I have OCD, so negative obsessions are not a foreign subject to me, but in my case they have been, and still are, very different from being passionate about something to the point of an obsession. Negative obsessions, for me, are things that sneak up on you, that won't go away no matter how much you want them to; things that makes you feel so pained and hurt, to the point of despair (if your obsession about something makes you unable to function, or hurt others, then it's also a problem, of course). And when I'm passionate about something, it's because it gives me happiness and joy, or because I think it's important. And even when I am obsessed, it still doesn't hurt me, really. So what if I've got Jon Stewart on my mind a lot, as long as it doesn't pain me to the point of wishing for death, or somehow hurts him/makes me unable to function, it's not negative to me. I try to separate my fannish/social- change obsessions from my OCD obsessions, because the difference lie in how the obsessions make me feel, and how it impacts others. And even if my passion about social- causes can hurt me, it's not directly thinking about the causes that pains me; it's how people treat/react to the causes. Does that make sense? The causes are things I want to think about, things that I want to care about, even if they can depress me; my OCD is not. And yeah, sometimes the two can bleed together, because my OCD shapes my way of thinking about things, and how much I think about things, but they're still two vastly different things to me. The only similarity, to me, is that they're both a form of an obsession; that's it.
Old writer's block, sorry, I know, but I just needed to rant a little. It's probably incoherent and full of mistakes, but whatever.
I'll try to do a real update soon, I promise; today has just been too exhausting, because I've been pumped with all this new information, and I need to process it, before I can do anything else. Hope you are all well.