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 back then was several hours' ride away by train -- and of course, to a young child that might as well be on the other side of the world.  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 from my life;  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 very 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 do as a visualization of mental illness in general;  the family medical encyclopedia wherein I first found my symptoms described also stated that in extreme cases OCD can be virtually indistinguishable from schizophrenia.