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ceponatia

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  1. I already work full time with school on top of it so after graduating I'd just be working full time. 🙂 I spent the last week or so cancelling every game-related account I had left. Hard drive is clean as well. I've been through this dance before so I have plenty of other hobbies to turn to which I'd been neglecting a lot. I stream music production demos once a week right now and that might be something I want to do more often in the future. I've actually met a few cool non-gamer people on Twitch which I wouldn't have expected. It's definitely geared toward gaming (they don't have very good options to classify your channel as music) but plenty of people use it for other reasons. Started studying Azure this week and I'm wrapping up a JS project. Also volunteered to write a program to make my workplace's tasks immensely easier.
  2. I set up next quarter's planner yesterday and thought hard about my annual and quarterly goals for once. I'd been doing that to some degree but not correctly. The purpose of writing those goals is so that I can break them down into weekly goals and make progress on them but I'd just been leaving them to do some day. Now I've identified 6 goals for the year and several can be done this quarter. Graduating is one of the long-term ones and an important one as the date of my graduation depends on how hard I'm willing to work. I can graduate almost a year early if I bust out some extra classes which isn't difficult it's just a matter of doing it. Then I have to get my Network+ certification and start studying for the more challenging certifications like CCNA and CEH. I'm severely anxious lately and I'd say almost terrified at the thought of graduating. This has been such a long term project that I have fear both about no longer having anything to do for much of the day as well as actually having to change my career and move across the country. Being willing and able to do that is one of the things that separates the successes from the failures though so I know I'll do it and it'll work out.
  3. I've hit the lowest weight I can get to with my current food habits at 165, which would be my ideal weight if any of it was muscle but it isn't. Since writing my last post I've made more of an effort to eat better: making sure to eat 3 meals a day (although they're still quite small), setting up a meal plan, and prepping meals. I haven't made it all the way through to prepping meals yet but I will this week. I make a little progress every week until I finally get it down, I've noticed. What you noticed about people's output is spot on, I think. I've noticed this as well. It was the reason I originally opted to go to therapy, to see if I had some kind of mood disorder. I don't, I simply need to discipline myself better. My increase in activity isn't compensatory because I'm simply returning to doing what I should be doing from not doing anything at all. That wasn't always the case though. I did have a period of a year or two after sobriety in which I'd try to pour myself into a million different buckets and then get burnt out and quit all of them. I don't quit anything anymore, I just don't do them as often as I should. I also don't start new things that I know I won't do long-term which I think is a pretty good thing for me to notice. Sure, a part of me things it'd be cool to be an amazing painter, but I'm realistically not going to practice often enough for that to happen. There simply isn't enough time. Consistency is important, though. That was my New Year "theme" (rather than resolution) for a few years prior to quitting alcohol but I haven't done anything like that since (and of course while I was still drinking every day it didn't work). The main thing that rectifies the discrepancy in output for me is making sure to get my planner out of my bag and have it on my lectern (what I've dubbed a cheap Amazon standing desk that couldn't support my computer monitor and I haven't bothered to throw away yet) so that I can easily see it and am reminded that there are still things to do! Whenever I do that, I get most or all of the things on my agenda done.
  4. Hey, I've been meaning to share this with all of you for a while. I know several of you are interested in things in the same vein as I, psychology and whatnot. I'm linking a playlist of videos by John Vervaeke who teaches cognitive neuroscience and is a colleague of Jordan Peterson's at U of Toronto. Although he disagrees with Peterson on a few particulars such as Peterson's tendency toward Christian mythology, overall their work is quite similar. In this series, Vervaeke breaks down the entire history of philosophy and psychology to describe "The Meaning Crisis" as the singular thing that is causing so much trouble in today's world. Then in the latter half of the series, he beings to prescribe possible solutions. It's a huge time investment... I think there are over 50 hour long lectures, but just about all of them are fascinating and you can tell he thought a lot about how he'd structure everything beforehand. If you're like me and you ever look for descriptions of why you're an addict that are in very concise and well-plotted ways, this is for you.
