Posting as therapy
I think personality pathology – perhaps regardless of valence – makes you somewhat self-obsessed. In a sense, the patterns of thought and behaviour are different ways to defend oneself, maybe. Or maybe it’s just that the work that being in therapy is (and it is hard work, if you’re doing it right) entails a certain level of self-obsession while you’re at it.
Regardless, being anxious-avoidant (PD) gives you the tendency to try to retreat from the gaze of others, and from the world. On my part, “posting” in its various forms as the internet has changed the past 15 or so years, has always been an object of anxiety. Discoursing freely always seemed an unattainable goal (or: being seen was worse than retreating). But I say it ain’t so. I have made many botched attempts at posting in the past, but what has turned out to be a real, actual mental illness has ensured their futility. Blogging is a particularly ego-centred form of posting (and really, everything is blogging, now), and well, it’s the revealing of myself as an entire person that I think stops me posting beyond the single post. A second or third might run me the risk of revelealing “too much” of myself (to a, mind you, essentially non-existent audience.)
But I’ll give it another go, now, that getting a diagnosis has made the nature of my problems more apparent to me than in previous years. Hopefully a better consciousness of my thought patterns will help me not fail completely, this time.
(Already I feel a certain disgust at this project, and for this post specifically. There’s a certain level of both self-assertion and of talking about yourself entailed here that I am very uncomfortable with. Isn’t this kind of confessional online blogging a fundamentally disgusting level of self-centred, egotistical behaviour? Maybe, or maybe that is my pathology speaking, since I really don’t think such things about other people’s posting/blogging. Yet I do have a certain distaste for autofiction…)
So. It’s posting as therapy. Forcing myself to post, in a way that reveals myself to the (empty abyss of the) internet. No academic detachment allowed. It’ll all be very self-centered. I’ll try for a post a month, I think.
But this is also not therapy (only). I do like writing, and even being read. (Of course(?),) both are terrifying to me, but the desire remains. So it’s therapy, but also simply tryinh to do what I would have done long ago (disgusting self-obsession) weren’t I plagued by this type of mental illness. But I guess that’s really something therapy entails.