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There's a standard line among ex-drinkers that it takes you three years before your head gets sorted out enough for your real problems to emerge. The theme being that most people don't have a drink problem as such. They have a drink problem because they drink to suppress other, deeper problems.
Well, it's nigh on 10 years for me now, and I'm still (re) encountering emotions and feelings that I had before drink became a problem in its own right, rather than a solution. I had feelings last night (and, don't worry, they were nothing to do with girls or sex) that I suddenly realized I had not experienced since I was about 17 or 18. They aren't pleasant (loneliness, shyness, fear of the world, normal crap) but I suppose that it is good, in a way, that they are coming back to the surface (brought on, as expected, by minor crises) and that, through a few tears and depressions, I am managing to deal with them and, even better, think rationally what the best way is to move forward. And, even better than that, I feel that I have found some solutions.
I still feel like total shit, of course, but, weirdly, in an optimistic kind of way. In a kind of "I can beat this", kind of way.
Another plus has that, since I have realized that I am in no fit mental state to play cards, I haven't been playing cards. And thinking about that was, indeed, what got me onto one of my solutions...
+++++++++
If someone screams abuse at the table after he has suffered an apparent bad beat (I choose my words carefully here) it is often because he knows that he made a mistake earlier in the hand. I remember recently having KK against T2s on a board of TT3. Opponent put in piddling bets on the flop and also when a two hit on the turn. When I hit my king on the river he seemed keen to go to war for his whole stack, about $88 compared with the $12 that he had already put in. After I showed my better full house he went nuts.
Anyhoo, my point here is that many people need to externalize their own mistakes, to find some outside excuse, be that poor play by another player, bad luck, or whatever.
I have never really been able to do this. If I know that I made a mistake, I try to learn from it, but I internalize the anger. Although this is good karma, it can be bad for the nervous system. Life is a lot easier to cope with if every bad thing that goes wrong is not your fault.
I came to the conclusion that I was taking this a step further. I was often blaming myself for things, and taking the line that I was the one at fault, when much of the time it was 50:50 and some of the time it was not my fault at all. Hell, if it makes the other person feel better about it, why bother to explain your point of view? In poker, this line is positive EV, because you carry on taking money off the loser. In real life, I'm not so sure. I think that it might be right to let other people shift blame, but I really need to make rational notes (perhaps actually write them down) about why I am doing what I did, how I feel about the situation, whether what I am doing is the best thing for me and how I meann to go about things in the future.
There are no real specific incidences for me to tie this to. I've just noticed that whenever I HAVE pointed out to someone that, basically, I didn't make the mistake at all, I might as well have cut a knife through them. It doesn't go down well. Since my desperate need to be liked overwhelms the "blame game", I've learnt to take the blame on myself and so "be liked".
This, I have concluded, is not healthy. So I had a little think about how to resolved this little conundrum, and, voila, I think I found a bit of a solution.
+++++++++
They've just started some roadworks up on the A2, which effectively makes driving up the hill to Wickes an impossibility. I got about 50 yards (as far as Tesco) and did a U-Turn. It means that I can't buy the tiles (too heavy) but I walked up and bought some more paint. Good exercise, but, well, yet one more reason not to have a car.
And now, it's return to painting time....
__________________
+++ UPDATE, a few hours later +++
I am going to be careful here, because I have to beware of misinterpreting what might just be a chemical upswing in the brain as I enter a bit of a manic phase. But it doesn't feel like that. Or, rather, if it is a chemical upswing, then it's like one that I have never experienced before.
This is closer to emerging from a long long dark tunnel into some kind of self-realization that might, were I a religious man, be called an epiphany. perhaps the badness of the past few days (and there has been some badness, more than that written here) has served a secret beneficial purpose. There are no simple phrases that can fully convey what I feel, how I am different now from how I was a day ago. A simple rendition would be "I am my own man" (underlined, capitalized, four exclamation marks). But those words are a bit like the old monotonic phone renditions of Beethoven's Ode To Joy. The notes might be there, but they do not convey the depth of what Beethoven wrote.
Add to that the clarity of vision that you imagine you have when you have taken a line of coke, the elegant certainty you might have that your opponent is going to fold to a brilliantly executed bluff on the river, the difference that a new prescription makes to your vision after a five-year gap between bvisits to the optician. Yep, throw all those things together, and you have a bit of a representation.
A myriad of the duties, weights and responsibilities that I throw on to my shoulders, in the main, do not matter a fuck in the grand scheme of things. Ward has got it right. Most things aren't anyone else's business, and who gives a flying fuck what most of them think anyway? In most ways, I can be proud of what I have achieved, despite JayBee's attempts to decry it. But there's a case in point. His opinion doesn't really matter in the sense that my opinion doesn't matter, Aardvark's opinion doesn't matter. It's all cock (and brown...). I should have the strength of faith in myself, and I think, in some weird way, I've suddenly attained it. It's a kind of "Fuck you", but in the nicest possible way.
