This afternoon I met my roommates (my parents), my aunt, and a family friend at a cafeteria for lunch—like a buffet line, green Jell-O, all-you-can-eat-dessert-section cafeteria. Personally, I think places like this are heaven, but not when you’re on a diet. Somehow I was able to stick to salad and baked chicken, but kept drooling over the tacos, macaroni and cheese, and soft-serve ice cream. It felt like having a spectator pass at an orgy. Like, I wasn’t completely satisfied.

After lunch, I’d intended to go to my office (the public library), but realized that I’d left my laptop at home. Well, when you’re retired (unemployed), you don’t have anything else to do, so I drove home, got my laptop, then drove all the way back to the library.

Recently I discovered how to sync my laptop files to an online account. I realize I’m a little late to that party, but I can’t tell you how good it feels to have everything backed up, especially considering the fact that I lost all the files from my other computer. It feels good to know that something is secure. So today I copied the files from my recent CT scan to my online account, and I kept looking at the file structure, satisfied that everything was both “safe” and “right where it belonged.”

Even now, I keep going back and looking at the files. Yep, they’re still there—organized—exactly where I left them.

It just makes my little heart sing.

A couple of weeks ago I took a metal shelf from my parents’ garage, cleaned it off, and put my collection of Broadway show magnets on it. The project took about an hour because I arranged the magnets first by the city in which I saw the shows and second in the order I saw them. I realize NO ONE ELSE GIVES A SHIT or would even notice, but every time I look at it, it makes me happy and reminds me of a line from a poem I memorized in high school: “God’s in his heaven, all’s right with the world.”

I think my therapist has only used the term Obsessive Compulsive Disorder with me a couple of times in three years, and I think she said, “A little OCD” or “A touch of OCD.” (You think?) But it’s definitely a label that comes to my mind whenever I’m arranging my computer files or magnet collection. Hell, I should probably put it on my business cards:

Marcus Coker, OCD
(Let’s alphabetize!)

My psychologist friend Craig told me the story of a lady he knew who HAD to wash her dishes five times by hand before they could go in the dishwasher. She was afraid her family would get sick from germs. No one ever got sick, so that reinforced her habit. He also told me about a woman who could never see her son because she obsessively thought about killing him. (Whoa.) So Craig said OCD can get really bad; it can seriously alter your life.

Once I read a slightly angry blog that said people like the dish-washing lady and the might-kill-her-own-son lady who have clinically-diagnosed OCD don’t particularly appreciate people like me using the term. Like, YOU don’t have real OCD, I do. You’re just tidy.

I mean, I can appreciate that. And I am tidy. But I guess OCD is a bit like a scale, and Craig says that a little OCD can be functional, so I’m not quite ready to give up the label.

This evening I went for a two-hour walk. I ended up on Mount Vista, an area of town that was hit by a tornado in 1996. It’s really weird walking in that part of town because I used to ride my bike there, and I have all these memories of the houses and landmarks I’ve seen hundreds of times. Well, there’s this one house on my Mount Vista route that stands out because my sister and I volunteered to clean there after the tornado. And I really don’t remember much about it, but I do recall standing in the kitchen in a puddle of water and going through a cabinet, and there were dozens and DOZENS of Cool Whip containers stacked neatly inside each other, right where they belonged, tidy except for the fact that the house around them was completely ruined.

I’ve thought about those Cool Whip containers a lot over the years. My guess is that the person they belonged to was a little OCD like I am. And I think it’s interesting how we can hang on and put everything safely in its place, and then at some point, we’re forced to let go. A tornado comes into your life, and everything is out of place, and safe no longer exists, if it ever did.

Even though I recently voluntarily let go of a LOT of stuff, I still fight the tendency to start hanging on again, whether it’s with computer files, magnets, whatever. To be clear, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with collecting, and I certainly don’t think there’s anything wrong with putting everything in its place, right where it belongs. I imagine I’ll always be tidy. But whenever I start hanging on and organizing, there’s part of me that feels like I’m reaching for control, as if I’ll somehow be able to avoid a disaster if everything is—in order.

But life doesn’t work that way. Sometimes it’s chaotic and sometimes it’s messy. So going forward, I don’t want to kid myself into believing that having everything just so makes me safe and secure. It doesn’t. Everything, after all, passes way, and it’s not like anything temporary completely satisfies. And that’s more than okay. I don’t need all my things lined up in order for my heart to sing. The heart sings for its own reasons—it doesn’t need a thing.