Do you have a notoriously bad memory? Do you get lost trying to find where you parked your car? My whole life, my memory problems and poor sense of direction were the butt of family jokes. I did hypothesize that perhaps my bad memory was a defense against remembering situations and thoughts that could trigger more OCD, and there could be some truth to that, but I think the nature of my OCD made it extremely unlikely that I could have a great functional memory.
I spent nearly every waking minute thinking through rituals and lists while trying to function as a normal person. If you are not plagued by this form of OCD, I want you to imagine having a conversation about, say, your wedding plans, while simultaneously silently reciting the names of the actors from Star Trek and mentally correcting every grammatical mistake you hear with an elaborate thought ritual that you must repeat 144 times in various rigidly determined permutations. And just as your fiancé is telling you where to pick up the flowers, you hear somebody cough, initiating a different set of mental rituals, all the while keeping track of where you are in your repetitive list of Star Trek actors. On your way to pick up the flowers, or whatever it was she told you to get — it’s hard to remember — you have to name eight people from summer camp from when you were 10 years old, in a specific order, repeating the list of names until it feels just…
