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NEW VIDEO: The EASIEST Way to Stop Gaming

Leaving a Mark


Gentleman Rat

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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

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