OCD isn’t your quirk
So the other day I was at target and I saw a shirt that said OCD: overly Christmas disorder. This just really pissed me off because I have OCD. Everyone puts OCD off like its some sort of joke when it’s not, I always hear people saying how OCD they are when they have no clue what it actually is. Please don’t make a corky Christmas sweater out of my mental disorder. You wouldn’t put a quirking saying about depression or an eating disorder on a sweater, so please stop making OCD a joke.
AMEN to this. OCD is not an adjective; it’s not a passing phase that made you clean your room last night. Most of the time, OCD isn’t even about cleanliness.
When you make a joke of OCD, here’s what you’re really making a joke of: violent intrusive thoughts, anxiety attacks, self-loathing from the way OCD maks us act, mundane tasks/items becoming terrifying and triggering, being unable to stop certain rituals ((even if they’re bad for your health)), feeling like a freak when you have to do a ritual or behavioral compulsion in front of other people, constantly apologizing to others for the way you need to arrange things or the way you need to eat, inability to shake off terrifying persistent thoughts ((like obsessively worrying about a loved one dying or being abandoned)), inability to differentiate rational fears from irrational fears and threats, the tendency of people with OCD to develop many other mental disorders, and a variety of other things that make our lives a living hell.
When you make a joke out of OCD, this is what you’re saying to me and people like me: “I think it so hilarious that you have a condition that causes high anxiety and ruins your self-esteem because you lose your ability to control your thoughts, often causing you to become self-loathing due to the awful and terrifying thoughts that bombard you. Oh, and it’s so cute when you do those things where you organize something or have to do a some other silly behavior, lol. Your suffering is so quirky and funny to me!”
It’s not “just a joke”. It’s telling me that my struggle and my hardship is a joke to you; it convinces me and many others that you are absolutely disgusting.