How I recognised OCD and the effect it was having on my life

Writing this chapter has been the most challenging of all because to write about obsessive-compulsive disorder when you suffer from obsessive-compulsive disorder is very triggering! How many times do you hear someone throwing around a statement like, ‘Oh my God, I’m so OCD!’ Most of the time the person saying that doesn’t actually have a clue what OCD is. There are other forms of OCD, such as ‘Responsibility Checking OCD’, which could involve the compulsive checking of things over and over, such as whether you locked your door. If my mind came up with a scenario where I could potentially get ‘bad luck’, I would come up with behaviour I thought I had to do to avoid it. One of my compulsions would be to open and shut my door over and over again before I went to sleep, otherwise, I thought I would get ‘bad luck’ the next day.