Today Was Good

No. Today was great. I actually felt more like my old self today than I have in the better part of a year.

I had a bunch of purchased things to return, which meant a horrendous amount of exposures. It was a grand total of four retail stores and a trip to the postal store to ship and/or return other items. I also stopped at two secondhand clothing stores to sell some used clothing, and then I went shopping at a mall. In addition, I saw (and hugged!) my dad for the first time in more than a year. This, all of this, was huge.

I stopped being able to be around my dad, who I love dearly, because he became "contaminated". I have a thing about skin diseases, and he mentioned about a year ago that he thought he had a fairly benign skin disease. Even if he did, which he probably didn't, it should be long gone by now. But did the OCD Bully care? No. And subsequently, I have not been able to visit my own father for more than a year. I cannot adequately express how much that hurt me.

When I saw him pull up in front of my grandmother's house today, I thought I would feel panic and fear. I didn't. Aside from some momentary discomfort at the thought of a possible contamination, my happiness won out and I ran and gave my dad a huge hug. Nothing else mattered. For once in a long time, OCD didn't completely eff something up for me.

After a really nice visit with dad and grandma, I went to the postal store and handed contaminated items to a contaminated cashier, used a contaminated pen to sign my name to a contaminated piece of paper, touched a contaminated door to get in and out, and...well, you get the idea. So I was then contaminated, and so were my keys and car door and steering wheel and cell phone and so on. But I was mostly cool with it. And that surprised me.

I stopped at all of the other places, handed my debit card over to be swiped by multiple people to process my returns (I have to buy online a lot because of how far from malls we live), visited a secondhand clothing store (two, actually) - a huge exposure for me, and handled more potentially contaminated things than I could even keep track of. By the time I got to my reward store, where I just shopped for fun, I was almost feeling like a normal person (read: me, without OCD)! Almost.

This likely goes back to my previous post about habituation. Getting out is certainly good for me, and I should probably make an effort to do it more often. I really enjoyed my day, and being able to visit with my dad really, really made me happy.

Screw you, OCD. Today was mine.