People associate OCD with excessive cleaning, checking your doors are locked etc. That does affect a lot of people but there is a whole host of other weird shit the human brain can confront the OCD sufferer with. Here is a picture of some coins. You are probably thinking “ah yes, one of them is out of line”. Well symmetry and exactness is another common perception of OCD sufferers. Whilst I do generally like things lined up right I wouldn’t say it’s a huge issue. What I can have a fascination/obsession (delete as appropriate) is coins. Here are some of the odd things I do with coins (weird but not perverted!)
1 In times of stress I can find it quite cathartic to put all my coins in neat piles and count them.
2 When spending them or receiving them I like to look at the date on the coin and make a mental picture of me doing something that year (new pound coin has buggered this one up somewhat).
3 I really like to separate all coins so I know where I got them from. So in one pocket it’s the change from the corner shop, in pocket 2 it’s the ones I got from the pub near work etc etc. I don’t like mixing them up.
4 I take a lot of pleasure if I move I spend a coin quite a long way from where I got it from. So I try and take home with me any change that I get on a trip away. In 2015 I went to Lands End and kept a coin that I received in change. I put it in a special bag. Then last year we went to the Scottish Highlands. I worked out of all our wanderings where I would be the furthest away from Lands End and deliberately spent it in the nearest shop! As you can imagine the Euro has provided a load of opportunities for this. I worked out the furthest distance you could move a Euro was from the Southern tip of Spain to the far North of Finland. Maybe one day!!
5 When going abroad I really, really don’t like bringing home coins that I can’t spend at home, I feel its like “killing” a coin because it can’t be used again. So at airports on the way home I can’t relax until I have found one of those big charity thingies where you dump your spare currency. Once I saw one, and was about to do it and the kids distracted me with something and then I forgot to do it. I remembered on the plane and was annoyed about it all the way home. I have since discovered that Bolton Hospital has a special charity foreign currency box so it’s a good back up plan.
6 Likewise I don’t like “killing” coins by dropping them. So if one goes down the back of some furniture (no matter how small the value is) , that coin is coming back even if I have do rip up the room. Likewise if I see one in the pavements, its getting picked up, even if its only 1p. It makes me look like a miser but I don’t really care!
7 Imagine the fun I get at seaside amusement arcades, particularly on the penny falls games. Any coins that come out of these (or other machines) have to come home with me and get their special place in the house.
I have always done this stuff since childhood. In a cycle of OCD max there might be piles of coins all over the place. My family will ask me, if they can use any of them and which piles they are allowed to take from. Now I had never told anyone about all this until I went to the priory. There I met another patient who had the same coin obsession. He had to keep all his coins divided up by denomination and he carried around large bags of change with him. He works in a shop and once they were desperately short of change and they pleaded with him to let them use some of his, eventually he relented but it caused him so much anxiety that he had to leave the room whilst they used his coins. It was the first time either of us had met anyone who has a thing about coins!
