Hello everybody,

I’m not new to the forum, but first posted five years ago when I was on the back end of a particularly vicious phase of gambling and had just buried my entire student loan in an FOTB machine playing roulette. Before that I had been gambling most of life, fluctuating in degrees of severity, on one trick or another, anything, starting way back in the old penny arcades of Blackpool when my nan used to give me a box of change and she used to help me put the coins in and I had to pull the arm and wait and wait and wait and just sometimes out would pour all that copper gold and I’d scrape it all up, smiling, as though some secret, gnawing hole in my childish head that had never before existed had suddenly found its filling.

Tonight, for the first time in a good long while, I played poker online. I lost not a great a deal of money, but that’s not the reason why I’m writing. It was the way in which I went about it, how quickly my mind flipped back and started barrelling for it, calling my girlfriend’s friend up in the middle of watching a dance concert to ask her to ask my girlfriend (because she didn’t have her phone) to give me the card details, and how suddenly that same furious need to stake the cash came over me. Now, a couple of hours later, I’m still rocking, wondering how I could still drag myself through that state of mind. I only stopped playing when my girlfriend arrived home. I’m sure if she would have arrived later I would have carried on the same semi-conscious, maniacal way. But as quickly as it came, it went, and all that remains of the ordeal is the memory, the deficit, and a dull burning at the temples from frowning hard at the computer screen.

It’s seems as though even after all this time, even living here, in China, where it’s illegal to gamble and there are no ads or shops nor non of the other gaudy flashing promises of the omnipresent companies we have back home, that strange corrupted idea that I can relieve some of the stress and unbalance of living by creating more stress and imbalance in my life still resides within me. It’s a circle of bad feeling and thought that I’m too familiar with, I know the dangers and consequences of falling into it, how the merest root of a suggestion (I’d heard a friend talking about the website offhandedly, some weeks before) at a certain time can trigger the entire downward machination. I wonder If I was feeling generally any worse - if life and work started to get any more repetitive, I feel more cut off from my friends and family, or if I keep counting up my mistakes instead of what I achieve by making those mistakes - I’d dig that hole with as much gusto as before? That sense of wild, mind-blown desperation, I haven’t experienced it in a long time.

But finally and maybe for the first time, I’ve seen fully the length of that worm, and it’s short. As short as any moment can be short. Whereas before I thought it was inside me, a part and non-part of me, an absence of peace and pocket that screamed to be filled in again, now, observing this particle of experience away from its history, I see it only came to the home I made for it, in all my present depressions and misgivings, and that coiling up in sick hit of the activity that I suffered being a gambler. The suggestion never germinated at any other time, and not for many years. It is not the origin of my problem; it just melds itself onto the side of it. So I’ll start a new painting tomorrow and I’ll make a mess of it purposely, and I’ll lose myself in the mess making. I’ll get out to an unusual part of city and eat something I haven’t eaten before. And I’ll get in contact with some friends and family - that I promise you.

Please, you too many sincere, loving, distressed, struggling people of this forum, don’t take the moment for anything other than it is.