I’m trying really hard to break some of my obsessive-compulsive behavior when it comes to being online. It’s going to take forever because my head is so panicky about being in set patterns (and diety I am not touching the patterns yet), but at least I’m managing to make a minor inroad. It’s one that most people will be bemused by, but basically? If something comes across my dash (whether it be Facebook, G+, or Reader), I have to look at it. Even if it’s half-assed in passing (and sometimes I can’t even get away with that), it causes me intense distress to not look at the things. It’s as if my mind is convinced I have some social contract to look at other peoples’ crap, even if they’ll never know (since I’m not a frequent commentator).

Suffices to say, I always thought this particular compulsion made me a great forum mod, ha ha. It enabled me to satisfy that ‘need’ while doing good for other people. I like helping out, yanno?

Still, I’m trying to break it slightly, because of things like my Google Reader and G+. While I don’t follow many people (preferring to subscribe to a quality versus quantity model), sometimes the amount of posting is mind-meltingly high (which causes my brain to flip out double). But I’m trying to force myself to occasionally mark everything read, or to not scroll back to see what I missed. Dollars to dimes, what I missed isn’t going to be earth-shattering or paradigm-altering. It’s likely to be  picture of a cat, or someone snarking about God, guns, and government. I’m trying to remind myself that it’s okay to unfollow people who post too many things however I might feel about them (and really, I feel like the world’s biggest ass if I quit following a friend no matter how good my reasons). I know this is a stupid patch of mental guilt — likely whatever friend wouldn’t even notice that I stopped following their content, and likely they won’t really care (or if they do, like they’d come hitting me with how horrible I am for not sticking with them).

But still, logic can only go so far in the face of mental health. I’ll keep applying it as judiciously as I can and hope it’s at just the right time and place to get my brain to lose some painful idiosyncrasy… but I won’t count on it either. Nor will I beat myself up about it; I’ll just continue to internalize it because I know it is my ‘bad’, and that nobody in the world owes me anything.

<3