Welcome to the New OCD DIARIES!

After many hours spent re-categorizing 900-plus posts, buying a new domain and building a new blog from scratch on WordPress.org — plus a few spousal disagreements along the way —  I give you the new OCD DIARIES.

Mood music:

[spotify:track:7zKPPqSGLAfc8nfuCmg4PF]

What’s new besides the new banner, design and background color, you ask? Quite a bit:

• A broader theme that captures our ongoing struggles between darkness and light. I started this adventure a couple years ago to focus squarely on my own battles with OCD, depression and addictive behavior, but with time it’s become more about the demons we all live with and how we deal with them. Expect more commentary from me on politics. I’ll never tell you who to vote for or who I’m voting for, however. I’m more interested in how candidates behave and how we the masses react to and participate in the political discourse. Politics is a case study in how we talk to each other and what is says about us as human beings.
• Recipes for healthy eating, including the no-flour, no-sugar meals I live by. You’ll have plenty of opportunity to participate by sending in your own recipes. The only requirement is that it’s healthy stuff, because healthy eating is critical to better mental health as well as physical health.
• More guest posts where others talk about their struggles, because this stuff isn’t all about me. If you have something to say about a struggle you’ve had with depression, addiction, relationships and life in general, this is a forum where you can share. You’ll feel better afterwards, and you’ll help others in the process by showing that we are indeed all in this together. Share your coping tools and, if you’re a mental health professional, share your knowledge.
• Mood music straight from my Spotify library. Rock ‘n’ roll is one of my main coping tools, and instead of using YouTube to deliver the music, I’m going to draw straight from my Spotify library. Spotify rocks and can be downloaded for free. Almost every album from every artist known to man can be found there. I want to introduce more people to Spotify and share my music without the YouTube copyright police breathing down my neck. You’ll need to have Spotify running to play the mood music now, but it’s well worth it. If it doesn’t work out for most readers, I’ll revert back to YouTube. For now, this is a worthy experiment.
• A category list to the right of this space to help you find posts more precisely related to the subject you’re interested in. By clicking the music therapy category, for instance, you’ll get all previous and future posts dealing with music as therapy. By clicking the children’s issues category, you’ll get to posts all about children and the mental health issues they deal with. We’re also going to include more book reviews, and there’s a category page for that, too.
• Advertising. This new platform will allow us to include advertisements from entities who deal in the subject matter I write about — mental health organizations and professionals, for example. If you want your ad on here, let us know.
• A husband-wife team. Perhaps most important about the new OCD DIARIES is that it’s now a team effort. The fabulous Erin C. Brenner has played a critical role in developing this new site, and she’ll edit everything you see on here from now on. She’ll also be in charge of the marketing effort.

Welcome to OUR world.