Gentleman Rat

I feel like I keep failing myself, so tomorrow I'm going to a friend's house. Maybe I'll be too distracted to get cravings. Wish me luck. I've noticed that I'm pushing interest in my writing again, so I need to keep that ball moving as well.

Last night my fiancee got involved with a car accident, and today I was laid off from my full time job. I'm still stunned.

I didn't play video games today. Instead I edited half my novel and got in contact with a professional editor. I'm trying to publish this January, so I need to stay on track. I have to force myself to do this stuff, but it keeps me productive.

I finished writing the first draft of my novel last night, and I catch myself falling back into my writing groove again. I want to start a new one for NaNoWriMo this year, but I need to come up with a good idea first. I did a daily login for gta5's casino wheel, but to my relief, felt nothing. I put it down, and tried to find something productive to do instead. I think tonight I'm gonna try to plan something new.

I was listening to my audiobook, and during this I mindlessly played forza for several hours. I want to scream. However I am motivated to work on my novel tomorrow. I'm planning on going to the library to get that done.

Today has been decent. I went mini golfing with the kids, and got ice cream when we were done. Right now I'm watching tv with my fiancee, chilling out for the night. Haven't touched anything or had cravings today.

Today I haven't touched my controller because I've been too busy. Every time I get cravings, I acknowledge that they exist, as the youtube video says to do, and I've been listening to my audiobook instead to entertain me. Right now I'm listening to Stephen King's 'The Institution', read by the actor who voiced Christoph from Frozen. It's pretty great. I also bought myself a pumpkin spice frozen coffee too from Dunkin', so that's a nice treat to myself as well. I had to break up a fight at work today, also. One guy got a bloody lip from getting the piss kicked out of him, while the other guy "Slipped and fell" as he told me. I don't know. I've just been coasting it today, and I need to keep writing my book, but in earlier projects I've written, I perform better when I'm at the library or something like that. It gets me out of the house, and when I go across town to work on my book, I sit down knowing that if I screw around, I could be doing it at home. So instead I work on my project until my fingers hurt. I work tomorrow, and after that I'm taking my kids apple picking, and I always have fun doing that. Thank you all so much for following along with my journals.

My struggle today is that my best friends play also. I had plans on what to do today, but having to wait on someone who never came today killed me I'm checking out other forums, but I want to have a connection local to me.

Not feeling particularly proud of myself today, and I'm not sure i want to open up about it. Seeing a video of my daughter today reminded me of how fast time fleets, and here i am playing video games. I worked on my novel last night, but with how guilty I am and feel, it's no consolation.

Before I had an issue with gaming, I was first and foremost a writer. I've published a novel. LINK: (https://www.amazon.com/Vacation-Planet-Joseph-D-Slater-ebook/dp/B07FC4Z846/ref=sr_1_2?keywords=the+vacation+planet+cyberpunk&qid=1568750968&sr=8-2) and I'm trying to publish one a year. What sorts of hobbies have you picked up?

Blab, Just to start, I think you're an amazing writer, and there is so much potential with that. I think if you started a book, we could influence each other and push each other to keep going. I'll admit, I'm not perfect, not even by a small margin. However I made the decision to quite last weekend, and I've since relapsed twice. I caught myself making the same arguments with myself as well as bargaining with my own inner demons screaming, "It's not a big deal! Just push those emotions down and JUST get to the next level. You're almost there anyways!" Yeah, I get it. I'd love to be your friend, and I want you to know that I'm here to message as I hope you are free to get a hold of as well. I'm responsive, and I think since we're both starting this uphill journey together, maybe we can stay in touch. Let me know what you think. You'll find that I'm very lovable and honest, and want to help. Thank you for reading my post, and my heart goes out to you, Blab. I want so much for you to succeed.

Today I'm depressed, and feel extremely dirty. My job takes it out of me bad. I need to keep track of so many people who are doing extremely bad things. It's mentally exhausting, and I was fearful to go home because I knew that that's where my gaming addiction lies. Every time I say that I want to quit, I don't. My main struggle today was getting home, seeing that I needed to mow my lawn this week, and said, "Nah, I really don't care." Then I saw my laptop, and while I have a dozen other story ideas in my head, and I've given myself a deadline to finish by, I still said, "Nah, I really don't give a f***." Then I said, well, maybe I'll just watch an episode of a TV show, and as I was doing this, I saw that my friend was online. As you can guess, I relapsed pretty hard, and it's frustrating because the game numbed me so much that now any ideas I might have had before for my novel are gone. There's a blank slate. Angry, I turned on my audio book and stepped into the shower, and now here I am sitting on my couch, and wanting nothing else than a nap. I'm feeling pretty defeated right now, so I think I'm going to. This weekend I said I was done with video games, and on the second relapse in a row, I feel lost. Angry even. I'm going to try to go to the library tomorrow, and see what that accomplishes, but after work, my mental strength waivers greatly.

