Is it still a sin if it's the truth?
Up until this point, each installment of this series has been about the community as a whole.
This one is all on me.
So with past installments, I've been focusing on ideas that affect the
community as a whole. Envy was about the eventual dissatisfaction that
someone who actually undergoes a transformation might feel, Wrath
focused on anger towards the male sex, Sloth looked at how empty a so
called "fantasy life" might really be, and Gluttony touched on the binge
behavior promoted by tg caption sites.
While I can put myself into those situations, none of them really ring
true with me. So I decided that I've spent enough time making other
members of the community uncomfortable, it was time I did the same to
myself.
And so we have Pride.
I want to make this very clear. If you as a caption consumer or a
creator who can relate to this piece, that's fantastic. But this is 100%
about a huge negative aspect of my own personality.
I'm a very competitive person, and I always have been. Whether it was in
school, or athletics, or just playing a stupid game with my friends, I
needed to win.
Unfortunately this trait followed me as I began captioning. One of my
main motivators for starting making my own captions was the belief that I
could do it better than a lot of the people I saw being fairly
successful with what I believed to be sub-par captions at best.
This was especially true back at tf-media where I got my start. I kept
track of the people who joined the site around the same time I did, and I
made it a personal goal to make better captions, and more of them, than
they did. And while that did push me to become a better caption
creator, I'm still ashamed of the joy I felt at the time upon seeing my
captions get more likes and comments than theirs did.
When I moved to this blog, my competitive nature was still there,
although it had died down a little. I still compared myself to other
blogs, often using page views as a way to "keep score."
I have gotten considerably better about keeping this side of me in
check, but whenever I find a new blog I still compare the quality of
captions and the number of page views or followers to mine.
Which brings us back to this caption. This is always going to be a part
of who I am, but it's my responsibility to not let it dictate the way I
handle myself both within this community, or in the real world.