I urge all of you to either write it down or make a copy and keep it in your purse or wallet. We can all get through this with help from one another. Remember - "I am here for you. My name is Roschelle and I'm a Blogaholic".....(and the fellow blogaholics welcomed with a warm "Hi Roschelle").....
12 Step Healing Program - courtesy of Too Many Mornings
1. We admitted we were powerless over blogging–that our bloggity-blog lives had become unmanageable, even if writing about that chaos made for some really funny posts that were critically acclaimed on Stumbleupon and Reddit and brought us thousands of unique hits.
2. We came to believe that a power greater than ourselves—and we don’t mean our Internet provider, Google, Bing, Ask or Yahoo–could restore us to sanity, or something sort of like sanity. We’re bloggers, after all.
3. We made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him, instead of relying on the kindness of complete strangers we sort of meet in a secondhand way on the Internet, even if they seem very nice and helpful on the Internet when, in fact, they may be very creepy and weird in person.
4. We made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves, without worrying about how many unique visitors we have, how many readers subscribe to our blogs by e-mail or RSS feed and whether that’s more or less than our fellow bloggers, who clearly aren’t as talented or funny as we are, so screw them and their silly little blogs anyway.
5. We admitted to God, to ourselves and to another live human being (or a human being on a live web camera using Skype) the exact nature of our wrongs, which include writing that really hilarious post about Aunt Betty’s incontinence, the knee-slapper about Uncle Bob’s embarrassing affair with his secretary, and making fun of stupid people who almost kill themselves doing dumb shit but post videos of it on YouTube anyway.
6. We’re entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character, just as Google periodically removes all traces of our posts from its memory, or at least from its top 10 search responses. And we agreed to do this as long as we could blog about the process. Honestly, with humor and a box of fresh doughnuts to see us through it, of course.
7. We humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings and turn them into longcomings, if you get my drift. This doesn’t directly have anything to do with blogging, but we all agree it never hurts to have longcomings no matter what you’re trying to accomplish.
8. We made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all, even if it took the rest of our lives because our blogs are read by thousands of people we’ve never met and we’ve managed to offend most of them in one way or another hundreds and hundreds of times.
9. We made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others or would require an outlay of cold, hard cash. Hey, we’re bloggers, and we don’t make any money writing this crap because Google Ads suck except for the top 100 bloggers. In fact, a lot of people owe us for entertaining them for free, am I right people?
10. We continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted we were lying about our blog statistics to impress our Internet friends, who have no way of verifying whether anything we say is true and accurate, so we tell little fibs all the time to enhance the readability of our stories.
11. We sought through prayer and meditation and hitting the “Shutdown” button on our computers to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us when it comes to what to write about on our blogs and the uninterrupted electrical power and Internet connection necessary to carry out that work.
12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to other blogaholics and to practice these principles in all our affairs, and by affairs we mean the things we do every day, not sleeping around or engaging in inappropriate e-mail exchanges. That’s why we posted this 12-step list on our blogs and sincerely hope it receives a lot of unique hits–not because we’re trying to attract more readers in any way we can, but because we sincerely care about other bloggers who may be blogaholics, even if we barely know them.
