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ceponatia

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Everything posted by ceponatia

  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.
  16. I used to be very much the same way. I'm still the same way but not "very much", haha. I recognized that a lot of it had to do with how I was raised to be such a "mama's boy" because I had a weak father and an overbearing, narcissistic mother who made me rely on her for everything. Living with her while going through sobriety really helped to change my whole outlook on her and on women because I became super aware of how stupid and unnecessary everything she said to me was. I'm sure most of us have someone like this in our lives even if it isn't a parent... someone who is always giving advice that we didn't ask for and it often being bad advice. So, through that it helped me to realign my thoughts and feelings about my mother and in turn made me less eager to impress or emotionally satisfy every woman I encountered as if it was solely my responsibility to make them happy. It's still an ongoing process for me as I've only been sober for 2 years. I'm not yet at a healthy point with women and, unfortunately due to my age, I might never be. But I went from constantly trying to impress every attractive (physically, not at all mentally) woman I met and trying to get approval from them to being pretty much indifferent and just seeing the more attractive women as sex objects instead of Venusian idols. Still not a great attitude to have toward an entire gender of people but it's moving in a direction in which I believe one day I'll actually see women as human beings instead of either objects or goddesses. I had the same feelings for a long time as well so I understand where you're coming from. We're all emotional thinkers though, it's a mistake to think that men are more logical and thus are able to achieve some sort of objective perspective more easily. We appear more logical because we care about things more and women care about people more. Things generally require more logic to understand than people do. When it comes to our reactions, though, we're operating on emotion 100% of the time. Critical thinking is a skill, not a mindset. It's an over-used term that is mainly lauded by people who don't even know how to do it. I thought I did for years before taking a class on it in college and realizing how stupid I was (in a good way). It's exhausting and you can really only apply critical thinking for a few hours a day on a great day. What helped me overcome this was to realize that I wasn't really manipulated by women. They often didn't ask me to do any of the things I did. I was using a weak and creepy model of how to gain a woman's favor which was "bestowed" upon me by my mother. Give them presents, tell them they're amazing every 5 minutes, blah blah blah. It's ridiculous. Never listen to what women say they want. Nobody really knows what they want. Look at what men who are successful with women do and try to extract something from that. Something better than the "assholes get all the girls" mindset which I also held for many years and isn't worth a damn lol.
  17. It's been about a week since my last update. I actually fell into a brief habit of gaming heavily and finally gathered the awareness to get out of it. "Gaming heavily" is nothing like what it used to be when I was drinking but it's still a distraction which takes time away from better things. I watched one of Jordan Peterson's first lectures after he got out of the hospital and it was very motivational. It's funny because the topic was his 12 Rules for Life book but he always goes so in depth that he just talked about rule 1 for 2 hours. He addressed a few criticisms of the rule rather well which was great to hear because even though I find most of the criticisms of his work to come from people who don't read (not inherently a bad thing; I don't read nearly as much as I'd like people to believe, but if you're going to criticize a book you probably should read it) and who have never listened to a single one of his lectures, there are some genuinely constructive criticisms out there. I've encountered the idea that it takes 10,000 hours to master something several times lately so I got as superstitious as I get and took it as a message from the universe, lol. I'm starting to log my hours with music activities to try to get as close to that number as possible. If I spent the 1,000 hours I wasted on Skyrim from 2012(?) to 2018 on music I'd probably be a famous composer right now, lol. Those kinds of analogies bother me a bit, of course, because playing games for 1,000 hours and studying / writing music for 1,000 hours aren't even remotely equal activities, but I can still try. A lot of my problems are still a semi-direct result of Adderall. I feel great because I'm absolutely destroying my programming classes which is a complete 180 from dropping out of the same kinds of classes 3 years ago, but Adderall doesn't care what it makes you sit down and focus on. It could be homework or it could be chatting on Discord about nonsense for 3 hours. In fact I just deleted yet another Reddit account because I was spending way too much time on there again and started going down the rabbit hole of arguing with people about things I neither knew anything about or really even cared about. I need to see if I can do a better job at snapping myself out of it and doing what needs to be done and if I can't then maybe I should stop taking it. That would suck... I haven't developed any kind of dependence on it so I can easily go a day or two without it but to completely stop taking it and potentially go back to being depressed and angry all the time isn't a fantastic prospect. We'll see what happens!
  18. As usual we're on the same page with a lot of things, lol. There's certainly a fine line between holding people accountable for their own decisions (and for solving their problems) and negatively attacking people because of my own bias. I always try to re-examine what I say about situations I commonly run across like child support and gender differences in the workplace to make sure I'm not being too harsh. I do have a bias against women because of my past interactions with them so I try to always be aware of that and push myself past it. It's not logical at all... a lot of the negative situations I've had with women were either completely my fault or due to the rather poor job my parents did at socializing me. Consciously, I don't blame any woman for that, but we rarely (if ever) have control of our subconscious mind. I suppose that's why it's sub-conscious, lol. "Trivializing sex" is something I've thought about a lot recently. It's one of those things where I have to be mindful that when people call me a misogynist or too conservative for saying that fucking random people isn't a good thing, it's kind of like how I was bullied into being a liberal by friends for so many years. Just because a bunch of people with no impulse control say that something is "freedom" doesn't mean it's actually a good thing. I actually said to a friend recently that I think there is certainly a such thing as too much freedom and he simply replied "wrong. Try again". Lol, ok great point I suppose! It's people like this I am really wary of these days. It certainly lessened him in my eyes and I seek his opinion far less frequently than I used to. I wouldn't mind if he disagreed with me and actually gave me his reasons but to just dismiss me like that is pretty childish... and I'll be honest, hurt pretty badly from a (formerly) good friend.
