OCD???

I believe that almost every person has their own mental peccadilloes. Little, small, tiny flaws in the way we think. So I've told you how I absolutely cannot watch Hoarders because I find it tremendously depressing, right? All that garbage piled up and taking over your life...YUCK. I'm the anti-hoarder, and I have no problem chucking things out. Sometimes to the point where I do actually regret being so hasty about my "cleaning the closet" sprees. So that is me MOST of the time. And then today I was putting on my makeup, and holy cow, my makeup bag is a MESS! I might be a makeup hoarder because I have a hard time throwing any makeup away. If I think, for example, that I can get one or two more uses out of that stub of an eyeliner, I will keep it. I have old eye shadows that I haven't used in over a year, but I keep them. I have a blush product that is pretty much gone, but I might want it later, so I keep it, just in case.

I guess I am a hoarder in my own way. I probably do the same thing with office/school supplies. I stockpile paperclips and highlighters, pens and pencils, notebooks, binders, erasers.

And then there is my compulsion with food. I imagine that it is a type of OCD. So I decide I'm going on a diet, and it will start tomorrow or Monday or January 1. Whatever the date, I find myself obsessing about food and what I will eat up until the diet starts because, somehow, I imagine that after I start my healthy habits, I will NEVER EVER touch another ounce of junk food. I act as if those thing will never be allowed into my life again, so I have to get my fill now since I'm never going to eat it again. But I know that isn't true, right? I am going to have a shake or a cookie or some cake at some point in time. Almost no food is completely out forever and ever. Then I think if I could have a healthy frame of mind about this...if it wasn't sugar feast or sugar famine in my mind...then I could probably get a hold on both my weight and my relationship with those kinds of foods.

I think it stems from believing that sugar is the food of the devil. You know, I don't see other unhealthy foods that way. Take the simple chip. A potato chip, if you will, or a tortilla chip or whatever type you like. I like potato chips. But I never see them as forbidden because I eat them so rarely. I want them sometimes, and so I eat them sometimes. But if I have them on Friday with my sandwich, I don't feel like I have to have more and more and more. It probably will be a few more weeks and sometimes even months before I chow down on chips again.

Why, then, can't I control the need to down an entire bag of Reese's Peanut Butter Cups?

Then there is my need to clean/organize everything. My email in box, for example, had about four hundred messages in it, and so I HAD to go through it and clean it out, finally, and then I sighed and smiled and said to myself, "That's so much better." It was an actual mental relief for me to get rid of all the unwanted messages. And then there was the day I cleaned the bathroom a few weeks ago, and wow, once I got started...well, I was washing down doors and walls. I try to scrub and rescrub the shower doors but they are etched, and I know I can't get them completely perfect and it BUGS me to no end. But you can't reverse the etching, and oh, how I want the doors to be perfectly shiny, without spot. It isn't going to happen.

So there it is. I have my own little OCD/mental issues.