I Gotta Quit WoW... Again

I have a lot of things: a dirty apartment, a great head of hair, low self-esteem, an almost-empty can of mineral spirits that I have no idea how to properly dispose of... but of all the things I have, one I've had the longest is an addictive personality.  I've mentioned my issues with alcohol in a few other places, but it's not just that.  I suck at taking anything in moderation.  As a child, my parents would have to pry my white-knuckled-fingers from the television set to get me out of the house and taking my Nintendo away was pretty much the go-to form of punishment throughout my adolescence.  By the time I hit my early twenties, I went from zero to pothead once I got over all my religious posturing and stopped being such a judgmental freak.  I mean, really... it's like magic potpourri that makes your brain shut off.  Who wouldn't want that?

Regardless, my point is this: I don't do anything small.  Go big or go home, man: if it's worth doing, it's worth doing right and if I can't either go crazy and freak out/impress somebody or experience some radical change in my mood and/or outlook on life, it's not worth doing.  Given these criteria, the number of things on the "worth doing" list is rather small and one can easily see why drugs and alcohol are a perfect fit.  Or maybe you can't, I don't know.  What I do know is that my brain didn't have an accurate and definitive model for words like "happiness" or "freedom" until the first time I got drunk, and it practically bounded out of the silly closet the first time I got high.  These experiences were intense and liberating in ways I didn't even know existed and on levels I didn't think it was possible to achieve.

But what does it mean to be "drunk?"  How do you define "getting high?"  Does it require a certain substance?  Are there safe ways to do these things?  I understand that there are chemical reactions that take place when alcohol gets into your bloodstream and that there are legal definitions of "driving under the influence," but what does that mean to the individual?  I can tell you from experience that, for an alcoholic, calling a .08% BAC "drunk" is like giving a hungry man a stick of gum and calling it "dinner."

One time after masturbating, I realized that I felt high.  I laid on my bed and felt the room spin as my pulse beat in my eardrums, which is almost exactly the same thing I used to do when I smoked weed all the time.  I mean, there usually would have been some Frank Zappa song going in the background and I didn't have to Febreze my whole apartment to get the smell out, but other than that, it was just like being high.  But who's to say I wasn't?  My heart rate was up, my vision was blurry, my body relaxed... 

I think that to define "drunk" as equivalent to passing out naked in somebody's lawn is to embrace a faulty description, and "being high" isn't necessarily related to just marijuana.  It's not some on/off switch with only two positions where you can say "Okay, I wasn't drunk before, but now I am" or "Well, I was high for a little bit, but now I'm not."  It's a continuum.  It took me a long time to understand this because the spectrum used to talk clinically about drunkenness typically follows a pattern of heart-rates and pupil dilation; things I don't really concern myself with until we get to the parts about "unconsciousness" and "death."  I think if someone had shown me a sliding scale that went from "Making eyes at that one girl you went to high school with who isn't very attractive" to "Puking off the balcony at some stranger's apartment you met in a bar," I probably would have related to it better.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to make light of addiction or say that it's just in your head and I'm certainly not trying to say that all substances are equal.  I know that there's a physiological component to all addictions: I completely understand that crystal meth is not a substance to be trifled with and there's no such thing as a recreational heroin-user.  But I think it says a lot about the nature of addiction that some people can have two beers and stop with no problem and I can't, even if I were to have two beers and stop.  If I even had one beer, it would open up a whole universe of addictive thoughts and behaviors that I've been, so far, granted victory over.  I can remember a time in my life when I learned that clinical alcoholism is defined as anything over and above two drinks a day, so I spent months orienting my entire life around my two drinks a day.  What would I drink?  Where would I go to drink them?  Would I want to be with friends or alone?  Should I drink them both together or space them out?  Would I drink them fast to make the buzz consistent or space them out so I could savor the taste?  Should I have two of my favorite drinks or two different ones for variety?  And I lived by that, man...  Two drinks.  Every day.  For months on end.  So that I could keep up the lie and keep saying that I didn't have a problem.  And I don't just think it's me.  I think a lot of people are bumbling their way through life with no self-awareness because they have a really skewed definition of what it means to be addicted to something.

