There are timnes when I think I should start drinking just so I have a reason to feel like used crap all the time.

I mena, I feel hung over right now and all I did was sleep.

At least if I was a drinker, I would have had some fun first. And who knows, the muscle relaxant effect of alcohol might leave me better off in the long run.

But ten there’s the diabetes. There’s always that goddamned diabetes.

I guess I have been doing okay. Getting through the day via Skyrim, as per usual. As usual, it threatens to crowd out all other potential activities.

And as usual, I feel helpless to change things.

I wonder if there are support groups for people like me. SOmeplace I could go where I couid talk about having a video game that you are addicted to.

Skyrim Anonymous, more or less.

I suppose I should be glad that I have tons of free time in which to feed the addiction.  Then again, maybe that’s the problem. If I had more demands on my time, maybe I wouldn’t have played it so much and maybe I would have developed the ability to set reasonable boundaries early on.

In general, I would benefit from having more things to do with my time. Blogging and/or prose keeps me going but it doesn’t make me feel like I have advanced my cause any.further. It doesn’t get me anywhere.

It just  make the time go by easy. And, on a good day, is also a lot of fun.

But the main draw is that it keeps this mighty overmuscled mind of mine busy. When I am deep into Skyrim, I am not thinking about anything else. My monkey mind is bestilled and I feel calm and engaged and alive.

I’d really like to be able to tame those damned monkeys. My mind is always so full of thought processes, most of them subconscious, but all of them loud. I keep hopinjg I will get to a place where I have something that can take all the mental energy I throw at it and that really uses my creative and analytical skills in a productive and hopefully lucrative fashion. Something where I can self-actualize.

Instead, I play a video game all the fucking time.

At least, I keep telling myself, I am happy. Sort of. At least I am happy while I am playing and enough is going on that my growing discontent with my lot in life is kept quiet. So there’s that.

But other times, I feel split in two. Part of me is having fun playing Skyrim but the other half of me is screaming and jumping up and down and pulling its hair out because it’s just not enough. I need more. I need to connect to life.

But it is so easy to just let life slide by as I playh in my private playground of the mind, only emerging to write, eat, and sleep.

Maybe I would be better off if it hurt more.

<——————————————–nap—————————————————————>

I keep telling myself that, any day now, I will log back into UpWork and go looking for more freelance work so I can at least advance my so-called career.

But I keep coming up with excuses to put it off. It’s become a joke of sorts, and the punchline is my wasted life. To do it would be to leave my cozy coffin of a life and go out into the real world, and I am far more comfortable remaining fictional.

Once again, I wonder where all that energy and enthusiasm I had right after I graduated from VFS went, I was so full of ambition and energy and verve back then.

And when I got the Uno gig, it felt like I was getting somewhere. My life was a lot better back then when I had a genuinely productive thing to do every day.

But I ended all that for reasons that now seem quite suspect. At the time, I told myself I was going to go rustle up another gig pronto.

That was months ago, and in tha time I have logged into UpWork twice. And even then, I did not stick with it for long. After all, joib hunting on UpWork was boring and stressful and involves dealing with myriad possibilities which challenge my sense of my own competence and capacities.

Why subject myself to that, says my depression, when I can just play Skyrim?

And so I once more lapsed into hiding from reality into the world of the mind where I feel the most comfortable.

When I quit the Uno job and failed to keep the momentum going by immediately hunting up another job, even a dumb scutwork job like that insane data entry.rephrasing job, I was doing my depression’s bidding and listening to the wrong voice in my head.

And I always know when I am listening to that wrong voice, that one I call The Jagoff, who always has the right words to convince me to give up on myself. To take it easy, relax, not stress mysel out over things, and just keep letgting things slide.

It even makesme feel good about it, like I am being smart and wise because I can elude the forces of “hassle” and remain in my self-indulgent hog wallow instead of doing something crazy like making my life amount to something.

Sometimes I fele like I don’t even exist because I leave so little of a mark on the world. My friends, both offline and on, would surely tell me that I do make a mark by being their friend and that they are glad to have me in their lives.

But people have a need to contribute to the community and be rewarded for it. It is not healthy for a human being to live without productive labour.

In fact, it is downright depressing.

Good thing I have Skyrim to treat the symptoms, right?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.