To Keep TheTwelfthStep.com Going Or Not, That Is The Question…

Pretty soon I’ll be coming up to the 10-year anniversary mark since I began writing for this site, TheTwelfthStep.com. Presently, I’ve written well over 2000 original articles for it, but I find myself now at a crossroads with it wondering if I really want to keep it going.

One thing I have the ability with when it comes to this blog, is to see how many are actually reading it daily. It has a tool built into it behind the scenes on WordPress that shows me the level of traffic hitting my site each day, including where that traffic originates from and any specific terms searched for within it. For the longest time I was averaging between 50 and 100 readers a day, which in all honesty I was thankful for. I know that those numbers are pretty minuscule when it comes to social media presence, but I was thankful for each of my daily readers nonetheless. I also learned to not care about having more of an Internet presence because I enjoyed writing about my life and sharing my experiences transparently with the rest of the world.

When I got on Facebook and Twitter years ago, I found they were a great way to increase my site’s traffic by reposting links to each of my blog entries. I became thankful for every time a reader who reached out publicly or behind the scenes to tell me how much my words affected them. Unfortunately, my site’s traffic and visibility on Facebook and Twitter have been reduced to a mere handful of people checking it out now on a daily basis, mainly due to social media changing their formulas for what they feel deserves to show up everyone’s individual’s newsfeeds. Sadly, Facebook’s and Twitter’s formulas don’t find what I write to be important enough for the world to see anymore, so when I repost my excerpts on either, they get completely suppressed now. Most of my friends have told me they never see my articles showing up on their timelines anymore. So, in all reality, I am simply writing for myself these days, making this blog mainly an online journal or diary of sorts and nothing more. It’s why I find I am questioning my motive lately whether I want to keep this going. Because I don’t find that I am feeling fed anymore by all the work I keep putting into it and that’s something I’m not taking lightly.

To keep this blog going actually costs me about $700 a year and takes about 6 to 7 hours of my time every week. In the grand scheme of things that’s not much of a commitment either financially or with my time, but for me, it does add a lot of stress. While I originally began this blog as a cathartic way to work through my own inner demons of my life, I had always hoped it would grow in size and gain better readership along the way. It hasn’t and in fact is now losing most of my original readership, all because of what social media considers important these days. Writing about self-healing, life experiences, and the spiritual journey I’ve been on, which is quite unique in of itself, seems like it’s not that important as far as where the rest of the world is concerned.

While I haven’t made a final decision yet whether to close this site down or continue keeping it up and running, me writing this very article is simply putting it out there to the Universe, or God if you may, asking for some sort of sign whether I’m meant to keep doing this. Look, I love writing, truly I do, but I feel I’ve exhausted most of my life’s experiences in here and have been re-sharing things in recent years that I know I’ve already shared before in some fashion. It almost feels as if I’m just repeating and rehashing the same material now again and again, simply for the sake of producing yet another article. I find this isn’t being productive anymore for my spiritual journey and I am praying for guidance from God surrounding this.

I don’t know if this article will even be read by more than a dozen people or less, but if somehow even one person responds to me and asks to keep it going because it’s helped their life somehow, then I’m going to take that as a sign from God to not give up. But if no one responds to these very words I write from my fragile heart, then I plan to take it as a sign it may just be time to call it a day and shut this site down, once and for all. It’s in Your court God now. I leave this with You…

Peace, love, light, and joy,
Andrew Arthur Dawson

The Biggest Challenge Of My Life These Days Is…

I think the biggest challenge in my life these days is keeping my heart open, especially when much of the world around me seems to not be doing so and instead chooses to lash out more than not from their hardened hearts.

I have spent decades working on opening a heart that got trampled upon and abandoned by one person after another for the majority of my life. I could write an entire novel on this, where each tragedy added layer upon layer surrounding my heart, making it become almost impenetrable at times. I’m thankful though this isn’t the case for me anymore because of all the work I’ve done around this. But active addicts who aren’t in 12 Step recovery usually have hearts that are almost entirely closed, something that tends to leave them in varying states of anger and rage.

One of the main goals of recovering addicts is to drop all the layers surrounding the heart that get piled on as the disease gets worse, and that often is a very scary thing to do. Much of the reason why an addict picks up alcohol and drugs or some other addiction in the first place is to numb themselves from the pains that life has served them. I can attest, as I spent decades perfecting the art of remaining numb by closing my heart off with one addiction after another, making my heart become a very heavy mass indeed.

