I was diagnosed with OCD last week, and would like some input from folks familiar with it?

I was diagnosed with OCD last week. So, to try and get out of ahead of some questions I know are probably coming, I'm drafting something up that I can send to friends/family in an attempt to sort of explain things if they ask.

I was hoping that anyone with experience with the condition might be able to offer some feedback on what I've got written so far. :)

To give a little backstory, I'm almost 40 years old and have never spoken to a psychiatrist before - I've been with mine now for 5 months and he's absolutely fantastic and we're making some great progress I think.

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OCD is not like... something I haven't been at least suspicious of having for DECADES of my life. There are things that I do that I know perfectly well, are not normal. They're not CRAZY things, or obviously obsessive things to anyone but myself (like I'm not an obsessive hand washer or cleaner or checker) but they're things that I know other people don't really do., but that I didn't necessarily think was "strange".

Like, I know damn well that I don't have to turn my light switch on and off 13 times every time I leave a room or my family's gonna die. But - I (as you know actually lol) need to buy things in quantities of 2 or 5, or I count things a LOT especially if I'm walking or driving past them, and in addition to that - I touch the things I'm counting if I'm physically capable of doing so as sort of an, "Okay you're counted," gesture.

I WILL HYPER FOCUS THE HELL out of things too. Like, if I hone in on something, I will spend HOURS doing it - such as spending 7 hours looking up educational links that are comparable to Michelle fucking Phan's scam of a "course" -.-

Like I said it's not SUPER obvious things, cuz I dont' SAY anything about it when I count stuff, or touch things, and it's not obvious enough that anyone's ever been like "WTF?" but yeah. I know I do it. And last night okay, I was putting snacks away. I have a cabinet in my kitchen that is "the snack cabinet". And it's damn near full cuz this last month I've been wanting sugar a lot which is out of the ordinary for me. So that craving eventually went away, but now my snack cabinet is full of sugar. BUT - I had a bunch of snacks to put away last night, and despite that I have 3 other cabinets with room in them, I COULD NOT make myself come to terms with the idea of putting snack food in the non-snack food cabinets. So I had to rearrange things to get it all in the damn snack cabinet.

And again, not shit that I ever thought was necessarily "an issue", but things that I knew weren't normal.

And OH, okay here, this is weird. This is something else I do that is apparently OCD and not just what I chalked up to being a perfectionist over the years. And this has ALWAYS been a thing, like I remember doing this even as a child -

I can't do something, unless there are no obstacles to me doing it. And by that, I don't mean something that makes what it is I want to do harder, I mean - for example - I can't change my sheets on my bed, unless absolutely everything that is going to touch them after I do that is clean too. Which means, I need to do all the laundry first, I need to vacuum the mattress top, I need to shower and scrub up and shave and wash my hair, anything that could potentially be something that would "dirty up" the bed after I spent a half hour changing everything off of it (even the pillows), needs to be done first, or I won't change the bed stuff. And I do that kind of thing with a LOT of stuff - if I want to do ANYTHING practically, my brain will automatically sort of reverse engineer the final result of whatever it is that I wanna do (change the bed stuff) and determine whatever the list of things that need to be done FIRST is, so that my end result isn't fucked up, creating what I effectively think of as an ideal outcome. And often leads to me putting things off for days, or even months sometimes.

So, it's not just me being lazy, or procrastinating, I'm just a lil nuts.

And i legitimately do it with everything, to some degree.

Which is why sometimes things can take me a long ass time to do - because I am the one that adds totally unnecessary shit to the process of doing it, compulsively. I imagine 99% of people are just gonna be like, "Gotta change the sheets," and then grumble, do it, and 20 minutes later be like, "Done," and move on. They're not going to think of all the things they need to do first before they can change the sheets. -.- lol

Everything from washing the dishes, to cooking, to learning something new, to getting my car fixed. I do it with EVERYTHING. It can actually be pretty hindering, but it's something I've ALWAYS DONE and never thought was completely out of the ordinary.