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Obsessive computer use yet to be classified as a clinical mental illness

December 25, 2006 By pia

This article is my worst nightmare come true, and last week I would have been beating myself up about not staying at a secure job with benefits.

Elvira Black has a great shot of Edgar Allen Poe’s house in the Bronx. The poem is pretty good also. The Bronx is one of the most misunderstood counties in the country. It’s small yet has everything including incredible apartments that look like building on Central Park West with good reason. Same architects. It’s a wonderful place to explore, and if winter continues being like spring, maybe I will. Then again…

obsessive computer use has yet to be classified as a clinical mental illness, such as alcoholism or eating disorders. Marathon Web surfing and electronic gaming sessions could be a symptom of a pre-existing mental illness, psychologists say: A person suffering from depression may spend countless numb hours flipping through Web pages, much as they might spend sleepless days lying in bed. A person suffering from an anxiety disorder may bunker themselves in the anonymity of online postings and instant messages to avoid dealing with people face-to-face.

If you’re worried that it won’t be classified as one don’t worry. Nobody has interviewed me yet about it.

Personally I think that an Internet obsession can be a good thing, and create new good behaviors such as disciplined writing that serves to help a person write things for profit if she doesn’t want to go broke blogging.

There are times in a persons life when she needs a blog and an audience. I will never forget 2006, the year I made some of the best friendships of my life. Blogging can be maddening. It takes time. And the interaction is as real or more real than real life friendships because boundaries can be broken.

This isn’t about Internet sex. It’s about Internet friendships, and the boundaries are the questions that straight males and females don’t usually ask each other. Women’s magazines love having male columnists so that women can better understand men. That’s bogus. The interaction between straight people of opposite sexes in blogging is real.

Yes I have very recently focused too much on Aspergers in my blog, my real life, and my other writings. But I needed to come out of denial about it. Many miscommunications with people in emails, mostly of political ilks, helped me realize that while I had mastered in face and phone communication when I was eighteen, except at large family gatherings, I couldn’t interpret many emails.

People with Aspergers are supposed to miss nuances and I often do, generally comically. But I need nuances to understand things fully, and many people don’t write with nuance. Yet other people are so good that they write in layers, and I love that.

I was falling into the symptoms of Aspergers, and believing that I suffered dramatically from each one. Stream of consciousness writing even if it wasn’t on that subject helped me deal with it, though at the time I felt as if I were breaking down.

Now I’m at a point where I have to be more structured so I have turned to short timed fiction. That microwave timer goes off in twenty five minutes and I’m through. Okay the breakdown was last week, but that’s almost last year, and it was structured

At times emailing becomes overwhelming and I apologize if I haven’t answered some or more. I used to be email obsessed but that was so mid 06.

Internet obsession has its purposes. I would assume that it’s healthier for a peson to sit at a computer all day than to lie in bed. Though any true bipolar wouldn’t be at a computer, during depressive episodes. Maybe this is a way for a person to come out of a situational depression that’s healthier than medication.

Personally I’m much more familiar with anxiety. I went through seven oral surgeries in my first twenty months of blogging, and blogging helped me be a model patient. I’m becoming less anxious in many ways, except when I’m overwhelmed.

I saw my new comforter in daylight this weekend as I gave myself permission to relax and to read, something I need to do to feel whole. My new comforter’s beautiful thanks and so was the view from the bedroom.

But I almost never get tired of the act of writing. There are so many stories that I haven’t told or have alluded to. I can write them now and write them well because I have had two years of blogging and bitching about blogging and everything.

It’s been a high colonic, or purging of my mind, and I have taken some of you on the innards journey. We have all survived. Uh, that was one of the grossest sentences I have ever written.

If I never knew that I had Aspergers does that make it less valid? Actually yes as I never lived an Aspergers centric life. I don’t plan on beginning one now. Though it feels so good to give into staying home sometimes and not feeling guilty.

Blogging about it gave my real life family of friends and relatives time to adjust and understand that I want to leave New York not because I want to leave them but because I just see it as healthier and cheaper for me.

My book is totally not Asperger-centric as that would be to deny my life of its many many experiences. Things happened. I might think so outside the box I’m in another crate. That doesn’t make my experiences less valid, less real, less interesting or anything else. As always I reserve the right to change my mind.

I don’t do New Years resolutions because they beg to be broke and if you read Courting you know I don’t do well with them–especially my own rules for me. I set goals and don’t tell. I’m a bit behind in some areas and ahead in others.

Blogging can be an obsession but it can be a much needed one that does serve to make a person more productive, more whole, more in tune with people, with trends and politics.

I don’t want it to substitute for magazines, newspapers and books Call me environmentally unfriendly but nothing will substitute for them to me. Blogging’s just a new way of communicating that lets us explore so many subjects with so many people.

