Young And Crazy

As I explained in the November 6th, 2011 post, I developed a serious case of obsessive-compulsive disorder as a child.  I believe it was triggered by the sudden anxiety I experienced when I woke up on New Year's Day morning and found that my parents had left me to go and visit my paternal grandmother in Daegu, which was hours away by train -- and of course, to a young child that might as well be on another continent.  The feeling of panic that overwhelmed me was absolutely crushing;  my parents hadn't prepared me by informing me beforehand of their plans.  But to be fair to mom and dad, I guess they really can't be expected to have foreseen the severity of my reaction to their sudden absence;  after all, by the age of ten the average boy probably would have faced it in a more pedestrian manner.  So.  Well.  Except, I wasn't average -- at that stage in my life I was a sickly, delicate child (I remember my father's MD friend coming over to diagnose me and give me a shot -- yes, doctors still made house calls back in those days), less emotionally developed than my peers and highly dependent.  I felt scared, vulnerable and abandoned.  If someone could have seen my aura at the peak of my pediatric trauma they might have seen something like this:

You know -- emergency-red inside, all het up and hopped up, and not in a good way, and the world outside all jumbly unthinkable darkness;  but still all locked in and unable to act out because of all the, well, all the societal rules and boundaries -- appearance and propriety still mattered, especially when you're a child and a "good boy" in Asia.  Anyway, that's kind of how the inner me felt at the time.

But of course, over the years I managed to grow out of all that by and by.  Albeit not completely (perhaps you can see traces of it in this blog?);  I still feel moderate twinges of it and I just have to obey the sudden irrational impulses that are apt to overtake me at unpredictable moments every day.  I guess at those moments I might impress third party observers -- if any happened to be watching -- as "slightly eccentric" or something along those lines.

I suppose the above image could also serve as a visualization of mental illness in general;  the medical encyclopedia (the one with the forensic medicine section authored by my grandfather) wherein I found my symptoms described also stated that in extreme cases OCD can be virtually indistinguishable from schizophrenia.