.
More often, the results of our writing efforts are frustration, mistakes, and even failure. And there have probably been times when you’ve found the mistakes you made (or someone found them for you) and you felt that failure all over again.
Now take all that — all of that difficulty and fear and anxiety — and add a heaping helping of perfectionism on steroids. Imagine that, and you’ll get a sense of what it’s like to write and publish when you also happen to have obsessive-compulsive disorder.
First, what is OCD?
What OCD is (and isn’t)
OCD affects about 3% of the population and if you have it, you know that it significantly impacts your life. You can read the criteria for diagnosis, as taken directly from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition here.
I describe OCD as the mind constantly battling doubt. For me, it manifests almost exclusively as obsessions, which means that no one can see most of my symptoms. They happen in the…
