Pot Roast Sliders and Other OCD issues

I have grown up in a world I most often don't understand, just like everyone else.  I am frequently baffled by the things I see.  I learned that you can't count on most things, or most people.  I still don't understand why.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying I'm some kind of paragon of virtue.  I disappoint my loved ones, make bad choices, forget birthdays just like everyone else.  When I do it, I'm just as baffled as when I see someone else do it.  I try, very hard and fail often, to live by the maxim "because it's the right thing to do".  This doesn't always make me popular, even in my own home.  It doesn't make my life easier.  Hell, sometimes it doesn't even make me happy.  Making the right choice often doesn't.

So I have this thing.  Well, a lot of things.  Some have short lives and some match my 42 years.  They are the things I can't let go of, my go tos.  They are the things I count on, that help me make sense of the world.  The things that I cling to when I'm confused, or lost, alone, angry, well, anytime I just don't get it.  I hold tight to them.  They live inside me and I foster them, nurture them, protect them, because they protect me.

This is my life with OCD.  I'm not clinically OCD, I don't think.  I can function in the world like everyone else, and most people never even see this side of me.  IF they do, it's only one the outside, never knowing what's happening in me.  I'm a terrific actress when I need to be.  It's how I cope when I can't cope.  It's how I hold on when the world is flying apart at the seams.  I don't pretend to know what OCD is for anyone else, and this isn't a diagnosis to help you understand someone who is clinically OCD.  It's just an explanation of my world, maybe it will help you in some way.

We all have things we look forward to or count on.  For me, these things can become nonnegotiable.  When they don't happen, I'm confused.  I'm scared.  I get "stuck".  I find it hard to move past the thing in front of me to the next thing because this one is wrong.  This is where my world makes no sense.  This happened to me tonight.  We went out to dinner with friends to a restaurant I have been to a number of times.  I love this place, they make amazing pot roast sliders.  Well, they used to.  We had gone there just for drinks and decided to stay to eat.  I looked through the menu (I always do, even when I have a "go to" dish, regardless of the fact that I am not ever ordering anything else).  The sliders weren't there.  I thought it was a mistake.  The waiter actually took my hand and held it as he told me that they don't make them anymore.  This is not a big deal, to anyone I know but me.  Our dining companions laughed, my husband teased to make light of it.  I joined in.  I made fun of me.  What they can't hear is the rush of tornado force winds, the crashing of hurricane seas, the silence of 8 foot high snow drifts, the buzz of locusts across a farm, the decay of epidemic infected flesh, the roar of forests engulfed in flames that has become the soundtrack of my brain in this moment.  You see, I thought I could count on those sliders.  I thought that was a staple of that menu.  Through the mere whim of some chef I have never met, something I count on is gone.  Done.  Over.  Never.  If that's not safe, what else am I going to lose?

This is how I feel in those moments.  What else will be taken from me?  What else will be gone?  What else will I lose?  I can control nothing, nothing is forever.  Does that mean I am not forever?  IS there nothing else after this life?  Because I was pretty damn sure that I could always have my pot roast sliders and clearly I was wrong about that, and if I was wrong about that, what the hell else am I wrong about?  I mean, I was sure I knew for a fact what was going to happen when I die, what happened when my Granny, Daddy, Grandpa, Aunt Donna, Aunt Susie, Aunt Jenny, Aunt Ida, Uncle Sonny, Uncle Richard, Uncle Joe, Uncle Jimmy, Cousin Alan died.  Am I wrong?  Clearly I was wrong about the pot roast sliders.  What the hell!  What else did I screw up?  What else is going to be gone, never to be seen again, because I thought I was going to see them again.  This is just bullshit is what this is.  This puts me in a tailspin that will last all night.  I will not sleep well.  I will spend the night terrified that the world is far more precarious than I had thought it to be.  There is less in this world that is dependable than I had thought.  Clearly, because you better not be depending on those damned pot roast sliders!

It's a stupid thing.  I know.  Why put your trust in something you can't control, Richelle.  Seriously, I know I have no control over the menu there, but that's the thing, you see.  That's the rub.  I have no control over it, but if I can still count on it, then there must be something right in the world because some force somewhere knew how I felt and protected me.  Yet, that didn't happen, which means no force is protecting me and I just don't want to feel all that kind of alone.  I want it to be better than that.  I want somethings to be dependable.  Especially if here and there I can count on something I have no control over.  Everything changes.  That's what I'm told.  But maybe not.  And this is how I protect me.  Sometimes things don't change.  When they don't, I have found a safety net.  A safe place where I know it will be just as it was and will be.  Maybe I am right about what happens when we die, because after all, some things don't change.  Some things are exactly the same.  I always put my left sock on first after all.  That hasn't changed.  I will have to hold tighter to those things, and look for some new thing to replace the pot roast sliders, (somewhere else of course because they clearly don't understand a damned thing there and I'm just not going back to relive the horror again) until I do, I'm in turmoil.  I'm wondering.  I'm worrying.  I'm scared.  I'm stuck.  I'm stuck with an empty-no-pot-roast-slider pit in my stomach.  (BTW, replacement rueben I ordered?  Seriously disappointing!)

So, this is how I will cope.  Tonight I will go to sleep thinking about all the things I can count on that don't change.  I will list them over and over in my own personal rosary.  This is how I will get through it.  And trust me, this has not been an easy week for me on this issue!  I found out I'm not having a turkey for thanksgiving, we're having capon.  I thought "what the hell!  I never heard of some third grade pageant that had a thanksgiving capon!"  So, I'm working through it.  In 42 years of life I've always had a turkey for thanksgiving.  This was a go to, a thing to count on.  My coping mechanism is to remind myself that my family is having a turkey.  I won't be there to eat it, but the turkey is happening.  The turkey will happen.  (note to self, ask Aunt Neesie to send me a picture of the turkey.)  Turkey is happening.  This is my new family and I have to learn new things with them. Maybe I'll be ok with it.  Ok, who am I kidding, I won't be, but I'll put on a great game face and work it out.  In a few years maybe I'll have worked it in to a go to as well.  I'll have to, because my husband's happiness is a part of this.  I can't ruin a holiday over my issues, and I know this is my issue.  And I know few people understand it.

Maybe they do?  Maybe you're reading this and thinking of some tradition you can't live without.  Something that makes a day a day for you?  Or not.  I know.  You're thinking I'm crazy to be this worked up over pot roast sliders, but I'm telling you, they were amazing!