I Want to Be Diseased

Not really. Or do I? I read brain articles. Came across one on Psychology Today where this blogger talked about why she didn’t engage in social media. Apparently she blogs about the pro-ana world, which is to say, pro-anorexic, people who view anorexia as some kind of romantically tragic condition.

Social media, it seems, reinforced her dangerous obsessions. She wanted to be anorexic, and “was” in the sense that she used not-eating as a control mechanism and it did bad things to her body. She doesn’t immerse herself in social media anymore, even though, to be honest, blogging IS social media, isn’t it.

Sounds like simple narcissism to me, but then I’m a blog reader, not a trained psychologist. Other articles and blogs I’ve come across talk about how social media sights, specifically Tumblr, have niches where people identify with depression and reinforce one another’s so-called symptoms. I’m not saying some of these people aren’t genuinely depressed, I’m just saying, don’t act as if social media is any more of a problem than the existence of tall buildings for people to jump off of. You don’t take hammers away from carpenters just because some asshole killed his wife with one once.

Came across another “affliction” in another read called “Typomania.” Oooh, I want that one. I write all the time, it seems (750words.com every day, three blog posts except on Mondays when I am too weekend-tired, writing for my job all day, novels and poems and short stories, oh my). It would be cool to tell people “I have typomania: I HAVE to write.”

But it’s not true. I don’t have typomania. My desire to have it is just a desire to have an identity, to be different, to be held in unique regard by people. “Look at him, he’s a genuine insane artist!”

Nah. I’m just a tragic fool stabbing fingers at a keyboard because I can, not because I have to. The article above does