How liberating. Now, where was that line of cocaine?
PJ
Well, it's nigh on 10 years for me now, and I'm still (re) encountering emotions and feelings that I had before drink became a problem in its own right, rather than a solution. I had feelings last night (and, don't worry, they were nothing to do with girls or sex) that I suddenly realized I had not experienced since I was about 17 or 18. They aren't pleasant (loneliness, shyness, fear of the world, normal crap) but I suppose that it is good, in a way, that they are coming back to the surface (brought on, as expected, by minor crises) and that, through a few tears and depressions, I am managing to deal with them and, even better, think rationally what the best way is to move forward. And, even better than that, I feel that I have found some solutions.
I still feel like total shit, of course, but, weirdly, in an optimistic kind of way. In a kind of "I can beat this", kind of way.
Another plus has that, since I have realized that I am in no fit mental state to play cards, I haven't been playing cards. And thinking about that was, indeed, what got me onto one of my solutions...
+++++++++
If someone screams abuse at the table after he has suffered an apparent bad beat (I choose my words carefully here) it is often because he knows that he made a mistake earlier in the hand. I remember recently having KK against T2s on a board of TT3. Opponent put in piddling bets on the flop and also when a two hit on the turn. When I hit my king on the river he seemed keen to go to war for his whole stack, about $88 compared with the $12 that he had already put in. After I showed my better full house he went nuts.
Anyhoo, my point here is that many people need to externalize their own mistakes, to find some outside excuse, be that poor play by another player, bad luck, or whatever.
I have never really been able to do this. If I know that I made a mistake, I try to learn from it, but I internalize the anger. Although this is good karma, it can be bad for the nervous system. Life is a lot easier to cope with if every bad thing that goes wrong is not your fault.
I came to the conclusion that I was taking this a step further. I was often blaming myself for things, and taking the line that I was the one at fault, when much of the time it was 50:50 and some of the time it was not my fault at all. Hell, if it makes the other person feel better about it, why bother to explain your point of view? In poker, this line is positive EV, because you carry on taking money off the loser. In real life, I'm not so sure. I think that it might be right to let other people shift blame, but I really need to make rational notes (perhaps actually write them down) about why I am doing what I did, how I feel about the situation, whether what I am doing is the best thing for me and how I meann to go about things in the future.
There are no real specific incidences for me to tie this to. I've just noticed that whenever I HAVE pointed out to someone that, basically, I didn't make the mistake at all, I might as well have cut a knife through them. It doesn't go down well. Since my desperate need to be liked overwhelms the "blame game", I've learnt to take the blame on myself and so "be liked".
This, I have concluded, is not healthy. So I had a little think about how to resolved this little conundrum, and, voila, I think I found a bit of a solution.
+++++++++
They've just started some roadworks up on the A2, which effectively makes driving up the hill to Wickes an impossibility. I got about 50 yards (as far as Tesco) and did a U-Turn. It means that I can't buy the tiles (too heavy) but I walked up and bought some more paint. Good exercise, but, well, yet one more reason not to have a car.
And now, it's return to painting time....
__________________
+++ UPDATE, a few hours later +++
I am going to be careful here, because I have to beware of misinterpreting what might just be a chemical upswing in the brain as I enter a bit of a manic phase. But it doesn't feel like that. Or, rather, if it is a chemical upswing, then it's like one that I have never experienced before.
This is closer to emerging from a long long dark tunnel into some kind of self-realization that might, were I a religious man, be called an epiphany. perhaps the badness of the past few days (and there has been some badness, more than that written here) has served a secret beneficial purpose. There are no simple phrases that can fully convey what I feel, how I am different now from how I was a day ago. A simple rendition would be "I am my own man" (underlined, capitalized, four exclamation marks). But those words are a bit like the old monotonic phone renditions of Beethoven's Ode To Joy. The notes might be there, but they do not convey the depth of what Beethoven wrote.
Add to that the clarity of vision that you imagine you have when you have taken a line of coke, the elegant certainty you might have that your opponent is going to fold to a brilliantly executed bluff on the river, the difference that a new prescription makes to your vision after a five-year gap between bvisits to the optician. Yep, throw all those things together, and you have a bit of a representation.
A myriad of the duties, weights and responsibilities that I throw on to my shoulders, in the main, do not matter a fuck in the grand scheme of things. Ward has got it right. Most things aren't anyone else's business, and who gives a flying fuck what most of them think anyway? In most ways, I can be proud of what I have achieved, despite JayBee's attempts to decry it. But there's a case in point. His opinion doesn't really matter in the sense that my opinion doesn't matter, Aardvark's opinion doesn't matter. It's all cock (and brown...). I should have the strength of faith in myself, and I think, in some weird way, I've suddenly attained it. It's a kind of "Fuck you", but in the nicest possible way.
How liberating. Now, where was that line of cocaine?
PJ
