Wednesday, July 20, 2011

Identity Crisis and ACOA/Al-Anon, part two

Well I think I am pretty much stuck with my Icepacklady name on Twitter. I'm starting to pick up some followers, and a few folks are even retweeting what I write. Yahoo! I retweet quite a bit too of course so it's all fair. For better or for worse I have my real name on there too.

My next Identity Crisis to handle has to do with ACOA and Al-Anon. I think I have this solved but I'm going to put this out there anyway. Anyone who knows me in real life knows that I am an Adult Child of an Alcoholic. I went to my first Al-Anon meeting when I was a college student and in a crisis. If my memory serves me right the meeting was on campus, at lunchtime, and the subject was balance. I probably cried. After that I went to some meetings there but not always. It wasn't a convenient time etc. Years passed by. Another crisis in my life. I actually shopped around for meetings this time. Showing up at a couple here, and a couple there, before adopting a "home group". I also went to meetings online. My boyfriend at the time was studying abroad and I was working two jobs. I managed to find time to go to a lot of meetings between the online ones and the face to face ones. When the boyfriend came back to town it got harder to go to meetings. Then the relationship ended and I rebuilt my life. That's another story. Time passes. Things change. Now my life is different and I cannot go to meetings, and I'm not sure I really need to but I picked up the books, actually went out and bought new ones since I'd donated my old ones long ago when I was cleaning things out. I also found a lot of blogs out there. So I started blogging about my life and what was going on, and I did it in Al-Anon terms. However there is something in most 12 step programs that talks about anonymity so I took that to be that I needed to be anonymous on my blog. I chose a different name and created a separate blog and I posted it all there. Sometimes I was pretty sure people would connect me to the blog, and once or twice I even told people point blank that I was the writer of that blog but for the most part I kept it separate.

You know what? That blog got more followers than this one has. People could connect to it. Maybe because it was specific. It wasn't scattered like this one is.

So now that blog is out there but I told my readers that I was dropping out. I started it when my mother came back to Massachusetts after my grandmother's stroke and I ended it pretty  much when she moved back to Florida. Now that she isn't in my life every day I don't feel like writing the blog.

What I would like to do is to add an Al-Anon/ACOA page here to this blog. I know that's not very anonymous of me, but at this point I don't really care. I'm more interested in unifying myself. In pulling all these different pieces of me together and putting them under one roof.

The family, the writing, the weight loss, the politics, good books, and ACOA/Al-Anon all under one blog. I'd like to do it all under different pages to make it easier to read. I'm still trying to figure out how to do that though. Although I've figured out how to create different pages I haven't figured out how to add posts to them. Still working that out.
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