I’ve joked to people before that having OCD isn’t all bad. One benefit is that it gives you extra drive to get things done.
Most of the time that drive is spent on all the wrong things: checking the door eight times to make sure it’s locked, going bat-house crazy when something on your desk is knocked out of place (and I have a lot of stuff on my desk), and trying to make sense of things you have absolutely no control over.
I turned to therapy and medication to eradicate or at least lessen such behavior. But truth be told, I didn’t want the OCD to go away altogether. I worried fiercely that managing the disorder would make me lose my professional edge, that I would somehow turn into a care-free robot.
That didn’t happen, thankfully. If anything, I’m a much more effective journalist now than I was when I was letting the brain spin out of control inside my skull.
But every once in awhile, the spinning mind forces me to get off the couch and do something I might not have done otherwise. In this case, I gave up a lazy evening to chase down news that President Obama has picked his new White House cybersecurity coordinator.