People will always find outlets for negative behaviors, unless there’s something healthy about going broke buying from the QVC channel, going broke at a casino or through a bookie. People will always find new ways to embrace disfunction but don’t make this into an all or nothing because it’s so not.

My real life friends and family thought blogging to be the sickest of all behaviors. Then I got some mainstream publicity and suddenly blogging wasn’t that sick. Frankly, it’s helped my relationship with all the people in my real life.

I’m more sentimental about family and more willing to compromise. Learned that from many bloggers. Thank you. My friends have been spared having to listen. They can read, or one can read and discuss it with others.

To succeed in anything takes persistence, luck and talent. Blogging is one place where that can come together. Sometimes, even I have begun to believe in me. Okay I believe in myself about half to two thirds of the time. That’s a hell of a lot better than it was.

Filed Under: Uncategorized

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Comments

  1. G says

    December 25, 2006 at 9:55 pm

    Blogging can become a bit obsessive but you know as I pointed out to my husband, it’s better than drinking or drugs. Not that I have the desire to go down that road.

    I agree that it provides a lot of positive outlets and a way to connect with people that I would not have otherwise met and I am quite glad that I did – yourself included. Keep persisting, success will come. ~ G

  2. THeAdMad! says

    December 25, 2006 at 11:17 pm

    Oh I’m sure that bloggin and browsing so much isn’t healthy, but I think I like being ill 😛

  3. neva says

    December 26, 2006 at 12:38 am

    “It’s been a high colonic, or purging of my mind, and I have taken some of you on the innards journey.” gross line? i’m sorry, Pia, that was a thing of beauty! and, i might add, a brilliant way to sum up the personal aspect in much of your amazing writing. from the inside out, so to speak. fabulous. just like you.

    i used to worry that our son was completely obsessed with the internet (okay, i’m still not convinced he’s not) but once i started blogging, and landed in the middle of the amazing “community” i currently find myself in, i understand the attraction. i really do. that said, there are a lot of folks out there who are easy to be nice to online, even tho’ you know you wouldn’t want to sit down and meet at Starbucks over a cup of coffee — on the other hand, thus far, there have been a few who have completely exceeded my imagination and/or expectations. fascinating developments all the way around. (some i still can’t wait to meet, by the way — including YOU)

    i hang on your words, and admire you more than i know how to express. i take much of what you say to heart, and hope to follow your lead — because i honestly think you know where you’re going. (of course, even as i write those words, i continue to feel guilty for not finishing up with no fewer than TWO emails i have in the works for *you*. my intentions are there, and they’re good, i promise…perhaps i’ll be more organized in 2007. ah yes… time will tell.)

    beautiful and thoughtful and incredibly insightful post, Pia. and one i plan to share with a number of folks who’ve been inclined to look down on me lately, because of this “little blogging thingy” that’s been taking up so much of my time. xox

  4. Brian says

    December 26, 2006 at 2:10 pm

    I have to agree that 2006 has been the best year of my life and it is all due to blogging. I have found my voices and have met some friends. For the first time in my life I have friends.

    Yet at times, I want to stop writing because I struggle with the balance between talking and creating.

  5. Bone says

    December 26, 2006 at 3:41 pm

    Innards journey?! Is that what this is? I thought I was ordering tickets to the Skynyrd/Journey concert.

    (My name is Bone, and I suffer from the disorder of knowing a joke is horrible, but telling it anyway.)

  6. TonyG says

    December 26, 2006 at 3:45 pm

    Like anything, I think there should be a balance.

    I enjoy writing and being on the internet. But I also enjoy (limited) social interaction, sports, and just gallivanting in general.

  7. Daniel Lee Sale says

    December 26, 2006 at 6:03 pm

    This is nonsense. When I experience anxiety attacks, depression, etc. I don’t feel like being at the computer. when I’m doing fine, I do. So what does that tell you?

  8. cooper says

    December 27, 2006 at 12:59 am

    Any kind of journey is better than no kind of journey.

    I love me some poe.

  9. philip says

    December 31, 2006 at 11:13 pm

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About Me

I live in the South, not South Florida, a few blocks from the ocean, and two blocks from the main street. It's called Main Street. Amazes me too.

I'm from New York. I mostly lived in the Mid-Upper East Side, and the heart of the Upper West Side. It amazes me when people talk about how scared they were of Times Square in the 1970's and 1980's.

As my mother said: "know the streets, look out and you'll be fine."

What was scary was the invasion of the crack dens into "good buildings in good 'hoods." And the greedy landlords who did everything they could to get good tenants out of buildings.

I'm a Long Island girl, and proud of it now.
Then I hated everything about the suburbs. Yet somehow I lived in a few great Long Island Sound towns after high school.

Go to archives "August 2004" if you want to begin with the first posts.

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