Chatrooms Are My Undoing

 I have an addiction I'm almost embarassed to admit to. It has undermined my personal relationships and sucked away hours from my life that could have been used to further my career or to meet real life friends and colleagues.

Almost from the moment I figured out how to log on to the Internet I discovered chatrooms. And right away I noticed something. My whole family found chatrooms at the same time, and within days they all decided they were a waste of time and after maybe 2 weeks they were done with chatrooms.

But as a creative person, I found them ever so compelling. I just couldn't stay out of them. Whether people were nice, mean, or indifferent to me, I just couldn't turn them off.

My boyfriend has been nagging me for  years to stay out of chatrooms. I didn't heed his advice because I met him in a chatroom. But he also swore them off about ten years ago.

Chatrooms are not inherently evil. Most people can go into a chatroom, stay ten or twenty minutes and then leave. I'm not one of them.

Many people have lost their jobs when caught chatting while at work. In my case, I'm self-employed so that's not really an issue. But as any self-employed person can tell you, that while a bit of chatroom marketing may even be helpful to your career, it also keeps you from making inventory, writing a bestseller, and basically doing your job. Unless of course your job is getting paid to be a chatroom monitor.

 No matter how wonderful a chatroom social group is at first, they invariably seem to end up with some bullies or trolls. Recently I had a particularly nasty day when 2 room bullies, both women, decided to turn on me for some snippet of overheard conversation one of them took totally out of context. The other woman wasn't even there at the time, but being friends, the two banded together to make my every moment there miserable. But they did me a favor. I finally saw quite clearly that I'd created the problem by being there in the first place. (Or being there too much). So the next day, I sat down with my long hand journal and wrote down 101 things to do other than going into a chatroom. And the basic conclussion was to get back to living my life.

I'm not going to say I'll never go into a chatroom again. I pretty much have to to touch base with my online customers. But I can limit it to maybe 10 to 20 minutes a day rather than 10 hours a day, right?