When a Good Idea Goes Wrong

 ...and one of my first misdiagnose was O.C.D.  both was told terrible things about this condition and read equally true and terrible things about the same.  Suffice it to say, the idea of being beholden to such a curse horrified me.  I analyzed myself at the time and realized that I had already accrued some bad habits that I wasn't entirely sure how to get rid of.  Since I didn't know that the problem I was dealing with was much bigger and trickier then O.C.D. on its own and merely mimicked that condition I really didn't know what I was doing.   Self therapy follow misdiagnosis can be like that I suppose.  

At any rate, in contemplating what I was going to do about this turn of events it was then that I came up with the concept of replacing one obsession for another.  It worked great... for a while.  I found I could replace any bad behavior with a good one.  I also swore to myself to never allow myself to fall into any rut.  I probably should have been a little more cautious in the wording of that oath though.  At first it worked great, I stopped being drawn to things for interminable lengths of time.  I was able to break away from things I knew I didn't want to do but seemed compelled to participate in when I wanted to.

It was awesome... up until I realized that I had a hard time continuing any good pattern I had replaced the bad pattern with.  This isn't to say that I went back to the incorrect pattern by compulsion.  No, nothing so simple.  I just kept finding new but not necessarily better ways of doing the same thing over and over again.  No matter how I tried to get back to the pattern that had been working for me I couldn't manage to make that pattern stick.  

Now the self made psychose has gotten to the point that I can't even leave a parking lot the same way twice and sometimes I get lost while driving because I can't even be boring enough to travel the same route to any place in the same fashion twice.   There was an upside though.  I found out a lot of ways that I really didn't want to do things.  Those ways weren't necessarily bad just annoying.  Eventually I have found that I cycle through a bunch of ways that are relatively the same in performance level ... well sort of.  But I still have a problem sticking to things unless I forcibly obsess about them and constantly do things to renew my interest in the pursuit.

This habit drives those around me nuts.  On more then one occasion my wife has flipped out at me because I got off the beaten path and started navigating by feeling.  This wouldn't be so bad except that such extra sensory work has a habit of draining me of energy faster then the original task would have and the more tired I get the harder it gets to do the task.  Eventually I end up stuck, confused, and doing things out of confusion until by some fortunate coincidence I end up relatively back where I started.  By this point my wife is frazzled and I am exhausted.  Fortunately when I get tired enough my mind stops wanting to be inventive.  Then I am able to take the boring route home.  

What am I going to do about the problem?  I really don't know.  I would think that by now I have the self control to go back to having obsessions that I can stick to like any normal mentally ill person can and not devolve into an illusion of sanity made up of rituals whether they help or not.  I think a part of me has way too much fun doing things as I do them now.  I believe on some level I don't mind it and probably would continue to not mind it if it didn't bother my wife so much.  

You would think that she would be used to it by now.  Truth being, we are good enough to each other in the big things, this little quirk only gives her the excuse to get pissed at me.  Eventually the excuse becomes a good reason and who can blame her.  She is a wonderful woman with some quirks but mostly made of gold.  She may have understood that I wasn't completely Hoyle when we married but living constantly with chaos that she can't stand and I foster out of enjoyment in perversity is enough to drive most women batty.  

Enough about her.  I invited or at least accepted her amongst others into my life and so deal with their objections with decent grace.  The fact remains that I am screwed up in this sense.  I may not mind the oddity.  I have yet found a thief willing to break into my place because I never leave at the same times or follow a schedule that anyone could case with any level of surety.  That is probably something that has saved me some money considering some of the neighborhoods I have lived in.  At this point I should knock on wood but who knows, I might get bored with that too and knock on steal next time.

P.S. Even as I write this, I have spell checked it and noticed that the words I misspelled I never misspelled the same way twice.  It is a good thing I have spell check.