Does anyone else find the amount of physical affection coming from Hanners sort of jarring? I mean there's heat of the moment, there's character progression, but I just find it odd we've seen so much of a jump to hugging Tilly 3 times in about as many strips.
Like I understand Tilly is the super special author fave right now, but when hugging her dad was such a big deal, and the closest thing from one of her oldest friends was this only ~100 strips ago, I have to raise my eyebrows.
Dunno - I've experienced OCD, but my intrusive thoughts didn't revolve around contamination/purity (*). Also, I'm no mental health expert, just
one guy who knows more than he ever wanted to know about
one manifestation of OCD in
one particular brain.
That being said: No, in my experience, OCD doesn't go into remission from one week to the next - but what
can absolutely happen is that some day, you find yourself noticing your support network avoiding
Bad ThingTM before you noticed the presence of
Bad ThingTM, and you catch yourself being 'eerily chill' about it. That's what "healing" felt like to me. That you start 'forgetting to freak out where you are supposed to'.
New meds can have that effect - I've pictured the onset of an SNRI becoming effective in my system as sensing that my 'mechanism' (**) was trying to go into high gear, but couldn't summon enough fear-fuel from my mind to start the tail-spin. Felt like it was screaming abuse at the "ignition" but the motor just wouldn't start. I
literally talked to it once:
"Mornin' 'lil fella. I don't seem to be able to be sufficiently freaked out for the horror-ramjet to start spooling up. SorryNotSorry ... "; and I swear this oppressive
monster I'd lived with for so long just looked a little sheepish and small and stupid and then pissed off to the afterlife for anthropomorphised malicious malcognitions.
Furthermore, there's a difference between Hanners
actually experiencing an episode of
'Brainlock' and
her friends trying to be sensitive about inadvertently contributing to her experiencing one (I hate the word 'triggering' - it suggests an entirely wrong picture about how OCD 'works'.)
Edit: As Welu points out below, OCD is a mental
illness - it's not about
following rules, it's about
breaking them, or the system of rules
breaking down. It's not a
function, it's a
dysfunction, a tiny error in one program's .dll that sometimes, when certain parameters coincide in just the 'right' way, causes the program to
stop doing what it was supposed to do. It's rational to expect the
program to follow rules, because it has a 'design-purpose' (Nope, this is not an argument for ID). It's
not rational to expect the same from the subtle
error in the program that causes the wet-ware equivalent of a BSOD - or to expect the BSOD itself to follow rules. Because that's what OCD is: A BSOD when there was no reason to BSOD. Trying to 'make sense' of your OCD is about as productive as discussing metaphysics with a warning light on your car's dashboard - which is part of what the four-steps method of CBH is about: To stop discussing with the warning light that shouldn't be going off, and to start realising that it's really just a false positive you're trying to haggle with.
(*) Guess we have to thank Howard Hughes for the cliche that OCD is always about germs - actually there's many people for whom it isn't and contamination/purity is merely one of at least ten meta-classes of intrusive thoughts. Intrusive thoughts cover the entire range of the human cognitive spectrum (which is why I'm no fan of trigger-warnings for OCDers - unless you're prepared to cease interacting with us at all for our own good, it's not possible to avoid triggering one of us (especially not for a mind as wonderfully inexperienced with scary absurdities as yours - you have no idea how deep that rabbit hole goes, Alice ...). A strategy that would, incidentally, trigger a lot of us, and add to the social isolation the illness often breeds). OCD is about part of your brains' OS' task-manager, the caudate nucleus, going TILT!, and it seems to be especially nervous about scary things. Illness is a scary thing - put another way: OCD has probably been around as long as there's been Homo Sapiens, but intrusive thoughts about germs likely do not predate Louis Pasteur ...
(**) I call the intrusive thoughts as a whole 'mechanism', because, in contrast to normal, organic thought-processes, they feel that way. Like an arcane mechanism that latches onto minute fears and excretes paralysis. There's no sense of origin, no purpose to what that machine does, and it doesn't really care which specific fear it turns into a debilitating monstrosity. The themes of intrusive thoughts can also change in sufferers - I've gone through at least two meta-classes of intrusive thoughts in my lifetime. The thoughts vary, even the themes that the thoughts revolve around can change over time, but the 'mechanism' doesn't. When I was younger, I felt like my OCD was always one step ahead of me because it seemed to be so astonishingly creative at finding ever new rationales for doubting again and again - especially doubting the debunk of an intrusive thought, and then the debunk about the intrusive thought about the debunk of the ... - but later on, I realized that every bit of 'creativity' was actually just my brain trying to make sense out of an absurd situation: OCD isn't even the mental equivalent of a virus (and virii are remarkably stupid things). OCD is, in essence, a faulty warning-light going off when your brain knows it shouldn't - that's what causes the fear, not the thought's content: the conflicting messages and your mind knowing that the conflict is happening at a very, very basic level of your cognitive architecture, something that it doesn't feel chill about at all.
It's the postman obsessing about a missing stamp on the letter they reluctantly hand to you because they have to admit there's no reason not to on the one hand, but on the other "it's just that there has to be order ...". It's a relentlessly shouted "BUT WHAT IF ... ?" that doesn't even have enough processing power to come up with a specific "what if?" to freak out about - it's hardly even a proper thought to begin with, not even an emotion; it needs the rest of your brain to provide a narrative for the fear. It's merely a false positive that happens to happen in a sensitive department of your brain - false positives are rarely awarded Noble prizes for literature. After a while, you notice it's always the same steps, again and again and again - looking back, I think I might have noticed how mind-numbingly boring this illness is, had I not been so freaked out at the time.
OCD is, at it's core, the "and then?"-question from "Dude, where's my car?". Not the racially stereotyped drive-in, not even the (supposedly) immigrant labourer who asks the question - out of lack of ESL-skills or just for the hell of it - it's just the question "and then?". That's all it ever does, regardless of circumstances or what you do in response; that's all it 'knows' how to do. It's a processing error, not a function. 'Knowing how to' do things is not something it excels at. It would be pitiful or aggravating rather than fearsome ... if it weren't for the fact that you can't simply flee the drive-in in horror and rage because it's in your head, 24/7/365 ... 
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Author
Topic: WCDT Strips 3646-3650 (1st - 5th January 2018) (Read 49310 times)