  19. The only way I can answer this is in a long-winded rant otherwise I'll come across as a sexist, lol. I think it's just the nature of governmental clerical work in the USA. It doesn't require any expertise, we have great medical benefits compared to private company jobs, and it's unionized so once you're through your probation period there's virtually zero chance that you'll have to worry about being fired or laid off. You can do very little work and never have to worry about being replaced (which is truly why the government is so dysfunctional and can never get anything done, in my opinion). To the issue of the industry being dominated by women, despite men and women being 100% biologically and mentally equal in every single way (sarcasm apparent I hope) there are many careers in which men without college educations can make a ton of money and those jobs don't appeal to most women. I'm biased; I think people like this are lazy on some level. However my more rational mind recognizes that not everybody is capable of what I am nor have they had as cushioned of a fall as I have. Single parenthood is also easier for men to manage because, by and large, men aren't the ones raising the child(ren) most of the month. Child support payments certainly are devastating to a man with low income but I'm the kind of person who finds it difficult to feel sorry for someone who put themselves in their situation. That said, paying a monthly fee and only having to watch your kids every other weekend is a lot easier to manage with a career than having kids 5-6 days a week (and usually on the work days). I work in child support so I'm a bit more aware of the reality of the situation than a lot of the people who talk about how unfair the system is to men. Although all of that sounds like a tangent it was all leading up to me stating that many, many of the women I work with are also single mothers so a job in which they can take time off whenever they need with no questions asked and don't have to worry about getting written up or fired for missing a few days here and there is pretty beneficial to them. The women here who really bug me are the ones who aren't mothers, have masters degrees, and still settle for a $40k a year job just because doing anything else would require effort. Those are usually the most negative ones because on some level they probably hate themselves, lol. I mean I'm going to college, have career aspirations, and tons of productive hobbies and I still hate myself most days of the week so I can only imagine.
  20. I've looked into selling mine but it's too risky for me. It's against their rules so if you get caught you lose your account and don't get anything for it, lol. I'm sure there are ways to do it securely and privately but I'm out of the loop with that kind of stuff.
  21. I sympathize with the exercise motivation. I will not work out if I'm not in a gym, lol. It's just a fact of my being. The things I do are very environment-dependent for some reason.
  22. How do you feel about Self Authoring? I've thought about trying it but always forget by the time I have a moment to actually do it.
  23. I think that when you boil it down, "normal" is just acting in a way that doesn't cause alarm in other people, lol. So you could say that we are normal most of the time but there are probably times in which we are not normal. Very few people are ever normal 24 hours a day, and those people are likely very boring in conversation. You write a lot about the deeper metaphysical quandaries of being human and that's what I enjoy thinking / talking about as well. Sadly, very few people in my immediate physical orbit are interested. I have one friend online who used to live near me but is out of state finishing a PhD; we talk a lot about philosophy and sometimes politics. He's extremely left-wing and I'm moderately right-wing so they're interesting discussions at least. Looking forward to reading more. Congrats on everything you've done so far!
  24. I read a lot of similarity in your posts so far. Although Morrowind wasn't the beginning of my addiction it's definitely an exclamation point in it. Also had an 18 year addiction to alcohol which I finally managed to put an end to two years ago. I don't think Kobe's death affecting you is weird or silly... we all should have someone like that to look up to in our lives (and if someone doesn't they really need to find one ASAP). I can think of two people whom I've never met but who have had a profound impact on me and if (when) they die it will feel pretty terrible. I guess a bonus of reading philosophy from the past is that those people are already dead, lol. Sounds like you accomplished a lot even with your addictions and you got a taste of how much more you can do without them. To your last post, I've been sober from alcohol almost 3 years and I've heard other people say that "some day you don't remember how bad it was" but that moment has never come for me. I still vividly can taste rancid alcohol in my mouth from the next morning, feel the pounding headache and self-hatred at doing something embarrassing. I think if you want to forget it, you can, but I don't want to.
  25. Maybe your clients are secretly poisoning you... haha kidding. I hope you do get more energy from your new medication; that's a struggle I've had for about a year now. Back when my therapist thought I had depression I tried basically every anti-depressant on the market with no effect. Adderall seems to have "cured" me of my blues but the (huge) downside is that the second it wears off I am completely incapacitated. My psychiatrist responded to that with "well, if it wears off at 5 and you get off work at 5... that's fine?" um sorry I'm not the typical 39 year old dude who just wants to go home and fall asleep in front of the TV lol. I got shit to do bro. Working out is another thing I have to get back into and you just reminded me. Thanks. Gyms are finally open. 🙂
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