Because I have no filter and can’t seem to keep anything to myself, I’ve been open in the past about living with anxiety and OCD. But also because I am a chronic smart alec, all my joking may have come across as “I hate getting dirty. I totally have, like, OCD or something.”

Just to be clear, I don’t have “like OCD,” where people think it’s necessary to apologize for liking to be clean. I have Obsessive Compulsive Disorder where I have panic attacks when the garbage can is full, I avoid leaving the house because the world is so scary, my hands feel dirty after I touch doorknobs and I’ve spent literal hours on the computer bouncing between email accounts and my favorite news sites to see if anything new has been posted in the three seconds since I last refreshed.

When I was a teenager I had a really bad experience with medication, so in the years since then I’ve done everything possible to avoid it. I have a ton of coping mechanisms that help me deal, arranging my schedule to allow me as much time at home as I can without being a total shut in, lots of counted crosstitch to ease those counting urges, soothing behaviors that make no sense to a non-obsessive mind but ease my nerves, and skills learned in therapy that help me power through thinking I recognize as irrational.

But as I’ve written and written, this year has been a doozy. With each disappointment that came along I felt less and less on top of my emotions. Unwanted thoughts and fears would stay with me and were starting to affect how I lived. One of the reoccurring thoughts that I have been obsessing over is that I’m going to lose control of myself and hurt Atti. It’s not a desire to hurt him, it’s a script that plays in my head over and over again that some force I can’t control is going to come over me and make me hurt him. As I saw this happening over and over again in my head, I started to be so afraid of this I wanted to limit my interactions with him. Which got me to recognize that this disease had progressed past the point where I could handle it by myself.

Over the last month I’ve seen a psychologist and a psychiatrist and taken tests and borne my soul and I’ve started taking Zoloft. The first couple of days were super rough. I felt like I was on a bad speed trip. My skin felt like it was vibrating. Then I started to settle in as we slowly ramped up the dosage, but once I started taking the full amount my doctor prescribed I got horribly depressed.

When I’ve had friends who have gone off their meds and had a hard time, part of me always marveled at the stupidity. A diabetic doesn’t decide to see if they can get by without insulin, why would someone with a mental illness stop taking their medicine? I get it now. Oh boy do I ever. I always knew that getting the dosage right was an artform and can be difficult to get through, but now that I’ve lived it I understand the temptation to go off so much better. The physical symptoms were troubling, but that was nothing compared to what was going through my mind. I no longer feared losing control, now the script I was hearing incessantly was, “You’re not talented. You’re not special. You’ll never be as creative or successful as the people you admire, so give it all up. You’re not special.”

This is really unhelpful thinking for a writer. If I’m going to share my thoughts with the world, I have to think that somebody out there wants to read them. I wanted that sense of urgency that makes me unable to sit down to abate a little, but I didn’t want to sacrifice my whole sense of self-worth in order to get it.

I went back to my doctor and we scaled back the dosage and I’m doing much better. I’m through the worst of it now. I can’t say I’m quite feeling better yet, but I’m no longer feeling much worse. I’m completely unmotivated to do much of anything, I’ve been spending a whole lot of time watching old episodes of Kids In The Hall while I crosstitch on the couch, but I think that I’ll get better at that as I settle in. Another benefit of having friends walk this road before me is that I know I need to be patient and take care of myself, and one day I’ll look around and realize that I’m feeling pretty good.

For years I’ve joked, in my typical dark humor, that I don’t think of OCD as a disorder, I think of it as a superpower. Every time someone asks me how I do so much in a day that’s always the answer I give them – OCD. But I’ve finally crossed over to where it’s causing me more harm than it’s worth. I’ve spent hours of phone calls and late nights telling my depressed friends to treat their disease like the physical ailment it is, it’s time I take my own advice.

I got hit HARD in Blogger’s meltdown last week. I spent the whole day right before the crash working on things only to have it disappear in the bowels of Blogger servers minutes later. It’s looking like what’s gone is gone forever, so I’ll be over here starting all over again. Be back tomorrow.

So for those of you not keeping track, along with the the regular old facts of my life – child with CP, chronic illness, infertility – this year I am living in a Roadrunner and Coyote cartoon. Dead cat, 3 month sickness including a hospital visit, failed adoption, plus a few behind the scenes things I haven’t been able to mention including a new medical diagnosis that I’m trying to deal with.

Then on Tuesday, catastrophic hard drive failure. My SECOND in three years. I must be sending out electric pulses or something. This one was our external hard drive, so the computer itself still functions, but it was some pretty epic data loss.

Since then I haven’t really gotten up from my computer. Losing stuff like this is a MAJOR anxiety trigger for me, completely bound up in how hard I work, my connection to the world, blah blah blah, I don’t think there’s anything that makes me freak out more than busted technology. I recognize that’s not logical, but neither is my anxiety.

Luckily, after the first hard drive failure, I started being pretty ridiculous about backing things up redundantly. So after a couple of days combing through the internet I was able to put things back together, mostly. I’ve lost all the pictures I didn’t blog between 2004 and 2007, but I’m pretty sure I blogged the best ones and that was pre-Atti, so we weren’t taking many pictures anyway. I can live with that. I’ve also lost my password to photoshop, but I found an open-source editing software called GIMP that I think will do everything I’d need to do anyway.

The music was the worst hit since that was the one area I wasn’t redundant at all. I’ve been re-uploading all my CD’s, re-downloading all my digital files, trying to remember what came from where. Stupid, time consuming, meaningless hassle that became so important to me in the middle of my panic. Bear and Atti spent the evenings playing together while I sat huddled over the keyboard like Smeagol.

The guy at Best Buy said that external hard drives usually only last three years. That seems like no time at all to me, and then I’d have to have a back up for my back up after year two. So this time I’m going to do online storage. I signed up at Dropbox and I’ve already used up my free space. If any of you want free online storage and sign up using this link, then I’ll get more free space to store my photos in. I’m really liking Dropbox, and I think this might be a good home networking solution. If everything goes in the box, then you can get to it from any computer.

So, crisis mostly recovered. But this does leave me pretty terrified considering that it’s only May.