When Hyperfocus Triggers OCD Rumination

Is this becoming an OCD blog? Did I use this title already?

Still hyperfocused on Derry Girls, although I’m trying to pull away from it. I feel like it’s become a bit too much of an obsession. Also, that I might ruin it for myself with too much watching of it and reading of fanfic. This might still be the OCD trying to ruin something I like. Not sure.

We were in Estes Park, CO, for Spring Break last week. We stayed in the condos at the Stanley Hotel. They were really nice and I loved the literary and haunted history of the hotel. I FINALLY got to go on a ghost tour. I didn’t see anything scary (except for pics the guide showed us that other guides and guests had taken) or get anything weird in my pics. Alas. Except for a freaky video I took of a carriage that is in the old servant tunnels under the hotel. No clue why it’s there or why it has a jack-o-lantern sitting in it. I just meant to take a pic, but it ended up a repeating video like a gif with a strange blue light. My husband said it was the flash’s reflection from the phone case. I got it in black and white somehow, too.

That distracted me some. I also started watching Roswell New Mexico. If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you know the original Roswell TV show was the subject of my first fanfic obsession twenty-two years ago. (I still can’t believe it’s been that long.) It’s ironic that I tried to wean myself from a new obsession with a new incarnation of my old one.

Anyway, I love the new version and meant to watch it for years. Only three episodes in, but it’s really good. I will always love the original, but the new one is much more representative of the real New Mexico, a state I was shamefully ignorant about before I met my husband, a native of Albuquerque. Now that I’ve been to Albuquerque many times, as well as Santa Fe and Roswell, I’ve fallen in love with the state. Even wanted to move there after Texas really started to go crazy a few years ago. (The real Roswell, the little I saw of it, isn’t as in to the alien thing as I thought it would be. But the UFO-shaped McDonald’s is fun.)

This turned into a bit of a love letter to NM, but that doesn’t bother me. It’s a hidden gem, which deserves to be known more. Although I don’t want it to get overrun and ruined. There doesn’t seem to be a middle ground a lot of the time.

I’m still trying to find a balance with the fanfic. It throws me back to teenage Sara with all my turmoil and regrets. It also brings back my romance and passion and inspires me about writing. (Some of it is SO GOOD.) At the same time, I’m reading it so much that it doesn’t leave much time for writing.

Maybe balance is overrated. Maybe this is more integration of my teenage self into my current self. Maybe I’m processing the regrets about things I wasn’t brave enough to do and say and forgiving teenage Sara for being a traumatized kid with undiagnosed ADHD and autism who didn’t know what she was doing. I haven’t been angry about those regrets in a long time, but I go through periods of intensely ruminating about them.

Part of my brain must think I can change the past by thinking about it so much. I try to write versions of it where it turns out the way I want, but it doesn’t help. I know the OCD is responsible for the constancy of it, but it couldn’t do that if the regrets weren’t there to exploit.

The only thing that does help is immersing myself in my real life. Reminding myself that in so many ways, I ended up with exactly what I wanted. I have a tendency to escape into stories when life is stressful, either on the page and screen or in my head if those aren’t available. I’ve done that ever since I was a kid. I loved books, movies, and TV for themselves, but they took me away from the stress of being unknowingly neurodivergent in a world where that term didn’t even exist yet and of living with my father.

Some floating up out of life is ok. In moderation. At night when I’m drifting off to sleep or spinning and replaying tales in my head while I drive or color or watch TV. (Don’t worry, I can drive and imagine at the same time.)

Not when it turns dark, though. Maybe. When I remember my father’s rages or imagine venting my frustrations and hurts to the people who caused them. Maybe the latter is therapeutic, but the former is probably flashbacks courtesy of my CPTSD.

When I am able to be present with my family, talking to them or at least all looking at the same screen (lol), the regrets and ruminations quiet. When my husband and I have a moment alone together, they quiet. When I write, they quiet. Basically, when I am able to let me be me having the life I want. Rather than the life limited by OCD guardrails that somehow morph into smothering, spiky vines, making me feel like I won’t be able to breathe until my rage burns hot enough for me to breathe fire and burn them away.

I don’t know how to live without them anymore, though. I didn’t even realize they were there until my more immediate harm OCD symptoms began to recede. Then I began to realize how OCD both encompassed and planted roots in my world.

I feel myself struggling to defy these strictures more and more. To question why I still do things this way and if it serves me. If it ever served me. I don’t know if or when this struggle might end in freedom. The fact that I’m casting about for solutions rather than feeling completely trapped gives me hope.