OCD and ‘Meaning’

Another beautiful blog about OCD. May they help those with OCD, their families and friends and those for whom finding meaning is a struggle.

“Hoover”. When my sister hoovers her home, she just “hoovers”. However, when I hoover my own home, I am thinking about the areas of my home that I need to clean, the direction in which I want to start hoovering, and whether I will hoover in straight lines vertically or horizontally or in another pattern. I am thinking about what hoovering will accomplish: it will mean that my floors are dust-free and ‘clean/pure’; however, dust will settle shortly after, and my floors will be ‘dirty/impure’ again. I am thinking about how my family wants the home clean and hoovered and how Allah wants me to keep my home clean as a Muslim who submits to a branch of the Islamic faith, cleanliness. In other words, I don’t just “hoover”, I mentally tire myself out even before picking up my machine and whilst hoovering, I am ticking off checklists and adding extra ‘meaning/rules’ throughout the process.

Overall, hoovering is difficult for me! It is not an action that I can just ‘do’!

Now, hoovering is not the only action I struggle with and add extra meanings and rules onto. With OCD, I do this with every aspect of my life, such as brushing my teeth, opening/closing a door, making a meal and many other mundane tasks that I know those around me may not even take more than a second to think about. However, as a Muslim who wants to get closer to Allah, having OCD means that I also struggle with Islamic acts, such as prayer.

When I pray, like hoovering, I do not just ‘pray’. However, unlike hoovering, prayer actually requires us to do more than just ‘pray’, with its own well-established rules and the requirement for an individual to be mentally present during the prayer and to actively think about the meanings of each motion and word recited, to ultimately seek a connection with Allah. Now, can you imagine if hoovering is hard for me, how must I fair with praying 5 times a day? The short answer is, barely and sometimes, not at all.

How am I trying to improve though? Thankfully, learning that one of the core reasons for why I struggle with tasks such as hoovering is the added meanings/rules that I obsessively add on, in turn, this means that to be able to do these tasks without mentally exhausting myself out, I need to actively stop myself from thinking about any meanings/rules associated to prayer (or hoovering) and to just ‘do’: to just ‘hoover’ and to just ‘pray’.

And thankfully, this seems to be working. From an inability to pray at all without tearing myself apart with obsessive thoughts and compulsions, I am now able to pray without thinking. I am in effect ‘just praying’. And hopefully, the next step will be to add positive meaning. However, for now, I am gradually learning what it means and how it feels to just ‘do’.