Addiction

Let's talk about addictions....  I think we can all agree that addictions are bad no matter what it is or how harmless it seems.  It starts out small, something that you just do for fun and then it grows like wildfire.  You can't control it, you think about it, and you crave it.  I'd have to say I've been addicted to many things in my life, but surprisingly never drugs or alcohol.  Being an avid player of games I would say that I was addicted to a few games in my life.  The biggest probably being Halo 2.  I was in high school when it came out and it became my life.  There were many times when my parents caught me playing when I was supposed to be studying or at 6 am when I was supposed to be sleeping.  It was so bad that they had to take my power chord away from me so I couldn't even use my xbox.  I don't even know how or why I stopped playing... It was probably because Halo 3 came out or something like that...

Now to the biggest addiction of my life.  Some of you know about it, but most of you don't know how big it really was.  A few years ago I started playing a game called poker.  I didn't play too much until I started going to Davis because when I was in Davis, it was basically just me and my girlfriend at the time, Felicity.  The two things I cared most about in my life were her and poker.  She couldn't even get me to stop playing, no matter what.  It was just one of those things that started out for fun too, but it consumed me.  I played all the time, I didn't study, I didn't go to class, I didn't want to eat...  It was everything to me and it even controlled my mood.  There were times when I just felt invincible.... winning as much as 3,000 dollars in a night and times when I would just feel like shit losing similar amounts in a night.  It was an uncontrollable hunger and I even knew it was bad for me.  I just couldn't stop myself and at the end of the day, I withdrew from college, lost my girlfriend, and lost money in the area of roughly five digits....  It pretty much destroyed my life and that's what it took for me to quit.  It's going to take some time to rebuild myself, but I've started....

If you have an addiction, you have to fight it...  This is something I take very seriously because it happened to me.  You have to realize just how bad it is before it destroys you.  It will eat at you, control you, hurt you...  If your friend's advice hasn't helped you, then maybe telling you my story will... Even if it's just a little.