Neurodivergence and the "Clean" Dream

Obsessive Cleaning Disorder LLC was started by a 10-year software developer looking for a better life than what corporate America offered. Her dream was to utilize her ADHD strengths - which despite popular belief, is an intense and incredibly focused attention span - rather than fighting against the weaknesses that the disability can also lend itself toward within the tech world. Furthermore, with the relationships we build with our clients, our service and and our media channels, we fully intend to discuss the harm that can happen when naming your business after debilitating medical disorders. We'll take "things that tend to happen when casting harmful labels disguised as jokes," Alex. In our case, however, our name is not a joke but fully intentional, purposeful, and meaningful.

Yes, our business name acronym is OCD (we wanted "hyper-focused cleaning disorder" or HCD, it just felt a bit awkward and "obsessive" was the next-most accurate word). But our origin story is rooted in ADHD traits for which obsession over details is entirely true. Consider this hyper-fixation a gift that ADHD offers, giving us impressive cleaning success, but which is diagnosed as problematic otherwise.

While the ADHD brain is known for its lack of ability to pay attention, that couldn't be further from the truth. The reason Obsessive Cleaning Disorder has more than 100 reviews that are 5-stars on the hiring platform TaskRabbit, and nothing less than a 4-star at the time of writing, is thanks to this business owner's ability to focus at an unmatchable level (...when cleaning, and at no other time). ADHD is a struggle with regulating where attention goes. But once it does, you can forget about any expectations you had for the near future as the ADHD brain will not be checking her cell phone, eating, or taking a large breath until the project is perfect, and she won't have awareness that she should be. All of her cleaning jobs in their entirety are performed in a single stream of consciousness, even across 10+ hours. Luckily, this fixation for cleaning is one of the healthier vices we could have been stuck with.

While we bask in our own cleaning bliss, it's important for us to clarify misconceptions around neurodevelopmental disorders that are guaranteed to persist thanks to silly business names like ours.

The truth is, the medical diagnosis for OCD patients who are obsessive-compulsive has nothing to do with cleaning, at all.  And of course, not everyone "has a little bit" of OCD nor ADHD. In fact, it's quite possible that no one does, as these are not decidedly spectrum disorders despite some debate. Our business doesn't claim to be medically compulsive (even though "compulsive" is, in-fact, still accurate to our ADHD origins). Therefore, now that we've established a conundrum between the politically [in]correct practices of perpetuating stereotypes while increasing education on others, we have no special conclusions here.

It's ok to feel cognitive dissonance. Everyone does a little bit.

Because we lean into the fun side our neurodivergent traits, which tend to waver between incredibly powerful and out-of-nowhere debilitating at a given moment, the educational side must follow. The lines that we draw between educating each other about cognitive disorders, navigating them, and celebrating them, is some real spaghetti code. Our brains are just an unstructured, unindexed, NoSQL database full of information, partial information, and misinformation around mental health disorders that doesn't align itself with its other data.  And within our blog and advertising channels, we hope to clean up the messy expectations around them. But, as we always say during our cleaning tasks - "it has to get messier before it gets cleaner."

Our clean dream is that our service increases your quality of life, which in-turn employs our staff and increases our workers' qualities of life, which therefore increases our owner's quality of life, and that every one of our lives will be a little bit easier after we work together. So follow our blog, work with us, educate us, and tell us how we can help!