In a recent post, I mentioned this idea of "Whatever I spend the next five minutes doing is going to be what I end up doing for the rest of the day," and I think it's true.  But I think the truth of what it looks like is different than what you think I'm saying, because you think I'm saying that if I spend the next five minutes looking at porn, I'm going to do nothing but look at porn for the next eight-to-ten hours straight.  Believe me, it's not to say that I haven't done it before or that I think I'm incapable of doing it ever again, but reality, as it often does, lies deeper than that.  The truth is that if I spend the next five minutes looking at porn, I'm choosing not to engage my life on a meaningful level because I'm afraid of the pain and hardship that comes from confronting areas of brokenness and dealing with sin.  The truth is that I'm embarrassed to say that I started playing computer games at 8 o'clock this morning instead of looking for a job. 

You're probably going to think I'm crazy, but sometimes I think there's a gigantic Ferris wheel in my brain.  I go around and around in circles on this Ferris wheel, and whenever I get to the bottom, the question of "What am I going to do for the next five minutes?" opens the door and asks me if I want off.  Most of the time, the fear of what will happen if I step off and the shame of admitting that I ever bought a ticket for this stupid ride in the first place will take over, and I'll say "No, thank you."  I'll take my chances and go back around again to see if I get any further this time.  But every so often, I get dizzy enough and I stumble off the ride.  I get sick of all the sweet-sounding voices telling me how much fun it's going to be, only to turn into the nagging screams that constantly remind me that I'm only going in circles.  Just when I'm at the tallest point and farthest from the exit, a voice whispers over the heights and the howls that tells me I'm not made for this... this is stupid... I don't have to keep doing this... but then I get to the bottom again and I see everybody on the outside and I worry what they're going to say to me whenever I step out.  I cling to my fears like a nasty old blanket and I go for another spin. 

To date, I have spent at least a combined total of four weeks, six days, one hour, sixteen minutes and fourteen seconds playing World of Warcraft.  I know that most of you aren't going to understand half of this, but I say "at least" because I've created and deleted numerous characters over the years that I have no way of knowing how much time I invested in.  If we assume that I've deleted as many characters as I've kept and that I played them at least as much as I've played the others, that means I've probably spent more like nine weeks, five days, two hours, thirty-two minutes and twenty-eight seconds online.  If you sat down to play a computer game for that long, you would have to start now and not eat, sleep, or get up from your computer until November, 7th at 5:45 in the evening.  And God only knows how much money I've spent on it over the years.  If I had a running tabulation of the time lost to pornography and masturbation in my life, I'd probably cry.

There are a couple of things in the Bible that address these ideas directly, yet I always seem to get distracted and forget them.  God seems to be neither surprised by my failures nor impressed with my excuses.  But the "Go big or go home" thing kinda works in my favor here, because it takes something drastic to get rid of stuff like this.  I understand the idea of unmerited favor, and I know that you don't earn your salvation, but God has some very specific thoughts regarding what's expected of us when we find ourselves trapped by sin.

I'm probably outing myself with a lot of this as sicker/dorkier/way more broken than you realized, but whatever... it's the truth and if you look down on me for it, so be it.  You'll probably have noticed an "Adult Content" warning when you opened this post up.  Don't worry, I'm not going to start dropping f-bombs or posting pictures of naked ladies or anything like that.  I am, however, (in case you haven't already noticed) going to talk about things you probably shouldn't read at work or around little kids; things that will give you a different impression of me than the one you might already have. 

I've also enabled comments again because I think feedback is a good thing, even if I don't like it.  I deleted everything from before for reasons I've already mentioned, but I still feel the same way: if you want to respond to ideas in my 'blog, that's great and I'd love to hear your thoughts, but if you're just going to tell me to cheer up or quit bitching or whatever, you can save it.  I did what I should've done from the outset, anyway, and set-up an approval system for all the comments, so  if I don't think your comment really takes anything I've said into consideration, I won't post it.

But I will get it.  So feel free to send it.  It means a lot to me that all you guys care enough about what I think to keep up with this... all both of you.

See you tomorrow...