my unhealthy relationship

I once read a quote from Oscar Wilde  (or was it Gustave Flaubert?) in which he lamented that he'd "spent the morning putting in a comma and the afternoon removing it."  This sums up my writing experience to a tee; it is at once my greatest love and my greatest tormentor.  We share a complicated relationship not unlike a romantic affair.  I love it, it hates me, and we are both highly co-dependant.  I actually feel like each of these blog posts has been its own little one-night stand: it starts off innocently enough as I flirt with ideas.  Then one comes in a flash, with the subsequent spilling of thoughts happening in a blur. Afterwards I spend the rest of the night second-guessing myself and maniacally analyzing what I've done.  It's a pretty sick ritual, really!  See, writing is really the only thing in my life I feel like I have absolute control over, so I really go all the way with it.  I scrutinize every detail, every punctuation choice, arranging and rearranging my words like a woman obsessed.  And then once I finally get it just the way I want it, I go back a few hours later and find a bunch of typos, because I had read it so many times earlier that I wasn't really even seeing the words anymore.  In the end I wind up knowing the whole damn thing by heart like a monologue and it remains stubbornly implanted in my brain until I write something else.  And I always write something else.  It's the shitty boyfriend I keep going back to; it's my dealer.  So, you see, this "post a day" project I've committed to is both a blessing and a curse: it forces me to write - which is clearly not the healthiest process for me - but it also forces me to write daily, which only gives me a twenty-ish hour window to obsess over one post before I have to switch my attention to a new one, thereby limiting my compulsive revising.  In the end, the pros and cons are a wash and it just comes down to the fact that I need to write.  Because, like any drug, any addiction, it is my ultimate high as well as my all-time low.  And like a true addict, I'll be back tomorrow for more. 

"I do not like to write - I like to have written."  --Gloria Steinem