Over the past decade, I have successfully been able to shed one layer after another surrounding my heart, thanks to my 12 Step recovery and my spiritual work on myself. But there are times I honestly struggle with it, especially when hatred, spitefulness, resentment, and the like is thrown my way, things I find hard to deflect and not feel when it happens. On a recent trip back to my fraternity, I felt that very thing from an active brother I didn’t know well at all, and it caused me to immediately shut down. I began to go to anger, as I sought to place a layer back around my heart not wanting to feel the pain of someone else’s hatred of me, one I know I didn’t deserve. While I knew it wasn’t about me, it was still hard to deal with. I’m thankful though that I was able to work through that anger quite quickly and find forgiveness due to the help of another brother I was there to connect with further. They assisted me that night to get me back into my heart, and into my tears, something that was able to lead to forgiveness, leaving my heart open.

While I know that having an open heart leads me often to feelings things that hurt, so much so that I shed a lot of tears, I believe it’s much better to remain this way. What I’ve come to learn on my 12 Step journey is that addicts who choose to live with hard and heavy hearts, always end up descending further and further into addiction, adding layer upon layer around their heart, leaving them in a vicious cycle of addiction that never goes anywhere but down. It may be the biggest challenge of my life these days to keep my heart open, but in the long run, I see in doing so the rewards far outweigh the costs, especially when I continue to remain clean and sober day in and day out, year after year.

Peace, love, light, and joy,
Andrew Arthur Dawson

When A Friend Says They Can Always See The End Of Their Friendships…

I spent several years getting to know an individual I eventually came to consider a pretty close friend who consistently told me throughout how they were always able to see the end of their friendships. I always found the statement alarming and never quite understood how they could see such a thing, that was until I experienced it first-hand myself, when I came to believe it’s something they probably have done before in prior connections and made a repeating self-fulfilling prophecy.

Friendships, like any relationship, take work on both parts. Sometimes even a lot of work. But not everyone wants to work on keeping a friendship going, especially when the newness of it has long worn off and all those quirks from both individuals seem to become more of a challenge to accept. I believe this became the case of this friendship, at least in respect of how they felt towards my quirks. While I’ll admit I definitely bring my own challenges to any friendship I make, I constantly do my best to grow, change, adapt, and adjust to each connection and joke it comes easily because I’m a Gemini. This friend however was far more set in their ways, and became even more so after the newness of it wore off. And once the pandemic came and went, they became even more reserved, and dare I say extremely resistant to change.

For the longest time, I think we both did our best to both adapt to the differences each other brought to the table in our friendship, but eventually, it began to feel like I was the only one trying to make it work. When they started to not be as motivated to drive the 30 miles to where I live on the weeks we alternated visiting each other, when they stopped being open to taking day trips somewhere more than 30 minutes away, when they stopped enjoying going into Starbucks with me, a place our friendship began in, when they lost interest in going to the movies, something we once did with regularity, it ultimately began to feel like they were only interested in doing what they wanted to do and I had to just be ok with that. But, the last time I drove out to their home to hang out for dinner they made and a movie I brought, they feel asleep for the entire running time and barely said anything to me while I was there.

Trying to talk to anyone set in their ways rarely goes anywhere, as was the case with this friend. It became very frustrating to me, wanting to explore more in the friendship and them becoming less and less interested in doing anything but quick dinners and sitting around watching tv. When I asked them if they still enjoyed hanging out with me, their answer was sometimes. Their answer stung, as this very individual once told me how much they considered me to be their best friend. But best friendships take an immense amount of work to keep going and my best friend Cedric would attest to this, as we’ve successfully navigated plenty of troubled waters for 25 years now to still be the closest of friends.

This friend though didn’t seem interested in doing that type of work to keep it going so I thought that maybe they just needed some time apart from hanging out. They agreed that would help and said they’d get back to me in a few weeks to set up our next hangout time. It’s been months since I’ve heard from them. In light of that, I accept now this friendship is over, but I also accept that it wasn’t because of my doing. It was because of the very principle I’ve come to learn in how friendships sustain the test of time and that’s how much work an individual is willing to do on themselves to keep connecting with someone who’s different than them.

When one individual in a friendship stops working on it and becomes more set in their ways, it makes for a very lop-sided feeling, one where the interests of the other often don’t feel as important. All that leads to in the end is being able to see the end of that friendship because for one set in their ways, it becomes very easy to predict the end of a friendship when they are the one causing it to happen.

They say friendships come into our lives for a reason, a season, or a lifetime, and I’m blessed for the bunch of seasons I had with this individual and all the spiritual lessons I learned along the way spending time with them. I still love them immensely and always will. I just hope one day they may realize the only reason why our friendship ended is not because I stopped trying to make it work, it’s because they did, which in the end, made their self-fulling prophecy come true…

Peace, love, light, and joy,
Andrew Arthur Dawson