My OCD: Living with OCD When I Thought It Was Just Common Sense

Author Bio

Paul Stevenson is a well respected advocate, author and public speaker who shares his experience of Tourette Syndrome, ADHD, OCD and Autism. Paul works for Genius Within as a Lived Experience Ambassador. Today he writes about his personal experiences of living with OCD and intrusive thoughts.

!! Content Warning: Please be aware that this blog contains mention of suicidal ideation

For years, I never knew I had obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD). Even when I began to understand it, I wasn’t sure how much it had shaped my life.

Looking back, things I once thought of as quirks begin to make more sense. At the time, though, they felt like common sense. I thought I was keeping myself safe.

I would wash my hands over and over again. I would throw away perfectly good food because something didn’t look or smell right to me. Even when I pushed myself to cook it and serve it up, once those thoughts had embedded themselves in my brain, the die was cast. I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was wrong. It would go from a plate on the table to perfectly good food in the bin.

At times, I became convinced my mother was trying to poison me. That is difficult to write, but it shows how powerful those fears could become. I struggled to trust anyone else to cook for me.

Public toilets were another challenge. I avoided them unless I was desperate. If I had to use one, I would practically gift-wrap the toilet seat with toilet paper. Opening doors meant pulling my sleeve over my hand so I didn’t have to touch the handle.

At home, if someone had a cold or flu, I would keep my distance and avoid touching anything they had touched.

Taken separately, some of these things might sound like ordinary precautions. But for me, there was repetition, fear and difficulty trusting that something was safe. These were things that affected how I ate, where I went and how I lived around other people.

Expecting a delivery or visitors is another struggle. I keep going back to the front door and checking over and over again. A delivery window of “between 9am and 5pm” feels impossible to manage. I struggle to settle while I’m waiting.

It becomes a vicious circle. The repeated checking builds my anxiety, and that anxiety stimulates my vocal tics. Each time I open the door, I either bark or shout an obscenity.

Behind that door is someone caught in a cycle of waiting, checking, anxiety and involuntary tics. For me, these experiences overlap, making an everyday situation much harder to manage than someone else might realise.

It wasn’t until my fifties that I began to recognise the intense, unwanted and distressing intrusive thoughts I experienced.

They don’t reflect what I want or truly think, but they can leave me questioning myself and going over the same thought again and again, trying to make sense of it or find some certainty.

The more I ruminate, the more space the thought seems to take up. It is like watering a weed. Each time I revisit it, trying to settle the fear, it feels as though I am encouraging it to grow until it threatens to take over.

That doesn’t mean I choose the thoughts or the distress they cause. Trying so hard to find reassurance can become part of the exhausting cycle.

At times, that distress nearly destroyed me. It became so overwhelming that I planned to end my own life.

That is a painful part of my story, but it belongs here. A list of habits cannot show the full weight of what I was experiencing.

It took family and friends pointing out my rituals for me to begin recognising patterns I had never questioned. They could see things that had become so familiar to me that I didn’t recognise them as rituals at all.

I am sharing my experience because what someone sees on the outside may reveal very little about what is happening within. They might notice the handwashing, the food being thrown away or the repeated checking. They may never see the fear, doubt and mental exhaustion behind it.

I didn’t know how much OCD had shaped my life because I had spent so long living with it without a name.

Being able to name those experiences has helped me begin to understand them, and to explain what was happening beneath the things I once called common sense.

Thank you to Paul for sharing his story, for anyone experiencing a mental health crisis you can find help by clicking here.

To learn more about OCD click here.

To read more about neurodivergence in general click here.