I am the Keeper of My Time

I've had a lot of time of my own this week, because my job is gone. I've been avoiding blogging here, in part because my whole routine is a mess, but also the OCD sneaks in quickly and says, "Well, now you have time to do everything *exactly right* so don't mess it up" and then I avoid posting at all. But today I'm here, because the support I've received from this community of readers and bloggers has been wonderful, and it's important to me to continue to share my experience of dealing with OCD, and sharing what I've learned.

An expression my therapist uses floated into my mind when I sat down to write, "I am the keeper of my time." As in, there is the possibility in my human-ness to keep my own time, independently of what the OCD demands. I struggled with this concept at my job in the past, because of my fear I would do the wrong task or do things in the wrong order, and even though I worked independently, I was not the keeper of my time much of the time, but rather my OCD was. The anxiety about making a mistake would come like a wall of water knocking my chest in, and I would divert immediately into compulsive web searching to distract myself.

The irony was that I would inevitably find something on the internet that caused me additional anguish, but the initial hit of anxiety relief kept me coming back. In 2001 I started therapy with Molly, who was instrumental in helping me find compassion for myself, and starting to create my own life, but who didn't really understand the nature of my compulsive searching. I started reading sites that left me feeling even more defective and unredeemable than when I started. When I said something about it to Molly she was alarmed, and told me to "draw a boundary" and stop reading the multitude of sites that were telling me I was going to hell.

My secret hope was that I'd find a site that said I was ok--the compulsive search for comfort. I was not the keeper of my time. My time was like a stretched out sweater that couldn't bounce back into its original shape, and one of my OCD fears was that once I started websearching I couldn't recover any of the day, that it was all ruined, and this meant just about every day was ruined.

My challenge now, while unemployed, is to claim my time. My well ingrained habit, my overlearned skill, is to start drifting on the computer, and making a schedule stirs up all the fears of choosing the wrong things to do, but there is true delight in actually doing things that are important to me, like writing this post. What ways has OCD interfered with keeping your time? How have you reclaimed bits of your life? My OCD says that it's all or nothing--either I claim it all, or none at all, but that's just another sneaky way for it to perpetuate itself!