  5. That's awesome, I drink seltzer water a lot as well. When I was trying to quit drinking I started trying it and it's stayed as something I just enjoy. Breakfast is tough for me because I still take Adderall and forcing myself to eat makes me nauseous even though my body is starving. I don't think I'll continue taking it once school is done. I'm a little worried about gaining a lot of weight back if I stop but realistically I probably won't because I ate pretty bad food for all of 2020 and actually lost weight. I was losing weight even before I started Adderall just from no longer drinking all that beer; the Adderall just greatly sped up the process. I'm knocking on wood because I've had a pretty awesome week. I didn't get 100% of the things done that I put in my planner but I actually used my planner all 7 days this week which is a huge improvement over the last... well... year. I got the important things done, anyway. I tend to put a ton of stuff on my to-do list just to keep track of it; I never feel like I have to get it done in one day but some days I do and it feels awesome. Since this is the end of the week for my schedule, I'm trying to wrap up the last couple major projects I wanted to finish this week. I'm going to finish a basic song tonight; it won't be anything amazing or worthy of sharing, I just want to finish something for the practice. I'm also doing pretty well on sticking to my AM and PM routines. I meditate and do 10 minutes of stretching in the morning and before bed. Not necessarily yoga, just bringing back some flexibility in my old-ass muscles. I've always been very flexible for some reason so sometimes on the videos I watch for stretching routines they'll say "you should feel this really burn in your ______" and I think "nope, this is easy" lol. I actually have a vivid memory from when I took Hapkido in middle school and the instructor was trying to demonstrate a technique on me that is supposed to make your assailant fall to his knees when you twist his wrist and he almost turned mine 180 degrees around before saying "ok, just pretend you're hurt". Lol.
  6. Thank you for your kind words! I'm glad I'm back as well. You're right, relapse is just a part of recovery. I have quite a few addictions I'm trying to tackle right now besides gaming. Drinking too much soda is the other big one. Then there's only eating fast food for the last year. I don't know how I have extra money these days with how much I order delivery but I suppose not being able to go shopping for toys has helped mediate that. If I could stick to a meal plan and stop drinking soda I'd probably become a millionaire very quickly (not really) 😉 This is day 2 of being out of my SSRI-induced apathy cloud and I've had a great morning so far. I woke up on time, made my coffee (instead of stopping to buy a Monster on the way to work so I'm already ahead of the game) and wrote in my journal. My goal is to write in the AM before work and in the PM before bed so I get a good summary of my thoughts and activities throughout the day. I'm also using it to track what I eat and drink and how much time I spend sitting / how much sleep I get so that I can try to start feeling better naturally. I've never been great about my diet, even when I was briefly on my A game after I quit drinking. Even though I'm at the best weight I've ever been at in my adult life, it's not a healthy weight. Like, I look good, but I don't feel good. Lol. Definitely malnourished and dehydrated all day. I ate a Cliff bar for breakfast; I bought a box of them months ago and never ate them because I always woke up too late and had to rush to get ready. It's not a breakfast of champions or anything but it's better than a 3 Musketeers bar, that's for sure!
  7. Wow. I came to last week and realized I'd been living in a dream for several months. My psychiatrist recommended an SSRI to help me feel more energetic back in the beginning of 2020 (wow has it really been that long) and the addict in me wants a quick fix for everything so I accepted even though I have known for years, through many trials, that SSRIs make me completely unambitious and lazy. It's a strange sort of complacency. I didn't feel more energetic at all, I simply didn't care that I was tired. I disappeared a couple months ago from this forum mainly because all I was doing was working, eating DoorDash, and gaming. I could easily blame the medication for this, and to be sure it does bear a lot of responsibility, but I chose to keep taking it. I stopped on Tuesday and feel completely different already. The brain-lightning hasn't happened yet (anyone who has ever taken and then gotten off of an SSRI knows what I'm talking about) so I'm looking forward to that trial. It only lasts a couple days, though. All isn't bad. I still have a 4.0 in college and I am graduating a year earlier than expected so I've begun to really commit to getting some coding projects done. A friend of mine is a senior software engineer for PNC in Texas and recommended I learn Go so that I can apply when I get my degree, so I've been running through some advanced tutorials on YouTube. I've already figured out how to deploy a server and build an API so, again, I can't say the last few months have been all bad. I would just be much further if I hadn't been totally soulless. So, I'm back. I even blogged today after not feeling like writing for a year. I squeezed out a terrible post here and there but nothing I was proud of. I never know what I'll feel like tomorrow but I am confident it'll be better than yesterday.
  8. I think I'm having my mid-life crisis, lol. It just really hit me the other day that I'm almost 40 and I'm so far behind all of the people my age that I look up to. I know people say not to think like that but it is true. I used to laugh at the people who lived with their mothers at my age when I was a kid. I suppose the only saving grace is that I'm living here to finish college while working full time and saving money to buy a house rather than because I'm one of those cringey incels who still get an allowance. Dating life is rough because of the situation I'm in, naturally. What woman wants to date a recovering alcoholic who lives with his mother? A few do, but they're disgusting. Lol. I actually went on a date a couple weeks ago and kept in touch with her for a while but ultimately decided it would just be kinder if I didn't waste her time as I didn't see myself in any kind of real relationship with her. She was super judgmental and extremely liberal which at 40 years old is fairly unattractive. Don't get me wrong, I'm a liberal too (although I'm much more conservative than many others) but she told me that me owning a truck offended her and that she once broke up with a guy because he said he didn't like Hillary Clinton. Jesus. Well good luck with that.
