ht, as a jumping off point ^[1], I will start me issues with letting go of things.

For example : I was just playing Skyrim. Quelle surprise. But I had to stop in order to fix myself some food^[2] and then get my sweet fat ass to bloggin’.

And I didn’t want to stop. It took a non-trivial act of will to make myself do it. I didn’t want to change gears, and when I made myself do it, part of me viewed it as being ripped from a nice warm happy room and thrown into the icy dark outside.

All this from just stopping playing a video game.

But it’s not just Skyrim. Whatever I am doing, I will react to change in mode the exact same way. For instance, when I finish tomight’s post. I will step away from the computer and take a nap. ^[3]

And that very same part of me will view that like I am being from my womb untimely rip’d. It’s like there is always the part of me that can’t accept a justified change of gears and that’s the part of me that adds drag to my every action, weighing me down in every single thing I do that is significantly different than what I am doing.

That part of me is never, ever ready for change. Any change, no matter how good. It could be a change from waiting for a bus to having amazing sex and it wouldn’t matter. Part of me would still be wishing I was still at that bus stop and not in this new situation where everything is different and weird.

And I wasn’t always like this. I clearly remember having the simple instincts that regulated my activities, the primary one simple being getting tired of what I was doing and deciding to do something else.

That doesn’t happen any more. I don’t get tired of playing Skyrim. I learned that when I first had my tragic and precipitous plunge into addiction. I played (and played with) Skyrim for every waking hour of the day, not even eating and barely sleeping.

And the thing is, I didn’t feel bad, exactly. Not the way you would think completely neglecting oneself like that would hurt. The hot circuit between me and the game pushed all the usual sensations like hunger and thirst to the periphery of my consciousness. And, I reasoned falsely, if I don’t feel bad then everything must be okay.

In a way, it’s shocking that our minds are even capable of that.

Anyhow, back to the point. I can feel how wrong my mental situation is. It’s not normal to spend most of your waking hours playing a video game. And it’s not just abormal, it’s unhealthy. Life is meant to contain more ingredients than that.

And yet, I remain addicted. Healthy or not, when I am playing Skyrim, I am happy. Against that no logical and/or sensible argument can prevail. I have, at my mouse-clicking fingertips, an unlimited supply of a stimulus that can keep me sufficiently absorbed that there are no mental CPU cycles left for being depressed or anxious or picking myself apart.

All my demons are too busy with the game to harm me.

That’s my kind of religion.

And unlike other addictions, it has no self-regulating limitations. Whether you are addicted to crack cocaine, gooey desserts, or long distance running, there is only so much of it you can do before physical limits kick in.

Plus, in the case of substances, you only have so much of them, Once you finish that, that’s it, you are out of it, and so the experience limits itself that way.

Not so with Skyrim. No matter how much I play, I will never run out. EVen when I exhaust every single aspect of the game that I currently have at my disposal, with a few minutes work I can download entirely new things that revitalize the game and suddenly it’s a whole new toy.

I’ve been slowly trying to pull myself away from it ever since I fell into that deep dark hole, and I feel like I am making progress but only peripherally.

I have not come anywhere near confronting the addiction itself. That will only happen when I have the strength to choose to do other things with my free time. Things that cannot help but seem pale and dull and onerous compared to my beloved Skyrim.

Hmmm. I set out to talk about my problem with letting go, didn’t I? Oh well. ^[1]

It is the nature of addictions that they make it nearly impossible to believe that anything in the woirld can be as good as the object of the addiction.

That’s the point of my obesity related question, “If you could take a pill that made it so you would get everything you get out of food now but from half the amount of food, would you take it?”

Clearly, the logical answer is yes. After all, it is one heck of a good deal. You would lose weight without sacrificing anything at all.

What a bargain!

And yet, for an obese person, the instinct is to say no. Why? Because we cannot believe that we could ever be happy with less, even when it is stipulated as part of the hypothetical. It’s an unthinkable thought, an unbelievable belief.

The addiction can only see less food as deprival, no matter what else is said.

And that’s how I feel about Skyrim. Intellectually, I know that there was life before Skyrim and in said life I did many things with my day and enjoyed them all.

But I can’t relate to that any more.

For me, there is just Skyrim and the void.

And the void left town.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.