How did you spend the holiday last week? What holiday, you ask? Well National Punctuation Day of course— Sept. 24 — one of the biggest holidays out there for word nerds such as myself.

Sadly, I spent the entire day trying to break off my co-dependent relationship with my favorite guilty pleasure … the ellipsis. I know it's wrong to use it in some instances, and I know that it's become a crutch, but those three little dots give me an opportunity to slow down and … finish my thought. Truth was it had gotten out of control and I found myself using the ellipsis far too often.

Surely, I thought, I could find a support group among the many writers who have been similarly led down this particular primrose path of pauses, but alas … none existed.

Not to be dissuaded, I set out and started my own support group called “Ellipsis … Anonymous.” I invited everyone to my house at 2000 W. Maple … a place, I must confess, I bought for the address alone … and I served M&Ms in small batches of threes.

However, the people who showed up tended to trail off midway through their stories, or stopped abruptly before staring off into space, which seemed appropriate but really stymied the healing process. It was … discouraging.

I found myself wandering the streets that night, talking to myself, bingeing on one story after another without end, drinking deep from the nectar of incomplete thoughts until … I hit rock bottom.

It had gotten to the point where I couldn't pause for breath in my prose without automatically hitting dot-dot-dot. I was ravenous … a wild animal on the prowl for a pregnant pause, a thoughtful moment or a half-baked idea so I could swoop in and get my fix. I was putting ellipses where a comma would suffice … ellipses when an em dash would do the trick … ellipses when a yadayadayada would convey the same idea. It was all too much and I collapsed under the pressure.

I woke up the next morning in the gutter outside of a Barnes and Nobles, gripping my beat-up copy of “Love is…” poems and staring in the face of one harsh reality … I needed help.

I got up out of the gutter, flipped open my laptop and started writing … hair of the dog and all that jazz. What I was after was a mantra to get me through the tough spots, those times where it's just so … tempting to use that one, single punctuation, albeit incorrectly. I needed a higher power to see me through, and … amazingly … this little beauty fell out of the sky like a penny … or coin … from Heaven:

God grant me the serenity

To accept the proper uses for the ellipsis;

Courage to use it when I should and deny myself when I shouldn't

And the wisdom to know the difference.

I decided then and there that National Punctuation Day should be my quit day, and I decided to quit cold turkey. No more ellipses for me.

The stay started out well and I was clean and sober for a while until I realized that I couldn't use any punctuation at all for fear that the pause in and of itself would throw me headlong into a full-blown relapse from which I might never recover until I could once again use my beloved and reliable ellipsis just saying the word makes this all the harder until I simply … break … down.

They say that admitting the problem is half the battle, and I'm counting on that to be true. But right now, I have an inexplicable desire to learn Morse code and eat M&Ms. Besides, as my friend Scarlett O'Hara once said … “Tomorrow is another day.”

Note: This column was featured in a recent "National Punctuation Day" episode of the Grammar Girl podcast on quickanddirtytips.com. You can hear podcast host Mignon Fogarty read the column by clicking this link.

Eileen Burmeister lives and works in Roseburg as a freelance writer. She can be reached at burmeistereileen@gmail.com.