As far as I'm concerned, I'm perfectly normal. Well, for the most part.

I have this thing where if I touch something with one limb, I have to touch it again with the other limb. For example, if my right forearm accidentally touches the footboard of my bed, I have to touch that same part of the bed with my left forearm. It needs to be in the same spot, and I need to touch it with the same pressure that I pressed with my right arm. If I press too hard, I have to press the same spot with my right arm again and if I press the wrong spot on my left arm, then I need to press on the new spot with my right arm. Basically, I have to keep touching until I feel physically balanced.

And if I try to ignore that urge? Well, it's not fun. I get a feeling that I used to get when I was a child, when my mom would braid my hair and I would freak out from sitting still for too long. It's like having an itch somewhere between your bones and your skin and trying to scratch it with your brain. It's as weird as it sounds and wildly uncomfortable.

Now, it's not debilitating nor is it usually very noticeable. I can generally resist the urge to do whatever weird thing my body is trying to force me to do, and life carries on all the same.

My perspective on these little tics changed when I saw this video here. It details the daily life of a woman (who goes by the name Kat) living with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD). She talks about everything from her daily rituals to her avoidance of certain things and finally ends with intrusive thoughts.

Initially, I'd only watched the video because mental illness is a topic that interests me and one that I strongly believe is worth being educated about. This wasn't the first time I'd learned about OCD. I'd aced my psychology class in high school and knew that OCD was more than just obsessively washing your hands (though that is a ritual that some have). It's complex, and it can be debilitating for many. Luckily, it wasn't something I had to deal with.

So when I watched this video (made by someone who actually has OCD), I was a bit startled by the things that I had in common with Kat.

I didn't realize that other people had the same little issue that I have about touching things until you feel "balanced." More confounding, I didn't realize that I shared that issue with people who were considered to have a disorder.

Did that mean I had OCD?

No, I didn't have any sort of ritual that I had to perform lest I fall into a fit of panic.

I don't need to quadruple-check a door to make sure it's locked when I know that it is definitely locked.

I do have to ration everything I eat so that one part of a meal that I'm eating is proportionate to all of the other parts of my meal, but a ton of people do that, don't they?

No, I definitely don't have OCD. I'm completely in control of my actions.

But then I found out that OCD is also in the mind. Kat spoke of this idea known as "intrusive thoughts" and how they existed in the mind of a person with OCD. They're pervasive, and can take up residence in the brain without any sort of provocation. For Kat, she'd feel this urge to drive into the rails or jump of a bridge or to do a number of other awful things.

Immediately, I thought of the crippling fear I've developed over standing on balconies or near railings or any other structure that prevents you from falling to a lower floor. It's not necessarily a fear of falling, but a fear of forcing myself to fall; of leaning over the edge just enough that my body weight sends me plummeting down. It's a pressing voice that's telling me to hurt myself not for emotional release, but because it physically feels right. It's dizzying and I have to keep myself at least a few feet away from the railing to keep the urge at bay. If I'm lucky, there's another railing nearby that I can clutch onto to balance and ground myself.

I can even remember having these thoughts as a child (it should be noted that OCD is common in children). My dad had a work truck and there was an occasion where I'd climbed on to the back of the cab. I'd gripped a small ledge to keep my balance. From then on I had this image of myself trying to hold onto the ledge while wearing mittens. I knew that my hands would slip and I would fall head first into the pavement of the driveway. Instead, I would sometimes walk along the cement blocks that lined the rock bed next to our driveway in order to balance myself out. I'm pretty sure I had this issue for years.

Now, these thoughts aren't necessarily scary because of the images I had of myself getting hurt. It was because I had that itch again. It's like the whole touching issue I described earlier, but instead of touching my forearm to scratch the itch, I had to fall over a railing or off the back of a truck.

To clarify, I'm not suicidal. Nor have I ever been. But the thoughts don't go away.

I'd never thought of these things as being problematic or that strange, but according to professionals with a lot of knowledge and experience, my tics were symptoms of a much larger issue.

I began to panic, then quickly dismissed the idea of my having a mental illness. I'd never had one before and I didn't see how I could get one at this stage of my life. I'd never experienced depression and my anxieties came from tangible sources. I was fine.

I'm still fine, if we're being honest. One of the biggest indicators of whether or not one has a serious mental illness (as I have been taught) is whether or not the issue is severe enough to impact your everyday life. Does it cause you to harm yourself? Does it cause you to harm others? Does it make you feel out of control?

My answer to all of these was a calm "no." I still give into the touching urge, but it's usually rather easy and unnoticeable to assuage (unless I'm in a movie theater, where I will probably do this weird flexing thing with my shoulder blades for half of the movie and convince everyone around me that I'm doing a bizarre chair dance). I subconsciously trained myself years ago to keep the strange things private and, so far, those intrusive thoughts have been fairly manageable.

It's strange to think of myself as being someone that a psychologist would look at and study. I'm really quite normal. I mean, yes, I have some aspects to who I am that I can't explain, but doesn't everybody? Does being different in certain ways suddenly make you ill?

So, I've built up this elaborate account of discovering that I have a mental illness just to say that I don't actually have an illness? Yes. And no. For all intents and purposes, there's a strong chance that I have mild OCD (according to the OCD tests I took online that I wouldn't suggest completely relying on). However, suddenly acknowledging those traits that I've had all along are different isn't going to change me. It's just going to make me aware that if these things grow, it might be something more serious than a couple of tics.

Perhaps the biggest thing I've learned is that the OCD I learned about in textbooks isn't the OCD I saw in myself. When you hear about OCD, you usually conjure an image of some freak who locks and unlocks a door 15 times or who washes their hands 20 times in one day. Just like with many other illnesses, we think of people with OCD as being caricatures of themselves.

Except, they're still people. Those compulsive behaviors aren't because they're just quirky or weird, but are their attempts at correcting something that for some reason is wrong. And I don't think that struggle is talked about often enough.

The glimpse into OCD that I have had has allowed me—someone who has never had much experience with mental illness at all—to change my perspective on people who have some sort of mental health disorder. It's not a consensual existence between the illness and the person who has it. Their ability to combat it is not indicative of their intelligence or their strength of character.

No, I'm not claiming to have a thorough understanding of OCD and people with OCD just because of recent personal discoveries that really aren't that big of a deal. I'd just encourage the people who only know the textbook version of an illness (like myself) to not try to put it in a box. Humans are different, and thus the illness will look different from person to person. Trying to pinpoint a specific image of an illness causes so many cases to not be diagnosed, which is honestly quite tragic.

I've learned that one of the best qualities I can have as someone who wants to learn about mental illness is knowing that until I have that illness, I cannot possibly understand what it feels like. Try as I might, mental illness is something I can accurately imagine and think my way through, despite how smart I think I am.

But I can offer acceptance and a willingness to be there for that person regardless of how much I "understand" them. There's a reason that nurses don't assume how much pain you're in when giving you medicine. Every person is different. Shouldn't that apply to those with mental illness as well?