True story. I fell off Steemit for almost a solid week due to what I shall call an “account recovery situation.” It was terrible.

If this was Facebook, that would be one thing, but this is Steemit, where we live in dog years. Every day I wasn’t posting, upvoting and commenting felt like an eternity. I felt as though I was snubbing those who commented on my most recent posts. And I was certain those who regularly read my blog would forget I existed.

Thus, I did what any enterprising person would do under the circumstances. I created my own doppelgänger.

Why did it happen, you ask? I did a dumb thing and lost my Steemit password. Actually I did not lose it, technically. It was dumber than that. I will tell you about it in Part 2, where I’ll talk about the account recovery process.

Here I’m going to talk about how I dealt with the situation, which was somewhat simple. I created a new Steemit identity. A new me. A mini-me. I’m not saying this is the recommended approach, but it was the option I chose because disappearing completely was not an option.

Part of the reason it was so disturbing is because I was running a weekly challenge. Every day I could see that people had faithfully posted their challenge stories, and I couldn’t respond. My greatest fear was that I wouldn’t be able to recover my account at all. I launched the process and then waited. And waited. I heard nothing back.

Setting up my mini-me

By some miracle, my “account recovery situation” coincided with a Steemit meetup I attended in Tennessee — a very exciting event that brought together some of the awesome tribe from The Writers’ Block and super cool entrepreneur/originator of www.steemnews.online, @instructor2121, who talked me back from the precipice! (Kidding. I wasn’t that distraught!)

I had a lot of questions. Is there anything wrong with having two accounts? Is it frowned upon? Can I post right away from the new one? (A year on Steemit and I couldn’t remember anything from my early days!) @instructor2121 had all the answers, and he just did it. He got me set up, made sure I properly recorded all of my keys, and explained the importance of each one. It was a rare and wonderful opportunity to get a little hand-holding from someone with in-depth Steemit knowledge.

You can read about my doppelgänger here.

Getting back in whack

Someone at work used the expression “get back in whack” today, and I realized no one ever says that. Here in the U.S. we use the expression “out of whack” to describe situations that are messed up, but we never say the reverse. It’s high time this expression came into usage.

Just as everything fell into place with my secondary account, I received an inquiry from a challenge participant who wondered why I hadn’t posted a new weekly challenge and if perhaps I had been abducted by aliens. I was able to respond from my second account and describe my account recovery situation.

And then I posted a new challenge, and all felt mostly right with the world. It occurred to me that I could rebuild if I needed to. If I never received an email telling me that it was possible to recover my account, perhaps I would permanently assume my new identity.

But today I received a message that my account recovery request was approved. I clicked a link, followed the instructions, and BAM. @jayna is back!

Thanks for reading! In my next post I’ll describe the account recovery process and some things everyone should do to prevent such a situation from happening in the first place, but also how to prepare just in case.

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