i am neurotic.

When eating chips, I cannot stick my hand in the bag. I just can’t. This, of course, means pouring the bag out, or tearing it open, even if this is at a great inconvenience to me (for example, while walking down the street).

I have to clean my table after I eat at a restaurant or other place. I realize they have people who are paid to clean up after me there, but I still can’t walk away from a messy table. It might also be that I feel bad for the table itself because nobody will want to sit there after me if it’s still dirty. So I clean it up so he can be the best table that everyone wants to sit at.

I’m very much a neat freak, to the point that I would clean other people’s messes. I would walk into a friend dorm room for example and start tidying up, sometimes I would beg my friends to clean their rooms for them. Most complied, though some did take convincing. I thought it was a win-win situation, they got a clean room, and I had peace of mind knowing it’s not messy anymore.

Whenever I do washing, when its finished and I have taken out all the wet clothes I have to spin the inside of the machine to make sure I haven’t left a sock or something even after I’ve stuck my head in there to check. Then when I’m putting the washing onto the airer [dryer], I have to sort out all the wet clothes into piles, my husbands socks, my socks, his pants, my pants, tshirts, pjs and trousers, then I have to put them all on in that order. Because of this my husband never does the washing!

When i am writing my notes in my notebook, I do my best not to have erasures and little dots and lines or anything dirty on the page, cause if the paper has dirt on them, I’d do the whole page again! So my classmates tease me by writing random things on my notebook, so I would rewrite everything again!

I can’t clean my apartment unless it is in a certain process where I start from where you walk in and what you see first and go through each room heading to clean towards the right side first. And if I can’t complete a cleaning task then anything that is beyond that area won’t get cleaned.

I’m extremely sensitive to stray hairs on my skin and clothing and spend about a quarter of my unoccupied time picking them off my shirts/brushing them off my neck/arms.

Ever since I started school at 5 years old I have had an obsession with the teacher erasing the chalk board entirely. Most would rub the eraser around but leave stray lines and continue writing. I would stare at the stray lines and it would drive me crazy the remainder of the class. I would get hot and get headaches. I am 22 years old and in college and nothing has changed.

I absolutely cannot stand doing the dishes without wearing rubber gloves. I will refuse. I can wipe a dish clean with a paper towel and water using only my hands but I can’t touch a sponge or dirty dishes without my gloves on. I just get really grossed out by the texture and moisture of the sponge, the thought of all of the bacteria and then the remnants of food soaked in water. It grosses me out.