By: Anonymous
Luke Combs, a thirty-five-year-old redhead from North Carolina with a thick accent and thicker beard, is my favourite country artist. His voice is great. He has the perfect amount of rasp, and combined with his rolling, smooth lyricism, his songs are tender and sweet and melancholic all at the same time. My current fixation is his cover of Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car”, although, for the longest time, it was “She Got the Best of Me”. I highly recommend both, even if you aren’t into country music. I wasn’t either, until Luke Combs. He’s truly a breath of fresh air.
If you’re still with me, here’s another fact about Luke Combs: he has OCD. He made that public two months ago, on some Australian TV program I don’t follow. I browsed an article about it a month after it came out, during a ten-minute break between Pomodoro method work intervals. Naturally, I skimmed over it, before going back to my decidedly more pressing AP exam prep. You know how it is. The grind stops for nothing.
Point is: Luke Combs has OCD. That stuck with me, even though I was cramming terms and graphs that should have stuck in my head instead (if I were taking AP Psych, this would’ve been a whole lot more helpful).
OCD, or obsessive-compulsive disorder, is one of those disorders that are constantly misunderstood, despite its name being self-explanatory. There are obsessions: intrusive, unwanted thoughts which cause distress and anxiety. Then there are compulsions: repetitive behaviours and mental acts done to neutralize the obsession, often to an excessive degree. Common obsessions are religion, taboos, sanitation, and unintentional harm, though there are countless others, each unique to the person experiencing them.
The typical media portrayal of a neat freak who loves to tidy stems from a poor interpretation of a sanitation obsession. Here’s a more realistic portrayal of how that might look:
During flu season, it’s natural to be worried about getting sick. That’s normal. But for people with OCD, magical thinking kicks in, and that worry could become a fully-fledged obsession: “If I don’t wash my hands fourteen times this morning, I’ll get sick, and then I might die”. If you thought this would happen (and OCD does a great job at convincing you it does), you’d naturally panic, not wanting to die. Then comes the compulsion, a poor attempt at neutralizing the thought. Off you go to wash your hands fourteen times. And then maybe another fourteen times, when it just doesn’t feel right. And maybe another fourteen, just for extra measure. You can never be too safe, right?
OCD wants complete, 100% certainty, and that type of certainty doesn’t exist. It’s nightmarish. It’s time-consuming. And you can’t stop thinking about it.
Although excessive hand washing and cleaning are common symptoms of OCD, there are other, less noticeable ones. They can include ruminations on past events or worries about future possibilities. Here’s another example:
“When I was young, I pushed a friend into a swimming pool. I haven’t seen them since childhood. Maybe they drowned and I forgot.”
Now, in this case, there’s a real-world connection- something about the obsession actually happened, so the rest of it seems true. You really did push your friend into the pool, and you really haven’t seen them since childhood. But the rest of it–even if you remember your friend climbing out of the water right after, even if your parents still keep in touch–will seem true too.
In this case, the resulting compulsions are much more difficult to spot. One might Google things over and over like: “What do I do if I’ve killed someone”, or “local police stations in my area” or “How to turn in a crime with no evidence”. They might avoid pools, fearing they’ll drown someone, or steer clear of a class reunion, fearing confirmation of that friend’s death. They might attempt to confess to the crime, or constantly seek reassurance from others that the crime didn’t occur.
Luke Combs (yes, we’re coming back to him), has OCD. And hey- so do I. I’m only throwing that in so my opinion has some merit to it.
People make self-aimed jokes about OCD all the time. I’ve been told countless times over that everyone has “a little bit of OCD” in them, or that someone has OCD for getting fussy about organizing or loving the smell of Lysol cleaner. It’s no big deal. I don’t think it’s all that funny, but don’t let me police you from cracking some jokes. Just know that the actual thing is far from a personality quirk. OCD isn’t some whimsy that predisposes you to hate crooked portraits, uneven pizza slices, and mismatched socks. It’s an actual, debilitating disorder, one that countless people (Luke Combs and myself included) grapple with every day.
So hey. If you’re going to make the joke, at least know what you’re talking about.