  9. "Always tell the truth, or at least don't lie." I've been revisiting this one a lot over the past couple of days. Trying to really figure out what not lying would mean in my own life. I don't outright lie... at least not nearly as much as I did when I was a drunk. I do still occasionally say things when I don't know if they're true. That's going to be my focus for the time being. I haven't been present on much social media which includes this forum and my blog. I'm rather against airing dirty laundry in public these days. It seems to be too close to virtue signaling to me in that when people virtue signal they're telling the world how great and compassionate they are in order to get praise while with stuff like mental health blogs, people talk about how depressed and lonely they are in order to get sympathy. None of it is genuine. I do feel a connection with some of the people here, though, so I keep occasionally coming back to read what they've written and to post an update for anyone who is curious. I haven't given up gaming. I've even been doing it more than I should. For many months I was pretty moderate with it. It hasn't negatively affected my school or work routines so I haven't had much of an incentive to quit, especially during lockdown and now winter. I have far too much experience with addiction to lie to you and say I'm going to try to "cut back" because cutting back is a useless exercise. I need to quit 100%. It's hard, though, because right now all of my friends are gaming friends and, like most of you have said, if I didn't play games we would no longer be friends. In that sense, they truly are not friends. But some companionship is better than none. Much of my life has been filled with these conditional friends. Women who talk to me because I make them feel what their boyfriends can't, gamer friends who talk to me because I'm funny on Discord and have a lot of "gaming experience". My best friend in my 20's was an actual sociopath who used me as his entertainment but I was too drunk to notice. On the bright side I wasn't one of the many women he raped. So I've decided that the best thing to focus on, as a theme possibly for the new year, is to try and be the man I want to be instead of lying about the man I am. One of those views is moving toward something while the other is hiding from the truth. We'll see how that goes.
  10. I'm late to this, but congratulations on your year!
  11. I'm re-reading 12 Rules for Life. Well, I didn't finish it the first time so I'm re-reading the beginning of 12 Rules for Life and then finishing it. I think I got through 5 rules on my first go before I got burned out on reading. I highlighted and made notes on my first pass so it's interesting to reflect on them several months later. It's also interesting to see other poignant things that I didn't highlight, partially out of fear of just highlighting the entire damn book, and partially because I didn't notice them. I think we tend to skip over a lot of what's written in books and our eyes focus on things that are either outrageous, pertain to our own lives, or more poetic. After highlighting those things and re-reading, I'm noticing the content that's outside of those areas. I wouldn't do this with every book I've ever read; most aren't even worth the effort. It's a good thing to keep in mind though. Lately I've also seen a lot of men balking online about how there are so many therapeutic and psychiatric resources available online directed toward women but hardly any for men. I used to believe this as well but now I think that it's not true at all. I think that men who are just starting out on their journey of truly trying to better themselves (as opposed to reading self help books and expecting that their lives will improve through divine intervention) aren't yet ready to be receptive to actual advice because... well... they're basically little bitches. Lol. They're still ranting about toxic masculinity and how ________ is a Nazi or something, just to impress the equally broken woman who has no interest in fucking them. Anyway just my random thoughts for the day. Had a good week. Way ahead in class now. Super pumped about how quickly I've been able to learn Python. Oh I've also spoken to my psychiatrist about feeling so tired every morning, potentially due to Adderall. He prescribed a low dose SSRI to take every morning and it's been a 180 change. I'm social again, I've started reading (obviously from what I wrote above) and actually wrote some music instead of just fiddling with synths like they're toys.
  12. Great point. Following every impulse isn't really freedom, it's being a slave to your impulses.
  13. I won't focus too much on "If I would relapse even one more time, I'll let it go and would never attempt quitting ever again in my life. I'm sick of it." because I said that so many times in my own addiction(s) and it's simply not true. It might be how we feel in the moment but there's never a last time for these things until we're successful. I understand the despair and feeling of hopelessness you must have for failing to quit but keep in mind that being conscious of your problem really is most of the solution. Even if it doesn't feel like you're making progress, you do every day. Every time we relapse we learn more about how to stick to it.
  14. When I get a song stuck in my head I just listen to it again and it goes away for some reason. I don't know if this would work for you.
  15. I don't check in to the site regularly anymore so I had to read all your entries in one go and there's certainly many, many similarities between you and I which is pretty common here. When you strip away all of the individual flavor in people's lives, addiction is addiction. It's great that you're setting goals for yourself and that you're reflecting on what led you here. What you said about dishonesty particularly stood out because, to me, that's one of the hallmark traits of an addict. It doesn't matter what you're addicted to, if you're an addict you're a liar. That's probably one of the major points that makes addicts so difficult to help... there's no way to know if what they're saying is true. I lied about my drinking for over a decade, pretty successfully. When I start telling little white lies, it's a major red flag for me that I'm not living the way I want to and need to do something ASAP.
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