Reputedly, if you tie a knot around your finger, you’ll remember things. Reputedly. I don’t know the veracity of such a thing as I’ve never tried it; I think it would freak my brain out to have something on my hands that wasn’t a ring. Not that I’m wearing any rings right now ’cause my fingers are still a bit swollen postpartum, but anyways.

You see, my brain keeps telling me that I’m forgetting to do something. Like, every day, all day. I know that I’m not though! The house is mainly clean, kids are fed, I’m not flashing the neighbors, and I’m doing all my daily/weekly writing tasks with no issues. But the brain insists I’m forgetting something, and as a result I have some pretty high anxiety. Which in turn feeds OCD rituals. At least the newest one is not particularly harmful — my brain keeps insisting that my hands and face are dry, which means I’m applying lotion to both anywhere from half a dozen to several dozen times a day. Hooray for overmoisturised skin? If anything, I’m sort of chuckling at myself and wondering if I need to go watch Silence of the Lambs. You know, ’cause it rubs the lotion on the skin…

Salvation in a container (I prefer the tubs!).

Still, it’s sort of annoying because it takes up a bit of time. The other main OCD thing that bipolar has ever-so-kindly granted me is compulsive skin-picking to cope with/bring relief against anxiety. While it’s not ideal, it doesn’t take up a lot of time, and using Carmex helps me minimize the actual damage (being mentholated, it gives me chunks to peel off that aren’t ‘live’). And while sure, it would be ideal to not need to injure my face to exact relief… it brings relief and that immediately makes it tolerable-to-okay. The relief lotioning brings is much more short-term, and requires parts of me to be damp, and I’m such a cat-at-heart that I dislike being damp, and and and.

There’s also the vast annoyance that once an OCD ritual establishes itself, it doesn’t seem to go away. Could manage to be all sorts of relaxed and having a great time, but that ritual is stuck with you. I know, you can supposedly get rid of them with therapy, but yanno, therapy doesn’t work for everyone (or we can’t get on the waiting list, or we can’t afford to go private, or any number of other things). And really, there seems to be no rhyme or reason about what becomes a ritual either, heh. It just happens, and keeps happening forever (or close enough to).

Of course, with anxiety repeatedly spiking because my brain thinks I’ve forgotten something, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that the lotion thing has established itself so fully. Hopefully this sensation is going to pass as we continue to settle into this new house of ours, and that it’s just a leftover from having to double down and work really hard to get packed up. We’ll see. Until then, I guess I should be grateful for such hydrated skin.

<3