My compulsion

I have a compulsion:

When my brain is idle, ie I'm just looking out of my head, I often start to count letters in words. I try to divide words into two equally long parts since I was about 13 years old. For exemple, exxe-mple. x counts for two. LLev-ente.

MMatéé-riauxx. fils*d-e*pute. TThe*for*c-e*awwakens. Sometimes I do entire sentences.

The rules are many and wildly complicated for spaces, accents and the *signs (fillers for odd character counts). I have prefected this word-splitting throughout the years. I can't not do it. Whenever I leave my brain blank, the character-counting starts.

On one level, it gives me some kind of weird satisfaction, yet I also hate it and would erase it from my mind if I could. I recently looked it up and it is a form of OCD.

The system by which I cound letters has evolved greatly throughout the years, although most of the rules were established by the time I was about 16.

here are some of the rules:

• Capital letters count for two. 
• x, y, q, w count for two. (capital X, Y and W are 4 but Q is 3)
• accents count for about 0.6. I cannot quantify them, as much as feel their value. eg. áásv-ányy. tööröö-lközőő. I think I round them up so that the word gets an even value. The dot on an i barely ever counts at all while an ő is almost always worth 2. The dot on a j has only ever got counted in the most desperate of cases.
• The "mh"s. The spaces count for 1. I pronounce them as "mh" or "uh". Although I never ever said it out loud.
• The fillers (*). When the word has an odd number of characters, I need to balance it out with a *, pronounced exactly the same way as a space. The filler must be placed closer to the middle of the word (eg between 1/4 and 3/4) but never in the middle. A filler cannot be next to a space.
• Re-ordering: SShit*a-HHppens (Shit Happens). NNe*a-w*wge (New age). WWWWord*o-C*Cunting (Word counting) As shown on the exemples above, sometimes I have to go a couple letters ahead and use them to finish up a half that would otherwise have to be a space or the middle of a capital letter.

This must sound totally fucking weird. And as I'm writing this down, I realize that it is really weird!

I'm wondering if it consumes extra time and effort in my brain or if it just fills those idling states, where my neurons are just 'doodling'. It is unconscious though, I barely even remember when or for how long I do it, but I would guess I do it about 5-50 times a day. When I'm studying I do it all the time because I'm forcing my attention onto something I'm not all that interested about and my mind starts wondering into letterland.

I believe this counting/dividing compulsion is related to my rhythmophilia. I create short, 2-10 sec long beats in my head. Sometimes I tap them with my two hands on my chest/lap, sometimes with my fingers on a table, sometimes do a mental beatbox.

While I mentally pronounce divided words, I give them a certain beat, so that the two halves rhyme.

Accounts of other people with similar conditions point to a compulsion to group or order things. These people often compulsively order their environment, but I am as messy as it gets. Maybe I could use some of this compulsion to get tidier (which I think I need).

My newfound interest in my mind and what meditation and mindfulness can do to it points to the fact that I could probably control this compulsion or at least transform it to something more productive or maybe end it altogether.