It's like a drug

___I'm proud to say that my editing habit is down to just a couple photos a day. It may be hard to believe, but photo editing is addictive. It's 2 parts control, 6 parts power, 3 parts illusion, and maybe 1 part boredom. I'm pretty sure you can talk to anyone who owns (and uses) a photo editing program, you can't just edit for a couple seconds. You can't just touch-up a couple things and leave the rest of the photo alone. You may start with the objective of just evening out the shadows but, low and behold, four hours later you're still cleaning up the acne off the faces and tweaking that red channel for a little more color in the cheeks.
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___It's not even your fault really, you're just trying to make things right. The tools are in front of you, it would be wrong not to make the poor souls in front of the camera look their best. After all, they are dependent on your abilities to make their permanent presence on your hard drive a pleasant existence. There's almost a code of honor involved in making sure that a bad picture won't lay quietly, hidden deviously, on you computer, waiting for the right moment to bring an awkward social situation to the light.
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___On top of that, there is of course the pressure that is put on the photographer to take the best pictures that they can. Let's face it, sometimes even the best of pictures (or photographers) need a little bit of correction. Worse, it's always possible that the viewers of the images will know that this set of images has rested on your computer, they will ask why, when any of the images isn't perfect. Not one photo editor (amateur or otherwise) wants to face a day when they must choose between shame and keeping an image that has potential for greatness.
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___And that's probably the worst part, you won't know if an image can be great unless and until you start playing around with it. Even then, you need practice to make sure that it isn't you that is bringing the image quality down like bad image compression. In order to do that you need a lot of photos. More than that, they shouldn't all be yours. You can hardly call yourself a photo editor if all you edit is your own stuff! And this, my friends, is where the downhill slope begins.
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___The signs are small at first, an innocent Google search for photo editing lessons or tutorials, a few small side projects from friends and before you know it you're doing mass searches through thousands of images just to find those few that have that potential to be great. By then you're already hooked in and invested, hours of searching later you realize that you have to spend at least that amount of time editing.
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___You find a few images from your massive search, at least a dozen (for variety), and you start with the first. You begin simply, some color correction, evening out the levels, but then you have to ask, Am I really pushing myself? Is this really the best that I can do? From there its only another short step to asking, Why should I stop with the data that's on the image? Why shouldn't I fill in the blanks?
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___And you enter into the world of, not just image editing, but image reconstruction. From there, image construction. Just having one image won't be enough anymore, you need lots of images, and you can only combine the best parts of each one. A picture of a friends face can suddenly be the quest for that one picture with just the right nose, or eyebrows. Reality soon has no bounds. Why, after all, should you stop with just what is real? This is the computer age and in your own private world (on your computer) YOU are GOD! The pixels are yours to command, the channels yours to change at whim, the entire landscape of color, light and texture merely a pallet to display your brilliance!
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___...
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___Sometime, probably weeks later, a friend (former, deities have no friends (only subjects)) will find you passed out, close to death next to your computer. You won't be able to speak beyond the hex codes for the pretty colors that are dancing before your vision (hex codes that extend beyond the boring 128 bit colors that normal people see in). If you're lucky, your friend will take pity on you and, after wiping your hard drive, take you to rehab.
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___After a few weeks you'll start to come back down. The looks you will get from former subjects will be the hardest, but after a while, you can find your way back to normal. Given enough time, you will even be able to look a picture again without loosing control. Usually, after years of counseling, you can go back to your computer. Pixels are just dots of color on a screen again, channel information and histograms only funny words part of a distant, intentionally forgotten, past.
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___Finally, with help, you can start editing again. It won't be the same anymore. The fire, the power that was there before will have been replaced by fear. Fear of losing yourself again. Comments on your pictures will have the sickeningly sweet taste of an adult telling a child that the scribbles on the page do indeed look like a giraffe. It isn't done to hurt you, just to make sure you know they value you as a friend to much to let it go to your head. Maybe someday, twenty years down the road, you will look back on this a tell it as a story to your children. Maybe...