Obsessive-Compulsive Note Taking
Too many notes
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Drone racing. Westworld. Do priority laundry. Paddington 1/2. Yt pc. Finances. All-in. Mindfulness.
The above is a small taste of my struggle. The image is a bigger taste of my struggles. It may be triggering, but I wanted to establish a baseline for my struggles with you. There’s a lot of information out there about OCD. If you’re reading this, you’re probably already familiar with it. If that’s the case, feel free to skip the next section.
Please note that I am not a licensed professional. Everything herein pertains to my personal experience. I’m sharing it because when I googled “Obsessive-Compulsive Note Taking” I found painfully few accounts of people that struggled as I had. This is for those who find themselves in the midst of this struggle. I see you and you are not alone.
For the uninitiated, OCD manifests it self in many forms. The hallmark is some kind of “intrusive thought” or so their called. Intrusive thoughts as I understand them are something that persists in your stream of consciousness to the point of anxiety. This is the “O” in OCD. These thoughts result in anxiety. The anxiety increases with time. Typically not overnight, mind you, but gradually, or in spurts triggered by stressful moments. For me, my obsession was the fear of forgetting something important or something that could be important.
As the anxiety grows, we look for ways to reduce or remove the anxiety. We tell ourselves “everything will be alright.” I reassure myself that I didn’t forget anything. These ways that we temporarily reduce our anxiety that develop are denoted “Rituals.” These rituals are the “C” or “Compulsions” in OCD. My rituals were around note taking. The most obvious manifestation of this was me constantly having Evernote out, jotting down thoughts from the current conversation, stray thoughts, or things I thought of from visual cues triggered by things in front of me. My Evernote was a mess. Anytime I tried to take handwritten notes, they were a mess. But, they provided me temporary relief and I with time I had the crushing feeling that they were something I couldn’t stop myself from doing even though I knew it wasn’t normal and that it wasn’t rational. Having so many notes didn’t lend itself to me not forgetting anything, it lended itself to…