Well, here I am. I was procrastinating on creating a daily journal because I, a published author, cannot even write every day for my novels. But here I go; I started this journey of recovery two days ago. I took a long hard look at my endless list of games on Xbox and had just spent about fifty bucks on in-game money between Red Dead Redemption 2, and GTA5. Ashamed, and watching my money drain from my account like blood from a trauma victim, I sat on my couch in silence. Alone with my thoughts, I stared at the list of games, then to the stack of books to my left on the stand, and said, "You know, I used to be a great writer. I wrote every single day, and was excited to write, and loved hiding in these worlds I created. Now here I am, almost through all my twenties and staring at the screen at all the "accomplishments" I had really earned, and when I'm dead, nobody will even care." I should mention that in the first full day yesterday I was home alone with my three daughters, and we had an absolute blast together. We played with chalk on the driveway, we made dinner together, and I even taught them how to play a tabletop game (Here's the link to our session).https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7YOmAOcVsAc&t=52s It was wonderful! But, then, at the end of the day, when the girls had watched their episode of Reading Rainbow and were tucked in after poems and kisses, I came out to sit on the couch to perhaps watch some TV. I think you know where this is going. In front of me lay Overwatch, an old nemesis of mine, and as the cover of Tracer enticed me, I lied to myself and said that it would only be to see what the weekly challenge is. Five hours later, I had outlasted my friends who joined me who went to bed, and as I hung the controller up, I sat back on my couch in the darkness of my home and stared at my own reflection in disbelief. "You messed it up." I said to myself, "You had the best day ever with the kids, and you had to go and screw it up with a video game." I have a pretty bad bout of post-weekend depression right now, and I miss the girls, and I just can't get over how I actually FELT like writing again last night. I wanted to have a long cigar, maybe a small glass of bourbon, and sit at my post for some novel-writing. In fact, I'm at the climax of my novel and need to just finish up the ending. I started this project two years ago, and here I am wasting my time for achievements that won't speak for me years later. It's all for nothing, and I feel no better than the people at my job, (I'm a security guard at a methadone clinic), where sometimes they can't even make it through ONE DAY without a hit.

FPS games were my poison, and I know this is going to be extremely difficult. I'm doing it for my children as well, so I understand you with that. I accidentally left gaming, but all my best friends play, and I don't know anyone outside of gaming, so that's extremely difficult for me.

I don't fit under any of your qualifications, but I'd also love to have an accountability partner.

Hello everyone, I'm new here, and for the first time in my life, after more than a decade of pouring pointless hours into hype and money pits, I've come to the conclusion that I need help. I'm an Army infantry veteran, usually a goofball, but most pridefully, an author. When I was active duty a few years ago, my wife left me, took the kids, robbed my finances, and crippled my social status. In fact, when I held my newborn when she was two-weeks-old, it would be the last time I would hold her until she had already turned three-YEARS old. During this time, when I was dealing with 110 hours a week at work, and being emotionally abused by my now ex-wife, it felt like the only control I could gain was when I was playing video games. It started with GTA, then every COD, then that led to Battlefield games, followed by other shooter games, then others, and further still down the hole. In the last year, I've stuck to pretty much the same few games, spending hundreds of hours on each, trying to gain all the achievements, and challenges they presented each day. At last, I found the freedom to leave the military, excusing myself from my duties with my end time of service and came home to fight a custody battle so bloody, strangers tried to start street fights with me while I was out getting coffee or groceries. Moving to a new town, and after three long years of court, I was finally given sole custody of my older little girls, as well as at this point met my now fiancee and my new stepdaughter. Now that I've moved to a new town, and surrounded myself with people who love me back, I face an issue that grew from the year my ex-wife left me: video games. Before wasting countless hours, I had identified as a writer. In fact, I've published a novel which can now be found on Amazon, but ever since that accomplishment, I've found myself resorting back to gaming and sitting on the couch so long that I have to see a physical therapist for a slipped disc in my back from bad posture. It was last weekend that I was faced with a question that snapped me to reality by my five-year-old stepdaughter, who had witnessed me playing Red Dead Redemption 2, trying to earn an in-game achievement you can only get after 100 hours of online gameplay. "Daddy, do you know how many books you could write if you stopped playing video games?" She was right. Here I am with several novels I had almost completed on my computer, waiting to be finished, and here I am spending my whole day off staring at the same game that had stopped being fun for me and had turned into more of a job. Instant gratification had become less instant, and chasing that feeling left me hunting down that 100-hour in-game belt buckle. How dumb is that?! How pathetic had I become, to the point where my little girl, a five-year-old had noticed what I had become so numb to at this point? Why die and leave behind high scores that NOBODY is going to care about when I'm dead and gone when I could be leaving literature that will speak fifty years after I've been dead and rotted into the ground? It is for this reason alone that got me into writing, and playing Xbox has gotten in the way of that taste of immortality. I'm also a security guard at a methadone clinic. Each day, I see people addicted to heroin, meth, and benzos come in and describe to nurses their deepest darknesses related to their daily battles to the needle, and, as pathetic as it sounds, I was relating to their situations. It sounds horrible, but I was seeing myself in the symptoms that they were facing: the rage, the cravings, doing whatever is necessary to get what their brain has them honed in on to get by. I caught myself racing home just to work on getting loot boxes in Overwatch, or getting to level 50 in Battlefield V when it took today. 9/12/19, to realize that I had become emprisoned in my own head the same way patients do at work. I'm no different than they, and I had been so wrongly judgemental this entire time. I'm sorry that I have you all reading what could possibly be my next novel by checking out this thread, but when I searched for video game addiction support, I found this site today, and I hope you can accept me, despite my very many flaws. They teach the patients at work to find a support system, and this is what my attempt is; to find the support system I need to get by with my cravings, my withdrawals, my missed doses. Thank you for reading through my long-winded introduction, and thank you for your support. ~Rat