Pride

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.