Fear of Forgetting and Compulsive Note Taking
Tags: New Years Resolution, Obsessions, Notetaking, Mental Health, Ocd

With time, my broader anxiety did not change. If anything, it increased. I had all my original reasons to be anxious plus the new anxiety-inducing time-suck of sifting through my notes. Structure is good, but my notes that I was taking to reduce my anxiety weren’t written in a way that made sense organizationally. My internal monologue, my grocery list, my todo list list, my hopes, my dreams, my fears and my anxieties were all lumped together in notebooks full of notes. I couldn’t throw away the notes because there was a non-zero chance that there was something important therein. Also, I couldn’t process the notes because if I wanted to address stuff for work, I had to search for it and in the process of finding it (which was inefficient) I was inundated by triggers.

From there it only got worse. More triggers. More thoughts. More anxiety. More notes. Less control. I was at a low point in my life. It sounds unbelievable looking back, but at the time I wasn’t 100% sure that what I was struggling with was OCD. I wanted to believe that everything about me was normal. I didn’t want to admit that I had this weakness. I did my best to hide it from those around me. Whenever someone found one of my notebooks or saw me taking notes I was embarrassed.

OCD is not when you like to run a tight ship. It’s not when you like to have a tidy closet. OCD is when you have thoughts so intrusive that you are overwhelmed with anxiety that you seek immediate relief from through these compulsions, whether it be hand washing, checking, counting, writing, or anything.

The turning point in my life came when I started to read about my behaviors online. At the time there wasn’t really anything online about obsessive-compulsive note taking. I found the occasional article about hypergraphia and articles about certain Silicon Valley elites proclaiming it as a super power. At the end of 2017, I eventually came to believe that it was OCD. I read some online and tracked down a book by Dr. Jonathan Grayson. I immediately downloaded it to my phone and started to read it. It was a slog, and not because the book was poorly written or dense, but because every other paragraph triggered me. I persevered. I learned that OCD is not what society tells us it is.

OCD is not when you like to run a tight ship. It’s not when you like to have a tidy closet. OCD is when you have thoughts so intrusive that you are overwhelmed with anxiety that you seek immediate relief from through these compulsions, whether it be hand washing, checking, counting, writing, or anything. With time this neural loop becomes reinforced. And, as I learned, it has the capacity to spread. There comes a point where it gets so bad that the thoughts and behaviors will jump from fear of forgetting and note taking (in my case) to any and all of the other forms of OCD.

I powered through the book, one page at a time. With every page I became more educated about what I was dealing with. With every page, I pushed off finding outside help. The book ends with worksheets. I tried my best on my own to tackle this challenge. It was a valiant effort, but the place I struggled was in the accountability department. I also struggled in trying to tackle the most challenging aspects of my OCD. Eventually, after some tears I reached out to a local care provider. I didn’t know exactly what I was looking for, but I wanted a specific person (not a facility that rotates you through counselors) and I wanted someone who wasn’t just knowledgeable about OCD, but an expert. I found someone.