Let Me See You 1-2 Step

One month and eight days. So fucking long. One month and eight days is how long I have been entrenched in this monetary rehabilitation. It’s like jail. Correction, it IS jail. If we were playing Monopoly I would be in FUCKING jail. No passing Go for Jildo, no collecting $200— can you say pipe dream? Sayonara $200. 

To help this process along, I decided I would enlist the help of one of the most successful rehabilitation techniques around-- the 12 steps of alcoholic anonymous. Initially I liked the idea. Alcoholics want to stop drinking; I want to stop spending. Then I read what the 12 steps were.  In case you are like me and don’t know what the 12 steps are, please let me fill you in:

• Step 1 - We admitted we were powerless over our addiction - that our lives had become unmanageable
• Step 2 - Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity
• Step 3 - Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood God
• Step 4 - Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves
• Step 5 - Admitted to God, to ourselves and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs
• Step 6 - Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character
• Step 7 - Humbly asked God to remove our shortcomings
• Step 8 - Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all
• Step 9 - Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others
• Step 10 - Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it
• Step 11 - Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood God, praying only for knowledge of God's will for us and the power to carry that out
• Step 12 - Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to other addicts, and to practice these principles in all our affairs

Ok, first off let me just say, I believe in God and I believe that he died for our sins. But, and maybe this is my problem, I think a lot of the time God just wants us to stop being lazy SOB’s, to get off our asses and to use the talents and smarts he gave us to fix our own problems.  I mean really-- he has freaking disasters to clean up and serial killers to kick the living shit out of.

So, will I try out the 12 steps to keep the spending in check? I will leave that up to you. Personally, I feel like in the game of life the 12 step method is like yoga, a worthless exercise constructed to make you feel better about yourself.  But, if you want me to do the 12 steps, I will (as long as I don’t have to go barefoot or practice deep breathing).