About Me

[Kat]

A few days ago in my Psychology class, I felt incredibly annoyed. My professor was talking about OCD. He kept looking at me throughout it because he knew I had OCD and I think was checking to see how I was doing in case any of it bothered me or triggered me.

But it didn't. None of it was triggering me. I wasn't bothered at all. Because none of it rang true at all. If I hit a bump in the road, it won't even cross my mind that it could have been a person, and even if it did I wouldn't dwell on it for more than a second. I don't count things. Anyone who has ever met me could tell you I'm hardly ever bothered when things aren't in order (I'm a mess, lol). And my single compulsive behavior was not something triggered by an obsessive worry. If it ever happened as a result of worry, it was simply as an escape.

I'm used to feeling annoyed by the description of OCD. Most people's perceptions have been screwed up by the media's interpretation of it being a disorder where someone is such a perfectionist it is funny. But I'd been having a feeling of unease for a while. Everyone I met with OCD had very classic symptoms. My psychiatrist had never heard of my specific compulsive behavior. The medicine helped, but the way my therapist tried to restructure my brain so I didn't want to perform the compulsions wasn't working. There wasn't one particular trigger. Everything had the potential to be a trigger. A few weeks ago, one of the doctors on Grey's Anatomy developed OCD. She had very classic symptoms: counting, needing everything to be in exact order. It irritated me. Until I saw how well the show was handling it and I was reminded that the show creator has always been incredibly good about handling mental illness. So the doubts I had just expanded tenfold.

Back in my psychology class, we were learning about dissociative disorders. And the way some of them were described reminded me of the mild dissociation I had from reality when I was in the midst of my compulsive behavior. And for the first time in years, I wondered if I didn't actually have OCD. Maybe there was a very specific weird disorder. Maybe there actually was someone like me out there.

So I looked up different kinds of dissociation disorders. Nothing. I looked up psychosis. Nothing. I searched around the internet, going back to searching the sorts of things I had used to back before I was diagnosed, "running with headphones", "obsessive exercise with music", "getting lost in other worlds mentally." Finally I found a post where a girl mentioned something called maladaptive daydreaming. She talked about how she has intense daydreams about fantasy worlds. And - my heart nearly stopped reading this - when she got a walkman for the first time, she found that her daydreams were more vivid when she listened to music and repetitively paced. It was embarrassing, she said. It looked ridiculous. No one she knew did that.

I do.

I don't pace. I run. I run back and forth, like pacing but with running instead of walking. It first developed when my family got a trampoline. I used to listen to music, bounce on the trampoline and have vivid daydreams for hours. Only I didn't know they were called daydreams. I didn't know what they were - I thought they were something unique and strange. When I went away to boarding school, there was no trampoline so that's when I started running instead. And I continued doing so for years.

My freshman year was filled with social anxiety. I had a roommate who hated me. She never wanted me in the room, so I escaped outside and daydreamed for hours. It seemed like such a pleasant thing, but there were unpleasant realities to it. Running so much caused me to smell. Sometimes my legs would ache and I would be so tired when I was done, too tired to do my schoolwork.

When I was in sophomore year, my piano teacher died. She was a mother figure to me and one of my best friends. I had a bit of a breakdown and my running-daydreaming got completely out of hand. It's almost comical (but not, really) to see how much my grades slipped in the last quarter of sophomore year. I got mostly A's before then. I think I only got two A minuses after that. 

I have always been a terrible procrastinator (at the time I just believed it was a character flaw. Now I realize that I would be so caught in my daydreams of all different types that it just seemed too difficult most of the time to pull myself out and do real work). At one point in my junior year I procrastinated on a paper that was due and didn't finish it in time. Rather than confronting the problem, I just didn't go to that class. And then I was terrified of being seen or tracked down for my unexcused absence, so I didn't go to the next class. I didn't go to class for two and a half days. I hid in my room in the dorm, terrified of someone texting me asking where I was, or one of the dorm-staff knocking on my door. Nobody did. It was winter and too cold for me to go outside and run-daydream. So I went down to the basement of my dorm, which was an old bowling alley and ran during times that I figured out nobody would go down there (I had a schedule worked out in my head at that point). On the third day they finally realized I wasn't going to classes and they tracked me down. They asked why I hadn't been going. What had I been doing for two days? I was paralyzed. I couldn't think of any valid reason. The idea of saying, "I procrastinated on a paper, freaked out and have been hiding in my room and running in the basement for two days" was impossible. That was no excuse. So I lied. I said, "I've been throwing up" and pretended to have bulimia. Yeah. Not my finest moment. I just couldn't tell them the truth. To me, there was something fundamentally wrong with me as a person. Bulimia was something that they could sympathize with, that they could excuse. And I did have body image problems and I had tried to make myself throw up before. 

