I was thinking about the myfitnesspal app I use to track my calories. Some vlogger bragged that she didn’t obsess about it. She didn’t track diet soda or diet jello, for example, or pills.
“Good Lord, who WOULD,” I thought, and realized, thirteen-year-old me would, absolutely. Because there is safety in the rules. If you don’t follow the rules, you are cast out.
“What religion was I at thirteen,” I wondered, and then realized, it was the worst of all religions for rule-followers. Catholic. At thirteen I was on the cusp of Catholic and Southern Baptist.
If you know an obsessive who is in a rule-heavy religion, then know this thing I learned this week: there is a website called Scrupulosity that will help you with religious obsessions.
The site says it is multi-denominational. I suppose they might help Catholics with OCD who are trying to stop praying the rosary. Or maybe they might help Muslim thirteen-year-olds. Can you imagine being obsessed with the direction of Mecca at any given moment? (Google’s Qibla Finder will point you straight.)
2 responses to “TWIL: scrupulosity”
q: Worst for rule-followers because there are so many rules, or worst because there are different interpretations of rules such that OCD cannot be satisfied?
I am fairly nerdy and pedantic, but probably not OCD. (*definitely* not clinically OCD, but also even in the colloquial sense, there are things that bug me if they’re, say, sorted incorrectly or lined up a bit askew or if there’s one almost-but-not-matching button or whatever, but [aside from People Being Really Wrong on the internet] I have minimal compulsion to ‘fix’ them) Pedantic is sometimes enough to make you care wayyy more about the rules than normal people, though.
KC – You sound reasonable. I worry about people who fear God’s wrath if they momentarily forget how many Hail Marys they’ve said or rosary beads they counted, and then they start over, and then they get no sleep.