When I was a sophomore in high school, I began having to organize all the rugs in my room before I could play video games. It was annoying but necessary. If I didn't fix the rugs, I couldn't focus, eat, sleep, or do anything until I did. As I began to slip further from the reality that rugs don't have to be perfectly straight, soon I had to also wash my hands after I touched anything, turn on and off lights three times when entering rooms, or close and open doors five times when trying to shut them.

I say all this because that's a small example of what Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) actually is. It's not having a clean desk or preferring all the tiles on the McDonalds floor to face one way. The OCD test on your Facebook timeline isn't actually OCD, it's perfectionism. I tell my friends the story of my sophomore year in high school and they laugh and say, "Wow! Your OCD is even worse than mine!" Yeah, it is. Maybe that's because I actually have it and you just like things being organized. You're just a perfectionist.

See the difference is simple: when I don't have things organized I can't live my life or focus and I get physically sick. For you, it's just inconvenient. I had to wake up an hour early every morning for school my sophomore year so I could complete all my ritualistic routines. This is the life of so many individuals across the globe who are about damn tired of you saying you have OCD. You don't. Stop saying you do.

Sure, humans like a little organization in their life, OCD or not. Nothing is more satisfying than cleaning your house, organizing your desk, or tossing a bunch of stuff you've managed to horde for the past five years. What that doesn't mean, however, is that you're OCD. In fact, only 2.3 percent of American adults have OCD over the course of their lifetime according to the National Comorbidity Survey - Replication and is one of the most recent, long-term studies researching prevalence of mental disorders. So, in short, if you lined up 100 people a whopping grand total of 2.3 of them would have OCD. Not all of you.

Here's the real issue: we as a society focus so much on fighting mental health disorders and the stigmas associated with them. Yet, for some reason, we think OCD is a joke, something we all have. That's simply not fair for the 2.3 percent of Americans who are actually diagnosed with this disorder. We as a society need to take OCD as seriously as we take every other mental disorder, or we can't honestly say we're fighting for the betterment of individuals with mental disorders.