On Popularity, Shame, Perfectionism, and Internet Cruelty

My life motto. (Brene Brown, I don't know who created the photo.)

Today ladies and gentlemen and all others we're going to talk about Shame and Perfectionism and how this relates to popularity in the doll hobby. This will probably be another one of my possibly offensive and controversial posts, so I apologize in advance if I hurt your feelings.

You're probably wondering what perfectionism is doing on a doll blog. I've written about everything from confidence to honesty and economics on this blog, so why not this? With the proliferation of BJD Confession blogs full of snarky confessions about poor face ups and styling or photography to complaints about not being popular (enough), perfectionism is very much a part of our hobby.

I am not a person who is very open about my own struggles. Most of you know my teen brother died last August, and I've been grieving since then. This is on top of an anxiety disorder and cyclical depression and yes--- my perfectionism.

Through the therapy I've been attending for a few years, I've been learning how to deal with my anxieties and with my perfectionism. I've learned that perfectionism is based on something we call Shame. At the end of this piece I'm going to link my favorite Shame and perfectionism books and researchers, and I highly recommend checking these out!

Disclaimer: I am not a licensed mental health professional. Do not take anything I say here as medical advice.

My Thoughts on Ipernity and Flikr [Profanity warning: I swear a bit in here.]

A lot of other bloggers have written on this topic, but I'll chime in anyway. 

My random thoughts on the new Flikr:

1. The CEO said some stupid shit. I say stupid shit all the time. If the product works, I'll excuse it. At least once.
2. Some facts: the home page defaults to your friends' photos, not your stats. This is annoying, but dealable. On the plus side, you get to have a neato cover photo and pretty much unlimited storing and upload capacity. And if you're old kind of Pro, you get to stay that way.
3. I'll be staying with the old Pro account, at least for awhile. I like not having ads, but I don't know if paying $24-ish per year is worth not having them. I'll have to check my free accounts to see how intrusive the ads are. They can't be worse than facebook.