Hey, Geordie
OMG, I am so glad you fought your way out of that coma!
Your posts have impacted me more than any others. Mostly, because of their challenging nature. lol
First, way, way back when, I said I didn’t want to stop gambling . You said something of the nature of…I hope some day you will want to give recovery a try.
Then, when I was giving recovery a try, you said, “Do you really call this recovery?” You said this because I had just gambled. I was devastated because I really was working on recovery. To me, recovery meant more than not gambling. But, you made me think good and hard about what recovery meant to me. What it looked like to me.
Bare with me, this is not a post about kicking someone when he is down.
Last year, exactly about this time. I went on a women’s gambling weekend. You spoke of old-timers like me giving advice to new comers about barriers, etc. and then making the same mistakes. You were wrong in that I never did give advice. None, except don’t give up trying.
Then, on that same post, you asked me, “Do you really want to go through your whole life like this?”
This really got my juices flowing. lol I thought, yes, I do want to be able to go out once a year with my girlfriends and gamble.
But, each day, I started my journal with that question. I began to look at it from a broader perspective. Then, the question began to change from, “Do you really want to go through your whole life like this?” to “How do you want to go through your life”? I began to ask how I wanted my life to be, to look like. The question shifted from what i didn’t want to do to what i did want to do.
You talk about the same people doing the same things over and over again, year upon year. The people it hasn’t worked for. Is that because we have gambled, we are not entirely gamble free? I prefer to look at all the times we haven’t gambled.
I gambled in 2015. And, as like many other areas of my life, this is not perfect. But, 2015 was better than many others. Gambling was a part of it, but it didn’t win, it didn’t take control. I came back fighting.
We aren’t just the same people doing the same old thing, making the same old mistakes. We are people who keep coming back. Why do we come back? Because we believe our lives are worth fighting for, even if those lives are not perfect.
You believe your life is worth fighting for, too! You said you had to fight your way out of that coma. You did it, Geordie. You are alive! You had to fight for your life.
That’s what we are all doing here, Geordie. Come back and join us. Yours, like ours, is a life worth fighting for!
