Living with OCD: Boobies come in threes!

So now it can be told – I have Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD). 

"Apple Head."

When I was five years old, I was so good with numbers that I knew how to count by multiples of three even before I learned how to multiply.  In fact, I would count objects of the same kind in threes and always in threes – hotdogs on the breakfast table, consonants in my Alphabet Soup, heck, if my nanny's boobies came in threes instead of pairs I would have counted them out loud, too, “One, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three…”

I became so good at it that at one point I was able to guess correctly – in one glance – whether my dad and his friends had already downed 29 bottles of beer at a drinking spree.  I would feel upset about it, not because they were drunk, but because 29 isn’t divisible by three.  So I would wait them out until they hit bottle number 30, or 33, or until one of my dad’s friends emerged from the toilet with his dick still in his hand.

My dad, of course, didn’t know zilch about my little counting disorder.  But my mom did. 

Even then, she could see I was a pretty organized kid.  I always kept everything, be it my toys or my stash of Mongol pencils and Crayolas, arranged in a special order logical only to me.  You messed with that order, you messed with me.  For the most part, though, everything seemed harmless (and in some cases, such as schoolwork, advantageous) and, despite my penchant for counting everything in sight, I looked as perfectly normal as the next kid – only most normal kids at school were subconsciously inclined to meet Big Bird of Sesame Street while I had a secret affinity with my fellow arithmomaniac, The Count.

As a kid, I found it disturbing that Sesame Street characters had only four fingers.  Good thing The Count loved his threes as much as I did.

 

Then, around the same time my parents split up, the proverbial shit hit the fan. I started counting out loud, “One, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three…” – well, not really out loud, but more like “in whispers” – barely audible but visible enough to make my eagled-eyed mother think I was going nuts or was under some kind of demonic possession.  At nine years old, I realized it (or I) wasn’t cute anymore.  I was a weirdo in bloom.

The thing about OCD is that it thrives on the combination of two factors that seem meant for each other: Stress and Routine.  How do you escape it when school life is built precisely around these two things?  It’s distressing enough that a stupid disorder controlled my eating habits (counting nuts during recess only to find out, to my horror, that a pack of Growers had 49 nuts on average) or how I positioned myself inside the school bus (third from the door, right beside the ugly girl); it’s downright sad that I had to keep all these to myself.

And so I spent the next few years of my adolescent life finding ways to “go under the radar” and blend in with the norm.  My coping strategy was to always go in the opposite direction: To counter stress, I adopted a carefree, happy-go-lucky attitude.  To defy order, I developed a talent for chaos and turning things upside down, whether stuff in my room or thoughts in my head.  My nose for numbers (and with it my incessant counting) vanished into thin air and in its place I developed a knack for words. 

In my early teens I would still indulge my OC impulses every now and then, especially when nobody was looking.  The impulses ranged from the silly, such as avoiding cracks on the sidewalk and saying ‘sorry’ each time I inadvertently bumped into an inanimate object, such as a table or a chair or my gay Math teacher Mr. Cuevas (imagining them to be plotting revenge), to the practical, such as doing late-night checks to make sure that all the doors at our house were locked and that the LPG tank in the kitchen was safely secured, before muttering a stutter of a prayer on my way back to my room.  I had to do everything in the exact same way everyday and in the exact same order, or I would do everything all over again, lest some imagined misfortune befell me.

In high school, I was known as the class mambobote (bottle collector) because my locker was always filled with empty bottles of Coke.  Classmates who needed a quick buck just went up to my locker to exchange the bottles for deposit at the cafeteria.  While the whole class thought I was demonstrating an entrepreneurial streak, I was actually just satisfying an irrational urge to hoard and collect. 

I learned not only to hide but also embrace my obsessive compulsive behaviors so long as they did not severely disrupt my normal routines or make me look wacko.  If they did, I would make a conscious effort to overcome the said behaviors by following a tried and tested formula: break the routine, start a new one, and then break it again before it gets better or gets worse – steps as simple as one, two, three.

College brought forth a new set of challenges.  Suddenly exposed to girls after going through four years of testosterone-charged, all-boys education in high school, I suddenly had to grapple with raging hormones, a 24-hour erection, and the female species, renowned for their intuitive ability to sniff out creepy behavior from a mile away.  I was gonna get smoked out of my hole, man.

Pubescent girls, religious icons and my mom's hot Church friends -- the annual Reyna Elena celebrations put me in an unbearable moral dilemma.

Some of my friends complained that I looked at girls a ‘certain way.’ 

“Like what way,” I would ask. 

“Like you’re undressing them.”

Without going into graphic detail, well, yeah, it did look that way to the untrained eye. 

So here’s how the drill worked.  If you were a girl and I was meeting you for the first time, and you were immune to my sleepy-eyed charm, you’d notice that I would look at you in a sort of ‘Bermuda Triangle’ pattern: First, I would look at your face.  Then my eyes would draw a line from your eyes down to your right booby, and then to your left booby, and then back up to your eyes.  Creepy?

Darling, if I ever looked at you that way in college, forgive me, it’s not because I found you irresistible.  It’s not you.  It’s me.  I ain’t lookin' at them apples, baby.  I countin’ ‘em.

More specifically, I was merely responding to the compulsion to mentally draw a triangle by connecting three distinct circles on your upper body, yeah, as if you had three faces rather than three boobies.  In my twisted mind, if I didn’t give in to my compulsion, I feared I would get run over by a car or something.   It’s totally irrational, and somewhat disabling, alright, but nothing I felt I couldn’t handle.  And as my social skills became more refined throughout college, I even used that ‘look’ to my supreme advantage. 

The stigma of living with OCD further diminished throughout my early adulthood, as pop culture depicted it increasingly as some kind of cute quirk rather than a chronic illness: Jack Nicholson’s obsessive-compulsive Melvin in As Good as it Gets, Tony Shalhoub’s Monk character, Leonardo Dicaprio’s Howard Hughes in The Aviator (and Dicaprio himself).

As the stigma lessened, so did the symptoms and, except for the rare occasion that I’m late for work (on my way to the office, where I suddenly ask the driver to turn the cab around and drive me all the way back home because I missed reading the roadside billboards in the exact same order I’ve gotten used to every morning), I no longer do most of the stupid things I used to do.  Not even that triple boobie thing.  Well, almost.

So, if you happen to be a girl and you’re not so bad-looking and you feel as if I’m undressing you with my eyes the first time we meet – it’s not me.  It’s them apples.