March 5th 2008 - Everyone should give themselves a slap on the wrist sometimes

And today is that day for me.

I think I've been really unfair for a while and I blame it on my OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder).

I have a mild case of this... I find my self falling into bad habits all the time. They creep up on you and before you know it they are affecting your life. I get nervous ticks, if I hurt myself on one side of my body, I find myself putting pressure on the other side to even it out. I count a certain number of times when doing things yadda. If I catch these things early, I can usually make a conscious effort to keep from doing it and then it goes away pretty quickly. But other things just creep up and take over.

Now, the thing I'm referring to is not seriously affecting my life. But it's certainly something that's been bothering me.

I don't add favorites here on flickr. When I started, it was innocent. I didn't know anyone here and I was in some "score me" type groups and didn't want to have favorites floating around from people that I didn't know or care about. They would kind of pressure you to add them as favorites if you gave a score above a certain amount. My rebellious side would not allow me to do it. I'll be damned if someone was going to tell me what I'd have in my favorites. I mean... some peoples photos were great and deserved a high score... but they weren't my favorite.

Well... now I have a bunch of friends on here that I really admire and want to favorite. But my OCD was saying... "there are other photos from the past you haven't made a favorite.... it wouldn't be right to make this one favorite and not go back and find all those others that should be favorites".

So right now you're saying... that's irrational... and you're right... it is. But it's just how this stuff works.

Well, last night, disco~stu made a doodle of me from the set of the podcast. I LOVED it! It was right then that I knew that I had a serious problem... I wanted so much to reward Stu for something so cool... but my OCD jumped in again. I struggled with it for about 30 minutes as I did some stuff around the house. Then I recognized that it was the sickness and that I was again allowing it to affect some part of my life. It was affecting what I personally wanted to do.

So this day forward... the past is the past. If you look in my favorites... you will see that it starts with disco~stu. I will not worry about who I have not favorited in the past... I will only worry about rewarding those photos/pieces of art that I love with a favorite. You guys have not hesitated to favorite me... and it's very unfair of me not to return the favor.

I hope you will accept my humble apologies.

That said... Tam cooked me a steak and a baked potato last night and I got nice long nap and a good night's sleep. I feel a LOT better today!

#65 in Explore on Thursday, March 6