Posted by Abby on January 31, 2000, at 14:40:43
In reply to DP's Lair--The Tedious Play By Play, posted by Noa on January 31, 2000, at 12:09:10
> > Ok, so now I am answering my own posts. Oh well.
>
> I just finished part of the bathroom. Shoveled a ton of trash off the floor, tried to separate out laundry from trash (I might have lost a few items there), and scrubbed the sink and the area around it.
>
> As I was thus engaged, my thoughts floated around about how the hell I ever let it get this bad. I think I might have a bad case of "depressed perfectionism." I mean, that I am a bit obsessive about wanting it to be perfectly clean, but feel so overwhelmed and so lacking in confidence in my ability to meet my own standards, that I just give up altogether. And once it gets to be too big of a problem, well, then it IS overwhelming by anyone's standards. At that point it seems pointless to do a little cleaning, because it hardly makes a dent. It is very rigid thinking, I know.
>
> For example, just now I was cleaning the sink. Now, mind you my goal today is to do enough cleaning not to get myself evicted. But I pulled up the blind in the bathroom window for light, and then noticed how filthy the window sill, etc. was, so I cleaned that. Ok, no big deal, not a major detour. But my MIND starts in with the obsessiveness: I notice the dirt between the screen and window, and start thinking about how if I want the windows open, I will have to clean that thoroughly. Then, I think about how dirty the screen itself must be, and imagine taking it out and bringing it outside for a scrub and hosing down. I said to myself, don't be ridiculous, there is more dirt in here than would come in because of the window being open. But my obsessive mind stirs up this anxiety anyway.
>
> I was never really that afflicted with OCD, not overtly anyway. I don't have rituals. And I wouldn't have been characterized by people who know me as afraid of dirt. It is just a covert sort of thing my mind does and my reaction is to withdraw and give up.
>
> This is the process that used to happen when I was a kid and had to write for school-through college, actually. I would freeze up, give up, get overwhelmed. My mind would edit words before they even reached my pen, so I couldn't write at all. (Hah! Look at me now, you can't shut me up!!) This eventually subsided after college and when I went to graduate school in my late twenties.
>
> But the brain process is the same, I think.
>
> Any thoughts?I know exactly how you feel. Occasionally I do massive cleaning binges and get tons of dust out, and they take three days. (That's when I live with others, and the place can't get too too bad.) Then, of course, even if I feel well I don't want to maintain it. Often, I find it very difficult to do a little cleaning in a lot of places. So I'll clean the countertops and start getting into the grooves of teh refridgerator, and, by the time I'm done, I can't bear to do more. I don't think that particular trait is obsessiveness as much as it's tangential thinking. There are all sorts of things you notice only after you start cleaning, and you can get distracted by them, losing sight of the bigger picture.
I've often had similar problems with writing. If even on the bad end of mildly depressed, the words don't come at all. At times when I feel most creative and inspired, it's almost on a level beneath words, and teh writing does not come well. Sometimes I can't write it, and other times I realize only later, that what I wrote was crap.
Abby
poster:Abby
thread:19971
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20000128/msgs/20217.html