OPINION - So you’re a ‘little bit OCD’? For some of us, it’s a little bit more than a personality type

I’ve been guilty of it myself. Admiring a stranger’s colour coded closet, entering a well-made bedroom, perusing an alphabetised bookshelf categorised entirely by genre. Attributing all these things to the curator’s tendency towards “OCD”. I have uttered as much, even as I privately run through a mental checklist of my own paranoias. “A touch of the old obsessive compulsive disorder?” I‘ve remarked, when stumbling across a precisely labelled Tupperware collection housing a vast segregation of dried pasta shapes. This provocation occurred in the kitchen of a friend’s apartment, shortly before she launched into a story about a mundane encounter with her sick nephew. This is the last thing I really remember hearing, because at this point in the story my mind began to spiral uncontrollably.