I have OCD. I'm not proud of it, but I understand it.
When I look back honestly — which I do often — most of it traces back to insecurity. The compulsive double-checking, the obsessive little rituals: did I lock the door, did I leave the stove on, are my keys still in my pocket? That's not diligence. That's fear wearing the costume of diligence.
Here's the uncomfortable truth I had to sit with: the intensity of what you protect reveals the limits of what you believe you can create. When you're terrified of losing a set of keys, it's rarely about the keys. It's about a quiet, unspoken conviction that you couldn't replace them — that luck visited once and won't come back. OCD is, at its core, a poverty of confidence disguised as a surplus of caution.
I grew up learning to be frugal. Careful. Don't waste, don't lose, don't slip. Useful lessons, up to a point. But past that point, frugality of spirit becomes its own trap. You start guarding small things because small things are all you're certain you can hold.
The antidote comes from two directions at once.
The first is confidence — genuine, earned confidence that you can make things happen again. Lose the phone. Buy a new one. Miss the flight. Book another. The stove is a real fire hazard, fair enough, but the keys? The door? Let it go. Train yourself — or your kids, if you have them — to absorb small losses without catastrophizing. Teach them to handle embarrassment early. Show them what it looks like to fail gracefully and rebuild without drama. That's the real inheritance worth leaving.
The second direction is simpler, and I stumbled into it accidentally: fill your life with things that actually matter. When I have a high-stakes meeting coming up, a real problem worth solving, a decision with actual weight — I don't check my pockets three times before standing up from a chair. My mind, whatever its neuroses, still knows the hierarchy. It gravitates toward what's important when something important is actually there.
The tragedy of OCD isn't the checking itself. It's what the checking reveals: that nothing more urgent has claimed your attention. That the stove and the lock and the keys sit at the top of your anxiety because the top of your life hasn't been filled with anything bigger yet.
The cure, then, is partly therapeutic and partly aspirational. Build confidence from the inside. And from the outside — build a life worth being distracted by.