They put me into treatment for depression. It didn't really work, for obvious reasons. I wasn't being honest. I struggled my way through the rest of school. When I went to college, I was placed in a really socially isolated dorm. I had to take a bus to get to my classes and the social part of campus. I struggled to find friends for a few weeks, but I was a mess and people could sense that. A few weeks into school, I checked out. I stopped going to two of my classes and my running-daydreaming got completely out of hand. There was a woods nearby with paths and I spent most of my time there. I was constantly tired and disgusting. At one point I ran out of shampoo and couldn't summon the energy to get more. When it came time for late-drop date, I knew I needed to drop two of my classes but I was terrified at the thought of explaining the situation to my parents. I told them I had done so terribly on my last tests and I could no longer get a decent grade in them. They questioned why I had done so badly and encouraged me to keep the classes even with bad grades. Credit was credit, they said. On the last day I could drop, I finally looked at the form. I needed to meet with my advisor and get her signature, as well as both teachers' signatures. I couldn't do that in the limited amount of time I had. So I gave up. I ran-daydreamed all day. My parents frantically tried to reach me and I told them I would see them tomorrow and had something important to tell them. The next day, they drove me home and I told them I was crazy. I begged them to help me because I didn't know what was wrong with me. They told me it sounded like OCD, I was diagnosed with OCD and that is what I believed it was ever since.

Until now.

Finally everything connects. I have other daydreaming behaviors but I never questioned them because they were never so obviously unhealthy as my running-daydreams. But they do make my life less productive when I get caught up in them. This is why I find myself reading books, watching movies and t.v. shows and reading fanfiction for hours. And once I'm done with a story I'll go back and re-read it from a certain character's perspective, or try to recapture the perspective of not knowing what was going to happen. I recently saw Catching Fire for the second one just because I wanted to experience it from Annie Cresta's perspective. These things are not helpful and can be detrimental to my lifestyle. I would like to learn how to control them.

Despite the negative self-awareness discovering maladaptive daydreaming has caused me, I am overwhelmingly happy I found out about it. First of all, I finally am able to dispel the loneliness I've had inside me for the longest time. Nobody I spoke to with OCD or any other mental disorder could understand me. Nobody could relate to my particular problems. Now I know there is an entire community. It also uncomplicates my life quite a bit. Before I was unsure how to structure my life because OCD is anxiety based and I was cautioned against overwhelming myself. But I've always known I'm happiest and most productive when I'm busy, and least likely to run-daydream. That's because as long as I keep my life interesting, I don't need to excessively daydream. The second reason for my happiness is that this is the most beautiful explanation I could possibly imagine for my compulsive daydreaming. Essentially, I have so much creativity and genius inside my brain that I can't contain it. The reason I become so bored with life is because i have the ability to create far more riveting worlds and situations with nothing but my thoughts. I've always been told I have an exceptional mind. It makes just too much sense that my mental problems would be a result of that exceptionalness. 

It's a little frightening, because they know so little about it. Just because of my past experience I'm biased toward the opinion that it is a form of OCD, or shares many of the same characteristics. On the other hand, it is sort of invigorating. We're pioneers and we will be the first to go forth and discover why our strange minds work. Next week I'm going to head into my psychiatrist's office and say, "Guess what? I have a rare, new and under-researched disease that no one really knows how to treat. I hope you're up for a challenge, because I am!" 

[Kat]

I've always been this way, I think. When I was seven I transferred schools and was incredibly lonely, so I would sit by myself at recess. When I was nine my best friends and I played fantasy games and I was never satisfied with their endings so that's how I started writing.

I have to keep myself busy. If I'm left on my own with nothing to do I'll find the nearest pair of headphones and go off run-daydreaming. If I can't find any or I manage to stop myself, I'll go on my phone or computer and get lost in the internet. Sometimes in those moments I can channel that restlessness into some form of writing.

You should go out! You'd be surprised how interesting and fun just the littlest interactions with other human beings can be. The real world is so much better than anything we can create in our minds. It's lovely and complicated and beautiful. And if you feel disconnected from it, it can be very hard to try to ease back into it, but you have to start somewhere. Life doesn't happen instantaneously. You have to put your roots out there, plant some seeds and be patient.