Been dealing with a great deal of free floating anxiety lately.

Now, partly, that’s because my sleep and waking apnea (they tend to blur together after a while) that I needed to do my breathing exercises – a LOT – in order to get back to something like a normal blood oxygen level.

In fact, I am not even sure I am there now.

This happens sometimes. And it’s relatively easy for me to fix once I become conscious of it. But because I have such a poor connection with my body and because I tend to tune everything out while I am on the computer (and that’s most of the time), it often takes me a while to figure out that is what is going on.

After all, it’s hard to solve a problem you keep shoving to the back of your mind so that you can concentrate.

But slowly smothering wasn’t the whole of this free floating anxiety. The rest, I have concluded, comes from my desires trying desperately to make it through the thick ice-encrusted mass of semi-frozen goop that is my depression.

I came to this conclusion after “catching myself at it” this afternoon. I was pondering what to do and I went through a familiar sequence of thinking about taking a nap, then feeling a stab of anxiety from my video game addiction about all the time that would “waste”, then angrily asking myself what the big deal about that was.

It’s just video games. Time playing them is not exactly precious. I have loads of it. And it’s not like I am on some fucking schedule. I don’t have to get X amount “done” in Y amount of time.

It’s just a god damned hobby. And it will be there waiting for me when I wake up.

This is a well worn path in my mind as of late. An attempt to assert my true will against my video game addiction so that I can regain and retain a sense of autonomy and self-determination instead of always feeling like nothing but a sum of my compulsions.

What was different this time was that I just barely managed to hear a tiny little voice in my head say “But I want to!”.

And there it was, the answer. Well, an answer. The real issue is that part of me wanted to play video games instead of taking a nap. It wasn’t a matter of “wasting” anything at all. That kind of resource-maximizing thinking didn’t even apply here.

It was simply a matter of a conflict of desires.

And that is so much healthier than this compulsive bullshit.

In fact, it now seems bizarre to the point of almost being obscene that I was formulating this all as if it was some kind of resource maximizing thing.

It’s a classic case of “when all you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail”. My resource maximizing subroutines are robust and efficient and quite powerful in their proper application.

But trying to figure out what to do with my day ain’t it. To continue the hammer/nail metaphor, this is like only having a hammer when what you need is a screwdriver.

So you end up banging the screws in like they were nails. Not good. Especially when it comes time to take them out again.

The sum up : I have been going about this the wrong way. So let’s reframe.

It is not and never has been that I absolutely have to cram as much video game playing into every waking minute as possible. That’s just a silly addiction that I developed when I fell head first into a Skyrim addiction that took two years of my life.

Skyrim was more stimulating and more absorbing than anything I had experienced before and I was not prepared to handle that. And that meant that I developed a hard core craving for it.

And even when I ditched Skyrim, I kept the core addiction because while quitting one’s addiction begins with ridding oneself of the addictive focus (Skyrim), the hardest step after that is developing a new, healthy lifestyle.

Because every addiction has another addiction embedded in it : the allure of a vastly simplified world. One where you know exactly what to do with yourself : service the addiction. It’s like a habit, a religion, and a job all rolled into one.

So on the one hand, I wasn’t playing Skyrim all the time. But I was still playing video games all the time, and playing them compulsively.

Still an improvement, but…. not a cure. My life was, and is, still hollowed out by my video game addiction. I do other things, like hang out with my friends. but I still spend most of my waking hours serving this demon I have summoned.

And it wasn’t always like this. It is vitally important that I remember that because addictions can be so powerful as to blot out all conscious thoughts of anything but themselves. At one point, sure, I played video games a bunch, but I also spent a lot of time hanging with the fuzzies and surfing the web, and that was a lot healthier for me than the solitary and sealed off experience of video games.

I hung out with the fuzzies for two extra potential video game playing hours yesterday afternoon, and it was quite lovely. So much more soul nourishing than video games. I felt the addiction trying to get through but I resisted.

My frustration with this addiction of mine is getting to the point where I am seriously considering going cold turkey. No more video games. I can do whatever else I like on this a-here computer, but not video games.

Dunno if I am strong enough for that yet, but the idea has some appeal.

In the meantime, my short term goal is to simply get back to the state I was in before Skyrim came into my life, where I at least spent time being social and experiencing the wide splendor of the internet some of the time instead of simply plugging my brain into my latest video game and tuning the rest of the world out.

They might keep my mind busy and keep me from having to figure out what to do with myself, but I need more than that.

I need emotional nutrients, god damn it.

And I am going to get me some.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.