OCD is a shitty magician.

Remember that David Blaine Street Magic parody series from 2007? I think those videos are a decent encapsulation of what it’s like having OCD. You’re Mikey Day and your OCD is a shitty David Blaine impersonator who just… does his magic on you. You don’t ask for the magic trick. You don’t even like magic tricks. You’re just walking down the street and then… BAM. All of a sudden he’s shoving a deck of cards in your face, pestering you to pick one. You’re trying to tell him, “I don’t really care if you know my card… WAIT FUCK, STOP TRYING TO SAW ME IN HALF, DUDE. Geezus, man. Come on.”

OCD is that group project guy in school.

You know the guy. He suggests a really intricate topic, convinces you and the group to buy in, then he dips out. And all of a sudden you’re pulling an all-nighter, knowing you’re going to struggle to defend the science of spontaneous human combustion to your high school biology teacher in the morning1.

OCD is masterful at finding a theme or content area that paralyzes you—maybe it tells you that you need to check every door and every light switch a certain way and certain number of times before you can leave your house. Maybe it tells you that you can’t ignore a certain feeling in your throat because it means you have some kind of cancer or other dangerous illness—or that you need you check to make sure your dog is still breathing over and over again when you’re trying to lay down and sleep… whatever the content area is, it doesn’t really matter. OCD has a really standard (but incredibly effective) playbook. It finds a topic that threatens you or puts some kind of demand on you, throws you into a state of doubt, trains you to respond in a very specific way, then sits back and watches you do all the work.

Which brings me to metaphor #3:

OCD is that guy who’s way too into board games.

Your OCD is that jackass who walks into your living room, knocks your $90 succulent arrangement off the coffee table and slams down that shitty Settlers of Catan board game.

Let’s settle some Catan, he growls.

OCD is like a sick, twisted, nonstop board game of sorrow—where all of a sudden you look up, rub your eyes, realize three days have passed and you’re up to your eyeballs in lumber.

Your OCD creates stupid, arbitrary rules for you to follow. Like Settlers of Catan, OCD’s rules don’t really make sense, nor are they fair—they are built to keep you playing the game. You need to get another blood test to make sure you don’t have an autoimmune disease. You need to reset your phone for the umpteenth time because you’re being bugged. You need to put that hand sanitizer all over your face and in your mouth…

Playing by OCD’s rules is a waste of your time. And so is Settlers of Catan.

OCD is that Easy Momma, Hand Over the Purse and Everything Will be Real Cool you Dig?? character from Family Guy.

You need to personify your OCD—it’s a strong reminder that you and your OCD are not one. But rather, you are separate from your disorder.

And I like to think of my OCD like that “switchblade-wielding white guy from movies and TV who doesn’t talk like people talk.”

And lastly, a thought about funerals.

I have a bit of a fascination with funerals. Not necessarily the death part—although, yeah, I probably think about death a bit too much—but I’m talking more about the social element of funerals.

When my uncle died a few months ago and I was quietly sitting in the pew of the church, surrounded by my big, Irish family—it was hard to not look around and put myself in the shoes of everyone there.

The spectrum of grief at a funeral is odd. There was my cousin, the daughter of my recently deceased uncle, obviously heartbroken. And there was her husband—nervous, unsure how to comfort her, and overly-concerned about facilitating the transition to the In Memoriam video tribute at the end of the church service.

My aunt was more inwardly grieving. More solemn. She had also lost her son recently and she had stopped coloring her hair. Someone mentioned to me that she looked good going all grey, which felt like a weird, wraparound way to say, “Huh. Grief looks good on her.”

At the other end of the grief spectrum is the ugh, I’m absolutely gutted for you crowd. The people who go to show their support for the grieving, not necessarily the dead. I think that’s usually the majority of funeral-goers.

When the service was over and we all shuffled around the church, hugging each other, saying how it was good to see one another but—in light of the circumstances, obviously not that good to see one another—one of my other aunts patted my face and commented how handsome I was. She smiled and rubbed my face a bit, before accidentally popping her pinky finger slightly into my mouth. Her pinky lingered on my lips just long enough for it to leave a scar in both of our souls.

The day I’m posting this, I’m on my way to my other, other aunt’s boyfriend’s funeral. His name was Al.

My mom told me there’s going to be five hours of mariachi music because, she said, he was Mexican. I never knew that. I didn’t know much about Al—and most of my family didn’t know much about Al, either.

He was with my aunt since before I was born. It’s weird to think I never even knew his last name. Or cared to know, I guess.

But I think that’s what happens with a really big family—some people fall through the cracks a bit. My mom was the youngest of ten kids. And then my extended family grew exponentially from there.

This is all to say—rest in peace, Al. And I hope you enjoy the mariachi band. Making a bunch of melancholic Irish people listen to five hours of Mexican folk music seems like a really fitting sendoff.

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1

OCD is that group project guy in school who (in addition to ruining your sophomore year GPA) also, like… drives a wedge in your marriage and fucks up your relationship with your dad.

Four metaphors and a funeral