There’s this guy at work that turns the lights on-off-on-off-on-off-on every time he enters a dark room. So we make fun of him because it’s weird. He insists it’s his only OCD habit, but that’s one too many for a bunch of insensitive pricks like us.

This afternoon I was doing a quick site survey in a building I’d never been in before, when I suddenly became all too aware of one of my own little OCD quirks. It has to do with stairs. When I climb a flight of stairs, I have to take the last step with my right foot. I realized it today because, like most people, I don’t often find myself on unfamiliar staircases. We’ve got elevators and escalators now, and we typically use them when they’re handy. So today when I took that last step with my left foot and it just felt wrong, I instantly started feeling bad about the way I’d treated Mr. Lightswitch for his little idiosyncracy.

Because mine is worse.

See, the more I think about it, the more I realize that my stair thing is actually a bunch of odd mannerisms rolled into one. First of all, in order to deal with the stair thing, I make an effort to learn how many stairs are on each flight, or at least whether it’s an even or odd number, so I know which foot to start with. And I gotta tell ya, odd-numbered stairs feel the bestest because I can start AND finish on my right foot. Yum, right?

This is also how I know that both of the houses I grew up in have 13 steps between the first and second floor. 13 to the basement. 27 from street to platform at both of my old DC Metro stops. Two sets of seven per floor in the stairwells at work. My apartment building is trickier, with two flights between each floor, one with eight steps and one with seven. So I can start the first flight with my left and the second with my right OR start with my right, plant my left on the first landing, then swing the right around to the first step in the next flight, effectively making it one big flight of stairs. This might be why I chose an apartment on the first floor. Subconsciously, my mind is sick of dealing with this crazy shit.

So Mr. Lightswitch’s OCD thing is relatively minor but impossible to hide. Mine is a complete mindfuck but also invisible to anyone but me. This is why they say it’s always the quiet ones you have to watch, because we’re the ones with all the invisible freakiness going on in our heads until it gets to be too much, then we snap and kill 37 people with a nail gun.

I just hope the actual Stairway to Heaven has a landing every dozen steps or so, or else I’m completely fucked.

Tags: ocd, obsessive compulsive disorder, stairs