Backsliding

Child Number One: “Are you sure you want to get into that again?”

Me: “It’s cool, I can handle it now.”

Child Number Two (after being clued in to events in progress): “Are you crazy? You’re going to start that up again? You know how you are!” 

Me: “No, I’m different now. I can stop anytime I want and not let it take over my life again.”

Child Number One lifts her eyebrows in disbelief and Child Number Two snorts in disgust: “Ya, right.”  

I know what you’re thinking. She finally backslid. She finally gave in to those cravings and had a cigarette, thinking that this time, unlike all the other times before, she can actually be a “social smoker.” 

But fear not. We are not talking about smoking (no matter how many times the craving hits me).  

Rather, I have discovered online, free – TETRIS!  Dun, Dun, DUN! 

“So what?” you may be thinking. 

Well, the truth is that my addictive personality does not stop at chemical addictions. There is a reason I do not play video games. I get obsessed. I get sucked in. And I DO.NOT.STOP!  I damaged at least two relationships as a teenager/young adult playing Tetris – one ending with the game being ripped out of the game boy and hurled across the room. 

In the days of desktop computers that were set up in the back room office, my family once lost me to the game of Chuzzle. I emerged, months later, dehydrated and disoriented and discovered it was time to pack out and move to the next post. The desktop was sold and Chuzzle was not reinstalled on the new laptop. We’ll call that family therapy. 

So now here we are. My Facebook friends will attest to my addiction to word games and humor me accordingly. The thing about those games though is that I have to wait until my opponent makes their move. Sometimes I have to wait an entire 9 hours before someone makes a move. Presumably, those people have lives…

And then there is Luminosity. I started playing these games in the hopes of staving off the Alzheimer’s that I feel coming on. But as I am cheaper than I am addicted to games, I am limited to once a day for those. 

In a fit of ridiculous boredom, I decided to google Tetris. To my delight, there it was – online and free! So when I hit a lull in my ability to force myself to do something productive, my fingers head straight for the Tetris.

My girls are horrified. 

So far I have been able to limit myself to a few games a day. But I’m thinking I need to ween myself off again. I go to bed, close my eyes, and immediately start rotating pieces to fit into that imaginary game running in my head. I also notice that as I play the game (in real life – not in my head), my stress level increases, I hold my breath, and get anxious as those pieces start to fall faster and faster until I reach that point in which I know all is lost and I grieve the loss of control that inevitably ensues. 

So I’m thinking this really isn’t good for me. I really need to stop. Right after this one, last game…