So I’ve waited a while to post this NBCnews.com article I was interviewed for, and I’ll tell you why: I have OCD. Hold on, you already knew that. I have OCD, and I’m a proofreader, and there are mistakes in my section of the article! I haven’t been able to let it go. I can’t tell you how many times I returned to it in the first several weeks after it was published, hoping the errors had been fixed. It was almost becoming another obsession. I’m not 36 (I’m 35) and I babysat (not babysit) all through college–but I digress.
I’m glad I was able to share a bit of my story with a fairly broad base of readers, especially since I ended up so comfortable with the woman who interviewed me that I spilled the “secret” that one of my worst obsessions was that I’d inappropriately touch a child. More people need to know that that’s a symptom of OCD; I can’t even describe the toll those obsessions took on me until I knew I had a treatable disorder.
As embarrassing as it can be to talk about these things, spreading awareness wins out for me. And not to be selfish or anything, but talking about it and writing about it is like ERP for me, too.
Alison Dotson 
Thank you for the link to the article. And I have to say that, even though you mentioned the errors here and I knew about them. I read right over ’em! Didn’t even register! Our minds are amazing… 🙂
I know! I know it’s true that most people don’t notice them, and it’s probably worse to point them out–they’ve just been driving me crazy! I worry that people will think I said the wrong thing and that it isn’t a typo. Then I just have to sing, “Let it go, let it go!”
Great article, Alison! Congrats! I think I’d be bothered by mistakes about myself in an article (and I don’t have OCD), but my guess is they wouldn’t bother anyone else!