OCTOBER 28, 2025 – Thankfully, I’m not an alcoholic, but I’ve known people who are, and from what little I’ve learned about their struggles, I’ve heard it said that “once an alcoholic, always an alcoholic”; that at every AA meeting, participants in recovery announce themselves by name, followed by the phrase, “and I’m an alcoholic.”
I’m not aware of HA meetings, but I suspect that recovering hoarders would do the same, as in “I’m [Joe Doakes] . . . and I’m a hoarder.” Or at the more comprehensive OCDA meetings, “I’m [Jane Roe] . . . and I’m OCD.”
Before I go any further, I should distinguish between alcoholism and hoarding, on the one hand, which reasonable people can (or should) agree are negative forms of addiction, and on the other hand, additional forms of OCD behavior, many of which can produce admirable results, albeit often at a steep cost. Here I’m thinking of the fine line between “OCD” behaviors and discipline. Is the über-dedicated high school varsity basketball team member who gets out of bed at 6:00 every school day to throw 150 free throws before breakfast at 7:00 (and classes thereafter) exhibiting an obsessive-compulsive disorder or simply extraordinary discipline? Ditto the Olympic skater and triple axels, the conservatory-bound violinist and scales, the astronomer and a search for detectable exoplanets outside the Milky Way.
I like to think that to the extent I’ve gone full bore on things that matter—working on all-consuming legal matters, preparing for the bar exam, training for the marathons I ran, and practicing for all those winter house concerts from 2010 through 2019—I’ve demonstrated discipline, not (simply) OCD behavior. But I’m hardly alone in this respect. Anyone reading this post who has achieved one thing or another in life has done so via a form of personal sweat equity along the fuzzy boundary between self-discipline and clinically detectable OCD behavior.
But how many of you, my fair readers, live and work under the curse of inherited or acquired “OCD”? Don’t be bashful, now . . . I need the company. And in my case, I’m sure I have both forms of the disorder—inherited and acquired. Anyone who’s read about the industrial gauge hoarders on my mother’s side (in my 2023 blog series, Inheritance), knows that that form of OCD runs in the family. If you’ve read about my father’s perfectionism—a trait shared by other members of the family—you might well recognize that as a form of OCD, as well, though I’m sure those most affected by it wouldn’t see it that way, but rather, as having “high standards”—just as the varsity basketball star, the Olympic skater, the professional violinist, the astronomer specializing in exoplanets have high standards. But if my own proclivity for OCD-like behavior isn’t attributable to some genetic trait, one could argue that my OCD tendencies are acquired. I mean, given the extreme hoarding and extreme perfectionism that surrounded me during my most impressionable years, how could I have avoided influence by simple osmosis?
A couple of weeks ago I experienced an acute case of OCD. The instance revolved around a single cracker from a Target brand box of “Everything Flavor” crackers. I’d just embarked on my daily noon-time walk over to Little Switzerland. My stomach was growling, and to suppress the hunger pangs that might arise during my outing, I grabbed a handful of “Everything Flavor” crackers from the box.
I’d consumed four or five of the crackers by the time I rounded the front corner of our house. With two crackers to go, I stepped onto the public sidewalk and popped one cracker into my mouth. As I did so, I inadvertently dropped the other one.
Uh-oh, I thought. This creates an OCD dilemma. Which of two OCD-based impulses should be allowed to prevail: the one that says, “Don’t eat something that’s been on the public sidewalk (for crying out loud!)” or “Don’t let a cracker go to waste”?” The fact that I would agonize for more than a nano-second over this dilemma was strong evidence that yes, I’ve got a case of OCD. Happily, it took no more than five seconds more for me to decide I should leave the cracker where it fell. But for the next five minutes, I pondered the self-acknowledgment that only a person with OCD would spend five minutes dwelling on why it had taken all of five seconds to decide between the two possible responses to having dropped a cracker on the sidewalk.
Then came yesterday’s walk up and down the hill climbs inside Little Switzerland. On the eastern slope of St. Moritz, I espied a . . . not one, not two, but three golf balls.
***
Over the years my hoarding instinct had resulted in the retrieval of several hundred golf balls, mostly on the front and back sides of St. Moritz but elsewhere in Little Switzerland, as well. At least three years ago I gave most of them to Byron, the golfer in the family, and kicked the habit of replacing them. I was proud of myself for having escaped the clutches of the hoarding subset of OCD behavior.
Yet I wasn’t done with OCD, or rather, it wasn’t done with me. Soon after handing off a gazillion golf balls to Byron, as I hiked up the side of St. Moritz, I saw a fresh new golf ball—a high-end Titlest, no less. Impulsively, I stooped to pick up the trophy ball . . . but as I lifted it off the grass, I realized instantly my error . . . er, compulsion. Instead of dropping the ball, as it were, I held it tight and continued my ascent to the summit. There I stepped back across the tee box to allow for a running start to what I was determined to be a running start to a ceremonious fast-ball throw of the golf ball—symbol of OCD—into oblivion. Except . . .
As I watched the ball sail through the air, I rated the throw “lame.” A re-do was in order, so no . . . if I’d conquered my hoarding of golf balls, I hadn’t defeated OCD, or at least until I tired of “re-dos” and returned home.
***
Now fast forward to Monday when I encountered (and pocketed) the three golf balls arranged in such a fashion as to suggest a crude model of a planetary system of white orbs, each covered with perfectly spaced, perfectly uniform miniature craters.
Too bad Byron had left for Connecticut the night before. But that’s okay. In less than a month we’ll be visiting his family for Thanksgiving. On that occasion I can hand off three more golf balls to his collection. Or maybe not. When I asked him last weekend if he’d been playing much golf lately, he laughed. “I just don’t have the time,” he said. “I played in a charity tournament last summer, and that’s about it since last year.”
If I’m a short way from hoarding more golf balls, he’s a long way from an obsession with hitting them.
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© 2025 by Eric Nilsson
