How I Saved Manhattan! (or why a little OCD can be a good thing)

You know how in the movies (or on the TV show Monk) you see people who won’t step on cracks in the sidewalk, or who count everything obsessively, or who wash their hands obsessively? I’m not talking about THAT level of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. I’m talking more about the non-pathological, merely socially-awkward kind of OCD, where you run to your friends in delight and exclaim that you’ve finally finished putting together your meal binder with seasonal recipes and shopping lists for 52 weeks! And they throw Holy Water in your face and make the sign of the cross at you in the hopes that whatever Evil Thing has happened to you is Not Catching.

Yes, I made that meal binder. No one appreciated its genius.

The kind of OCD I’m talking about, though, is the kind where you take that obsession with detail — with finding the optimal way of doing something and then doing it THAT WAY — and point it in the direction of changing bad habits, establishing new (better) ones, and maintaining an even workflow for your career and your life.

Now, here’s the sticking point. It has to be only a small amount of OCD, just the parts where you get a happy-happy-joy-joy feeling out of things going smoothly, and where it nags at you when something’s out of place. Yes, that nagging feeling is a GOOD thing. It helps you establish new habits. It makes you wash the gosh-darn dishes even though you really don’t want to (and I REALLY don’t want to). It makes you write 500 words even when you’d really rather watch the video of the head-shagging parrot on Cute Overload just One More Time. It make you think: Hey, the head-shagging parrot will still be there after I’ve written something, and if I write FIRST then I can linger on Cute Overload long enough to also watch The World’s Most Inefficient Water-Drinker. You want the contentment, and you want the DRIVE, but you also want to keep some perspective. The point of this little bit of OCD is to make your life Calmer. It’s to reduce all the daily maintenance parts of life to unthinking routine — things you do as automatically as breathing — so that you can focus your ACTIVE mental energy on things like Creativity and Learning and Delight, instead of on Worry and Guilt.

And now we get to How I Saved Manhattan:

It happened like this: For a very long time, I acted on the principle that, if I never washed the dishes, the Shoemaker’s Elves would eventually show up while I was asleep and wash them for me, however, thirty-two years of empirical tests ultimately suggested that the Shoemaker’s Elves did not, in fact, have my address. (Yes, I DO find this discriminatory against non-cobblers, and I am willing to sign a petition to that effect.)

In fact, should I continue to rely on the Prejudiced Elves to help me out, I would eventually be faced with a mountain of plates and cups and saucers and silverware and pots and pans that would overrun my small apartment, leak out of doors and windows, and eventually achieve sentience and come to life as The Dirty Dish Monster, trampling Atlanta, Manhattan, and every other metropolis, and eventually DESTROYING THE WORLD!

The obvious solution to this dilemma was to buy disposable everything, but that would put a crimp in my budget, which is already quite decrepit. Also, then the world would be overrun with my paper plates and plastic forks, and Al Gore would hate me. I don’t want Al Gore to hate me. Therefore (<-logic), I was faced with the INDISPUTABLE FACT that the only way my dishes would get washed and Manhattan (and the world) would be safe was if I did them myself.

For you, world. I did it all for you.

Using this logic, I started washing the dishes twice a day. I still hate doing it, but now I kind of love having a clean kitchen, and the love outweighs the hate. It's a Warmer (not Fuzzier, though, because mold was part of the Mountains of Mess problem that I'm trying to get rid of) feeling I have now, when I face my kitchen. We are no longer Enemies. Now, my kitchen is simply the home of my good friends, like Coffee and Mozzarella Cheese. All the energy I used to expend avoiding doing the dishes is now energy I spend writing my dissertation, my novel, and my Long Rambling Blog Posts. I get an ego boost from being the savior of humanity. Also, I am healthier now because I cook actual vegetables. I have clean pots in this brave new world, and I try to use them.

So, that's it. OCD (in small doses) is just another tool in your creative arsenal. If you find yourself avoiding cracks on the sidewalk, you might want to try therapy, but if you can just focus that power on saving the world from your kitchen mold, you'll save yourself some money, AND you'll have more energy to focus on being joyful in the world. When the inevitable happens, and you miss a day here and there, don't stress out about it. Notice that something's up, so you can figure out if it's a one-time thing -- either there's been an emergency, or you've taken a one-time opportunity to do something super-fun and exciting -- or if you're getting stressed out and over-committed and need to Slow Down. OCD-ness is best targeted at maintaining permanent life-style changes because YOU want to make them. Don't let it become just another source of stress. The idea here is to make your life better, not worse. Remember the threat of the Dirty Dish Monster Taking Over the World! and have a sense of humor about the whole thing.

Tagged as: Cute Overload, habit change, OCD, routine, The Dirty Dish Monster, The Infamous Meal Binder