Argh. This blog has only been up for two days and it's already starting to eat into my free time and my sleep. Last night I was up past midnight tweaking the page layout and writing the page about my Cinderella thing, and here I am at work on the sly the following morning processing the shame. Still, this is a good example of how my addiction works, so let's take a look.
I'm a daydreamer, a planner and a collector. When I get an idea in my head of some way to plan or organise something along the lines of female dominance, I tend to get hooked on it. It almost always involves images of some kind, and even when it doesn't, such as my forays into fiction and interactive fiction, images tend to creep in eventually. One of the first things I did when setting up this blog was seek out that picture on the left and a little chess pawn for the profile photo.
And that's part of the fun for me, and part of the problem. Even when I know that hardly anyone is ever going to read this blog, and I've never shared a great deal of the other stuff that I've produced over the years, I'm a perfectionist when it comes to layout and visuals. The curation of my projects is apparently incredibly important to me, and the colours have to match, and the typeface must be right and the picture must be flipped around so that it 'works' in terms of visual grammar (actually a thing, really interesting).
And then I get bogged down, and then I start obsessing, and then I've spent a whole hour fussing over a single photo and not actually writing anything, which is the object of the exercise.
Or is it?
Could the object of the exercise actually just be the planning and design? Could it be that I just really like pictures, words and computing, and that my sexual fantasies provide the substance while I indulge myself in my own special brand of 21st century manly tinkering? Do I just like setting things up, to hone my skills, give me a creative outlet and avoid any real work or responsibility? I'll need to write a separate post about the relationship between my fantasy world-building and my pathological work-avoidance.
Take this blog, for an example. It'salmost certainly a lame excuse for me to delude myself into thinking that this time round my collection of words and pictures is safe. It's inocuous, harmless and it has a purpose this time. Never mind about the last two times I've tried to blog my way out of this, or the umpteen times I've sat down and meticulously planned elaborate systems with which to reward myself for 'good behaviour' with some tightly-controlled fantasy time. My behaviours are already starting to emerge, after only two blog posts, and that's depressing.
Also, it's telling that I've called myself out so soon in this activity. It probably gives you an idea of how many times I've been through this cycle before, and how few times it's ever ended well.
Wish me luck,
QP
However, this time, you caught it early and can dispense with the meticulous planning and get on with the day, having now posted.
ReplyDeleteI ended up posting every other day, for example, to avoid the blogging becoming an addiction. It sort of worked. I aimed for 15 posts a month in the end and real life tended to dominate as a consequence.
Of all the comments to start with, it's one on posting frequency!
And yet here I am back again, thinking about writing more about my Cinderella thing.
ReplyDeleteI think I need a rule about posting frequency.
But then (here I go) I've got so much to set up intially, and so many things waiting in my head to be written about, that surely (surely!) I can bend the rules for the first few days, maybe post one thing a day, and add a page (a page doesn't count as a post), then I need to find some links about sex addiction and post those too, which reminds me, I need to post about sex addiction in an actual post...
Are you beginning to get a sense of how my addictive behaviours around planning and projects work? The rabbit-hole... Dear God, the rabbit-hole...
Yes, yes I am. I share this to some degree.
DeleteAnd yes, I suffered from that too. I had to be strict in the first month of my blog (and, if you check dates, you'll see I failed at first) but once I had my 15 a month thing I anally stuck to it.
I did allow myself to plot out some future posts but strictly, *strictly*, in my head whilst marking. It meant I marked a bit more too. Also, over time (being the first couple of months), I settled into less planning ahead and more blogging what was on my mind at a given moment.
But, then, my version of addiction is clearly different to yours - YMMV. I can sympathise, and offer my own experience, but not a lot else.