If someone treated me the way that I treat my friends and watchers, I would be mad at them. I have a tendency to leave messages unanswered for months (or for forever) when it should just take a couple of minutes to respond. I also haven’t updated my galleries for well over a year even though I have new stuff to post.

These habits cause me a lot of shame and embarrassment. Unanswered messages make me look cold, a stagnant gallery makes me look lazy.

It’s hard to explain why I do this. I seem to have some weird, OCD-like tendencies when it comes to online activity. For example, I feel like I can’t post new stuff if I don’t have it all properly sorted in chronological order and if I don’t have all my messages answered and my inboxes cleared (Guess what? They never are).

There’s also some social anxiety at play here. For most people with social anxiety issues, the internet is the one way they can communicate with others comfortably. That’s not true for me. I go through periods where I just avoid all social media because it provokes a lot of discomfort. If anything, speaking to people face-to-face is EASIER because I have the advantage of body language, facial expressions, and tone of voice to convey and interpret meaning. If you take that all away and just communicate through text, I feel like I have to word things EXTREMELY carefully to avoid misinterpretation. It’s all too easy to shove messages aside and say “I’ll respond to those later when I’m in a better frame of mind,” then forget about them because that better frame of mind never comes.

If you feel I’ve given you the cold shoulder, please don’t take it personally. But if you say “To hell with it” and walk away, I’d understand. You wouldn’t be the first.

In the future, I’m going to try to make sure that I take no longer than a week to respond to messages, and go no longer than two months without posting something. If I can’t keep up that level of activity, then I really have no business being on this site at all.