Embracing non-perforated toilet paper.

Much of my life has been a work in forcibly ridding me of compulsions, attempts to order my life, and needs that were never really needs to begin with, but which I felt were essential to my existence.

I've talked before about what a strange child I was. Here's another reason to add to the list. Not too terribly long ago, there was a long list of things that I thought I had to do just so, or.....I don't know what. The world would fall apart, maybe? But time after time of it not falling apart, I've begun to relax. Let me give you a few examples.

For a long time, every time I used the bathroom I HAD to use 8 sheets of toilet paper. Two-ply paper, that is. If it was one-ply, I would use 16, because mathematically it works out to be the same. The symmetry was perfect. Fold 8 in half and you get 4. Fold 4 in half and you get 2. Fold two in half and you get 1. Thus I would hold in my hand a perfect square, and for a brief moment all felt right in the world. It was also nice that this seemed to be just the right thickness for most occasions. But, gross as it might sound, its square perfection more than made up in my mind for the times when it wasn't quite enough. Thank the Lord for soap and water. Oh, and what did I do in public restrooms that just had a continuous roll with no perforations in the paper? I felt lost, that's what I did. How could I know if I was using just the right amount?

With my music, I had a system I would follow in listening to it. When I finally reached the age that I started building up a collection of my own CDs, I alphabetized them, like any good obsessive-compulsive, organized person would do. I used the artist as my alphabetical determinant, and went by first name rather than last. There are few people out there that I think about by last name. I identify people by first name, and their last name is almost always secondary, so it made no sense in my brain to organize them by their last name. So with individuals, I went with first name. Bands only have one name, so that's obvious. Then for CDs with an amalgamation of artists, I went by the first word in the CD title. After considering all of this criteria and getting them in order, then I started from the beginning and listened to them all in that order. I wouldn't skip out of line. Ever. Even when I got my first computer and started listening to everything on there, I still stuck to that order. There would be times in which I would feel like I was in the mood for something specific, but I if it wasn't next in line, oh well. It would have to wait. For another time and another situation. In which I wasn't in the mood for it anymore.

I instituted something similar for all of my books. I wanted to read all of them. But I needed some guidelines for doing so, otherwise I felt too crippled to even begin. Thus I put them all in a certain order, then wrote all of their titles on a separate index card. I then placed the index cards in the same order that I had determined for the books. The index cards were a back-up that I wanted to have in place just to make sure that I had the books in order and was keeping them that way. Since I didn't have them in strict alphabetical order, the constant pulling out of the shelf risked me mixing them up and not putting them back correctly. Thus I would read them in the order in which I had my index cards, and when I got to the end, I would start over again. Always reading, I was.

I was also a compulsive matcher. The only pains I ever took with my clothes were to make sure that my outfits matched. If my shirt was green, my shoes had to be green too. As well as any accessories I wore. I actually started accessorizing just so I could accentuate whatever color I was wearing. I soon realized that jewelry drove me crazy, but I continued to wear it for a time because I "had" to. On my bottom half, I mostly wore denim, because that was the one thing that would match with anything. Obviously, it's typical blueness didn't count as a color. Colored pants, I didn't know what to do with. Throw me a red pair of shorts and I would have been inclined to wear red on top. But if I couldn't find the right shade of red, it would have looked strange, meaning I would put have put the shorts away and never would have worn them. My wardrobe choices were severely limited under these guidelines.

Here's one thing that still gets me looking back on it now. A lot of the rituals I went through and orders I had set in place didn't necessarily take up a lot of extra time, so they were easy to maintain and didn't intrude on my everyday functioning like so many of my favorite fictional detective Adrian Monk. But this one did. Starting when I was about 12, I spelled things in my head and would divide the letters into all possible equally sized groups. For example, if there were 10 letters, I would separate them into groups of two letters each, then into groups of five letters each. The more factors a number had, the longer it took for me to make my way through all of the mental separating. If it was a prime number, then I would divide it in half as closely as I could, and move on feeling unsatisified. I never did like prime numbers. As you might imagine, this soon became burdensome. Try having a conversation while your brain is juggling letters and numbers because everything you say must be spelled out and separated. Focusing was a major challenge. It was after this that I started to realize that something had to change. But hey, at least I was a shoe-in for spelling bees and had mastered basic math.

But I couldn't change anything. So everything stayed the same for a while.

Examining myself now, I was likely trying to compensate for all of the chaos around me. For about as long as I can remember, my life has been pretty crazy. My physical surroundings were pretty stable until I was six years old, but there were other aspects of my life that were chaotic before then. Then when my family made our first major move, even my physical surroundings felt like they had collapsed, never to be completely put back together. And I longed for order. For definition. I wanted everything to be certain. I wanted to be able to look at everything and say, "This is the way its supposed to be done. These are the confines in which this is supposed to operate. This must go over here. This must be separate from that. These lines must be just so." Basically, this is what this means and this is the way it's gonna be! So little in my life was definite. So I took the small realm of things I had influence over and I laid down the law. That's probably also a motivation behind my being so self-controlled my whole life.

But like so many other things, once I finally came to know Christ for who he really is and was able to relax, my need for order started to diminish. I realized that I wouldn't make my life any happier or more fulfilling. I had been trying to create order for the better part of two decades and it was stifling. Nothing was ever quite good enough. Even my perfect toilet paper square.

So now I'm a lot messier than I used to be, and it doesn't send me into a tailspin of anxiety. I use however much toilet paper I happen to pull off the roll. (Although, I have to admit that I get a small thrill when it turns out to be 8 sheets and a feeling of rightness overtakes me.) And if it's not perforated, that's fine too. I no longer feel like a child wandering alone in a dark forest. I listen to and read whatever I want whenever I want without fear of messing up a system. So if I'm in the mood to listen to my Centricity playlist and then read Harry Potter, I can do that without feeling guilty. I'm slowly overcoming the matching monster. I dare to wear colors now that coordinate and aren't all just varying shades of the same thing. (However, when I see something that's all the same color, whether it be anything from a person's outfit to a painted canvas, a peaceful feeling comes over me and I want to stare at it a little longer.) And I no longer spell and count everything in my head. I'll probably never quit doing it completely (especially the spelling - that's just second nature), but at least I can move on with my life if I read a sign and don't stop to divide the twelve letters into twos, threes, fours and sixes.

I am a much happier and more relaxed person now that I'm not bound to obsessing about things like not stepping on the cracks in sidewalks (which is something else I once did). Life is more beautiful without so much rigidity and all of the disarray now looks more like adventure than like catastrophe.