…but you can’t take the contamination fears out of the boy. At least, not with something as quick and easy as a plane ride…
So here I am in a new country, enjoying the lack of contamination around me after the unbearable cage that the environment back home had become. I knew that this new-found freedom wouldn’t last forever (and probably not even very long), because eventually I’d run into someone who had big nasty warts, and it would all start from there. Well, I had my first big trauma the other day after 6 weeks of not really having any problems. I knew it was bound to happen sooner or later, but it was a bad one when it finally did!
I had to get some documents printed for work visa purposes, and I didn’t notice the warts on the guy’s hands until I’d already sat down, used a computer in the shop, and printed my stuff out. Too late to bail, damage already done. I think perhaps my 6 weeks of relative freedom had lowered my vigilance levels, which means that as much as I would like to be able to let my guard down here, I really can’t. I obviously hadn’t completely let it down though, because I’d done everything in that shop one-handed (with my left hand firmly in my pocket throughout) – the door, using the computer, handling the print-outs, and paying – which made the contamination easier to deal with. Not sure why I did that in that particular shop, but I’m so glad I did – I’d have been locked out of my apartment otherwise! (it’s tempting to think that I’ve developed a 6th sense for detecting which people have warts, but that must actually be a load of bollocks. What I do know I do absurdly well is spot warts a mile off – like on someone’s nose at the other end of a train carriage – but in this case the guy had his nasty hands in his pockets). Anyway, I used my one good hand to get into my place, put the papers down on a bin liner, set everything up for my first big hand wash in my new apartment (I’d already worked out how I’d have to do it when the time came), and then spent a few hours decontaminating. (While I’m on that subject, I just want to say, why does water have to splash up out of the basin? Just fucking stay in there and go down the drain, don’t leap up and get me on the arm! An hour of hand-washing can easily become 2 or 3 hours with a couple of unlucky splashes, as it did the other day. Fuck you water!) Once I had my hands clean, I then had some contaminated papers to deal with, which was fairly easily done with some gloves and a couple more bin liners, and I had to do some very thorough laundry of the items I’d been wearing and unfortunately sat down in.
(I can’t even describe how relieved I am that I hadn’t already photocopied my passport in that shop, as I needed to provide a copy with my visa documents. That is one item that just can not be allowed to get contaminated. There is no way to avoid handling your passport when presenting it without looking so suspicious you get taken for questioning, and you can’t just keep replacing them. Besides, after all the trauma I went through to get the thing in the first place, it would be an absolute disaster!)
So, the damage done was just a few hours that day, plus dealing with the laundry, plus going out again the next day to a different shop to print everything out again – one-handed, just in case – so about 5 or 6 hours all in. Not too bad – compared with August and September, losing a few hours in a week really feels like nothing at all. In 8 weeks from late July to late September I recorded that I’d wasted a total of 168 hours, which I’ve just realised is exactly 21 hours a week / 3 hours a day. So just 3 hours this week is still a massive improvement.
However. The trail now starts. That guy with warts – where does he go? Where does he eat? Which shops must I assume are unsafe due to their proximity to his? Why does he have to go on living his life and not getting rid of those contagious fucking warts on his hand? Even if I didn’t have OCD about it, I think I’d bloody well get rid of my warts in any case so I didn’t give them to anyone else. What if he uses the subway? He probably does, in which case he uses my stop. Which means it is no longer my stop. I’m already walking the extra 10 minutes in the other direction to use a different station. If I lose that one too, it will 20 minutes yet another way to use a stop on a different line altogether. I can’t even let myself think about the fact that before I encountered him, I’d eaten in places right around there… it’s too late now to do anything about that anyway, I just have to hope for the best. So, although flying over here got me a temporary respite, it hasn’t rewired my thinking, and I expect things to slowly snowball from here. Luckily, this is a huge city and I can always move across it. This will be possible a number of times before the entire city starts to feel contaminated.
As much as this sucks, thinking about it I’ve realised something that might help me to improve somewhat. Before the incident with this guy and his hands, there was already a growing list of places (various shops and restaurants) I felt uncomfortable with – not because of people with warts, but because of people dropping things on the floor and picking them up. Which is to say, there are two mechanisms by which contamination is spreading – people I encounter with warts (red alert!), and places where things get picked up off the floor. I don’t think I can do anything about the first one. I hate warts so much, and am so obsessed with not allowing any exposure to them, that my OCD is firmly in place. But the second one, by my own OCD logic, is something that I should be able to work on. As I said in my last post, I never use socks more than once because I used to have verrucas and was too worried about them spreading. So I wear a pair of socks and then throw them away, and constantly have to buy new ones. Well, by the same line of logic, I became completely unable to touch anything that had been on the floor (or anything that had touched that, or that in turn), just in case the contamination from my feet had got onto the sole of my shoes at some point, and from there on to the floor. If I could have used new shoes every day, I would have! Well, my verrucas are gone now, so the starting point for that whole chain of OCD is gone – but the behaviours are still locked in place. This, I think, is the area I need to challenge. I’m in a new environment on the other side of the world. I never brought my verrucas here. I have to start trying to break down my OCD in relation to floors (fact is I’m never going to like floors, I’m probably never going to sit on them or intentionally put things down on them, but I can at least stop being socially and logistically crippled by other people doing so). So, a start: one small victory this week – I dropped a t-shirt. Not so long ago, it would have gone in the bin, but this time, it went in the laundry – albeit directly, by itself, with a ridiculous amount of detergent, but a victory all the same.
ocdvsme 