Today is my twelfth day in a row of abstaining from phone games.
It’s also my first day in that run of having a day mostly-off AND alone with the whole house to myself.
It is not easy.
Even though gaming addictions are very different from drug and alcohol addictions (most people would even say gaming does not qualify as truly addictive at all), the habit is not broken for me after going without games for more than a week.
As always, the moments when I feel most compelled to launch a game app are when I feel some kind of stress or excitement. Excitement over positive things — like getting good news, for example — often FEELS like “stress” to me. Like if I get a compliment or an unexpected deposit of money, the feelings get very mixed up in me and often result in FEAR. When that cocktail of excited feelings is stirred up in me, my impulse is to IMMEDIATELY FIND AN ESCAPE HATCH, like opening up one of my favorite match 3 puzzle games.
Abstaining from playing my favorite games is very eye opening; I get a chance to really FEEL the discomfort for more than a fleeting moment and run up against a brick wall where normally I’d find the “solution”/escape by launching a game. One of those moments today was when a felt an overwhelming amount of creative inspiration and synthesis of memories, stories, books, and pieces of wisdom and lost opportunities coming together in exciting multi-pronged lightning bolts of things I really want to DO and dive into and explore and learn more about and put together. Those feelings are so exciting and scarily full of potential for failure and grief at not being able to do it all, that before I even clearly recognize those feelings for what they are, I am already swiping to my game launcher to try and alleviate some of the pressure building inside me. Since those games are blocked, though, I was forced to STOP and question, “why is it you want to play games right now?” That little moment of hitting the wall and looking at my path and speedy propulsion towards it is PAINFUL. I feel embarrassed of myself, even though all of this is taking place in my head where nobody else can actually see it. I feel incompetent. I feel weak. I feel cowardly. I feel so much longing for those fucking games.
But I also move forward into feeling glimmers of hope and possibility.