Meaningful vs meaningless obsessions?

[Koala17]

Hey,

I was wondering if part of the reason why OCD is so persistent is that we end up in a confused state of half-trying to prove our obsessions are meaningless, and half-trying to prove that they have some degree of meaning, to avoid them seeming totally crazy. My OCD seems, like most people’s, to have mutated into different forms over the years, but I’m currently going through an annoying ‘trend’ of constantly trying to reassure myself that thoughts I am having are not ‘meaningless’, and then trying (normally unsuccessfully) to convince myself of what the meaning is (or was).

For example, I was in a supermarket and was trying to work out how my shopping had come to an amount other than what I had expected. It took me only a short time to work out the right amount from scratch, but then I had an overwhelming feeling of having to go back to my original flawed calculation to understand where it had gone wrong, to reassure myself (I think), that my original reasoning was logical (or meaningful).

Another sort-of-similar example happened yesterday – a book I was reading was cutting between descriptive text and a character’s speech, and it occurred to me that I quite liked the flowing style, without quite being able to put my finger on why. I had the usual creeping-dread OCD feeling, then realised it was because the writer had omitted the usual ‘he said, she said’ writing style to make it flow better. However, even understanding this didn’t make me feel better, as I began to doubt that this was why I had liked it, even though that was almost certainly the explanation. It sounds absurd to write down now, but I think I just need the slightest suggestion that I might not have thought about something ‘the right way’, or fully understood all the potential meanings and implications, and it sets me off into a crazy loop of self-assessment, trying to figure out why something bothers me, or to try and explain exactly my feelings about something, to show that they are logical and reproducible.

As yet another example, a few days ago I was cycling along a cycle path with railway tracks on my right, and it occurred to me that before reaching home, there would need to come a point at which I would cross from having the tracks on the right hand side of me to the left, because I could remember another point at which I would cross the tracks, which would change the tracks from being on the left hand side of me to the right, so there would need to be some point at which my position relative to the tracks would need to change, before changing back. All entirely logical, but this thought reminded me of another thought I had had a few days prior to that, where I had been looking at car parking spaces on two sides of a winding road and noted that they were slanted slightly in opposite orientations. At that time I had been wondering (whimsically) about whether my mind had recognised the difference in orientation by keeping a mental image of one set, and then trying to overlay it onto the other. Nothing particularly wrong with that, but it was again accompanied by a slight feeling of unease, and this, in combination with the right-left thinking I was doing about the railway tracks, made me feel profoundly un-nerved – something was bothering me about the general idea of things having certain orientations to other things, but I couldn’t work out what it was, and the more I couldn’t provide a rational answer to what my ‘fear’ was, so I could ignore or deal with it as appropriate, the more uncomfortable I got! It’s almost like the problem of ‘known unknowns’ and ‘unknown unknowns’. Something will bother me but I can’t describe what it is. Even when I do come up with a rational answer, I can’t convince myself that I have answered the concern that set me off in the first place!
I haven’t really got any questions to pose alongside this. I just wanted to try and articulate my current round of bewilderment, although I know that by looking for others with a similar story, I’m really just engaging in a compulsion by looking for reassurance(!)

[Koala17]

As another strange example, I was watching a TV show where one of the characters suddenly appeared with a beard, who didn’t have one before. It made me think (understandably) “he looks different with a beard”. I then however started thinking that maybe I was ‘seeing’ something more than the beard, in the sense that someone with a beard etc. might look more authoritative, or might have other attributes that might otherwise colour someone’s opinion. I started wondering whether these other associations were actually changing what I physically ‘saw’, in the sense that two people seeing the same person might be experiencing the same sensory data, but one might see someone as attractive while the other doesn’t due to different associations. In a similar vein, I recently saw a picture of a TV presenter, who used to be quite fat, who looked quite ‘good looking’ in this picture. However, I still didn’t find her attractive, possibly because of these pre-existing opinions on her. Again, I wondered if my pre-existing associations were actually changing what I was physically seeing in some indescribable way. Back to the beard thing; I wondered if I was seeing things differently to other people, i.e. they see ‘man’, then ‘man plus beard’, whereas I see ‘man’, then ‘bearded man’ as a sort of separate entity with all the associated associations. This then made me think; when I see ‘man with beard’, does someone else see ‘man plus goatee plus sideburns’? I.e. on a bearded man, even though I am ‘seeing’ the sideburns and the goatee, I just see them as ‘beard’, rather than seeing the subcomponents. This weirded me out, as I think that seeing someone with ‘sideburns’ or ‘beard’ has different connotations and associations in my mind, and, perhaps a bit like the ‘rabbit or duck’ illusion, people can only see one or the other. Perhaps there is a grey zone between sideburns and beard, where the two start to blur, and people see both!? As you can imagine, this kind of pseudo-philosophy is like fuel to the OCD fire, and the theme sticks in my head relentlessly as I try to unravel what exactly I mean, and what exactly the issue is!

 

It’s not that I actually believe that I see something that no-one else can see, it’s just that I worry that I can’t articulate what I am trying to, and so while other people may experience the same thing, it’s a thought that has occurred to me that might not have occurred to others, but isn’t something that I can put my finger on to explain!