The OCD That Everyone Mistook for Being Thorough

In Tel Aviv, where I worked in software engineering, the traits that were making my daily life significantly harder than it needed to be were also the traits my colleagues and managers most frequently praised. I was thorough. I was reliable. I never shipped code without testing it comprehensively.

I maintained documentation that was more detailed than anything my team had previously had. My desk was organised in a way that some colleagues photographed as aspirational. None of them knew that the thoroughness was not chosen.

It was compelled - a series of mental rituals and physical routines that I could not skip without an anxiety so acute it was difficult to function through. The checking was not about professional standards.

It was about a brain that could not move forward until certain conditions had been met and verified and reverified, and that had found, in a technical professional environment, a context where the compulsion could be expressed in a way that was socially indistinguishable from excellence.

I had no diagnosis and no framework for what I was experiencing until I was 27 and a close friend mentioned, casually, that she had been reading about OCD and that what she described sounded significantly like my daily life.

I was resistant to the label in the way of someone who has associated a condition with its most dramatic cultural representation and cannot find themselves in it. OCD, as I understood it, was hand-washing and light-switching - not the elaborate internal checking routines and the need for symmetry and completion that structured my days.

My psychiatrist explained that what I had was a form of OCD that had found expression in perfectionism and thoroughness rather than in the more visually recognisable rituals, and that its severity was not reduced by being socially acceptable.

Treatment was medication and a specific form of therapy called Exposure and Response Prevention, which works by deliberately inducing the anxiety and then preventing the compulsive response - an experience that was, in the early stages, among the harder things I have voluntarily done. The results were significant.

I still work carefully and I still maintain high standards in my work. The difference is that the careful work now comes from choice rather than compulsion, and I can leave a task in a state of good enough without a wave of anxiety that follows me home.

The six hours a day that the rituals had been consuming became, over about eight months of treatment, available for the rest of my life.