My Diary of Shame

Hope you feel better soon kelly x

Hope you feel better soon too ... just wanted to say i’ve found your diary an inspiration .. you have a great way with language, are so open with your feelings ... a great example to all that life might not always be a bed of roses, but gambling isn’t the answer. Richard x

Hi ODAAT - thank you for the post on the Chatroom Thread just now.

I declare it the shortest post on the Gamcare forums - ever 🙂 !

I wish you well, as always 🙂

Mixer

Sorry to hear you've been having a rough time of it.
All good wishes to finding good health, peace and happiness x

Hey Kelly,

Noooo pressure to write. I am thinking of you and willing you that much deserved peace of mind.Some emotions/ feelings (don't really like saying the word "feelings" how up tight am I? But, I digress...Sometimes feelings are just so raw and they seem to demand to be felt. It's ok to have them. Hang in there pal!

Hoping each new day has you feeling a little bit stronger.
All good wishes x

Hello ODAAT. Warmest greetings, cultural cuddles and a big hug from Hull. I appreciate you may be just having a little break from the diaries but wanted to send you my best wishes.

Five weeks ago you were full of enthusiasm with runs in Ashridge Woods, high intensity Zumba, yoga, swimming, christmas preparations, cooking, shopping and an hour long pummeling by your chinese physio. Now here we are mid january and zilch.

Thinking of you my friend and hope you are ok ...stephen

Hi ODAAT - just dropping in to say hello and that I hope the month is getting better for you after a bumpy start.

Hi ODAAT thank you for your post on my diary and lovely words . I have you partly to thank for me doing so well. You were one of the first people who I encountered on here and gave me a great reality check and have motivated me . A few weeks on and you are still helping others including myself and it really is appreciated

Gambling addiction sits in the doldrums of my mind, beaten into submission & replaced instead by a burning desire to sleep away every last second of daylight. Instead of the old familiar argument of should I stay or should I go everytime I ran out of the last last bit I was willing to lose, I lurk on the sofa after lights out catching up on soaps or reading by the blue light of my mobile. My mind sometimes tries to make sense of this pointlessness but even now, with the added knowledge of recovery, it would rather sit idle & wait for the answers to come to me than make any sustained effort to change.

I try & convince myself that being practically bed/sofa bound is harmless, but I’m not even kidding myself...I can’t walk up a slope without huffing & puffing, preferring to ponder whether I have some sort of debilitating breathing problem rather than accept that my currently idle way of living isn’t doing me any good. I tell myself that my swimming kick has always been weak as I move from the front of my lane to the back & struggle to keep up, glancing across with my peripheral vision to the non-swimmers 3 lanes down who are moving faster than I am. My fitness tracker relegated to the bottom of a drawer as I repeatedly struggled to hit the prerequisite 10,000 recommended steps per day, I decided it was ugly, oh & it lied. No point even trying to get back on track with that, not @ least I’ve got a new gizmo to pat me on the back everytime I achieve something I should take for granted! I even bought new training gear to go with my 2 fairly new pairs of runners & periodically (if once in a blue moon counts as periodically) drag myself out for an arduous 40 minute run. Long gone are the days when this meant 5 miles plus, it’s only by the grace of my finishing prowess that the 4 mile marker ticks over these days but it’s all it takes to impress work colleagues who consider pressing the lift button exercise & I despite everything I have learned, I still want recognition for EVERYthing. The trainers have done more miles walking the few steps between house, car, station & work than they have pounding the streets & all but one of my new gym items remain unworn or used solely to loll about the house & yet I look down from my pedestal & gloat @ all around me, too lazy to walk the single flight of stairs up to the office! I didn’t put me here, I can blame a plethora of people who refuse to accept I can do no wrong & regardless of how much that peeves me sometimes, I do enjoy the accolade that comes with it & so rather than step down the peg or seven I continue to try & live my life looking down & judging. Only now it’s tinged with the irony that these people I judge are my hall of mirrors...The qualities I hate most in others, my ‘strengths’. I can see recovery all around me & it’s a slow burn because I’m incredibly lazy & full of excuses but it’s there for my taking.

Today I caught a glimpse of myself in a mirror as I made my way out & decided to do something about it...My full make up routine gives my face that pretty much resembles an allergic reaction, a yellowy hue (the packaging assures me it’s bronze but I have my doubts) & the sample mascara that I was given some years ago still does it’s thing of sticking my eyelashes together in a clump that I’m not quite proud of. I’m pretty sure that with some considerable time in a chair a beautician could do something to reduce the Lidl £10 bags under my eyes to more respectable Sainsbury’s sized ones but for today, it’s enough to make me brave the rear view mirror properly & allow a wry smile to spread across my face. I’m not convinced that any sales rep would consider my feeble attempts @ make up anything of the sort but as Dale Wimbrow would say, it’s only the guy in the glass that‘s really important & for me, today, it’s enough. I’m calm & that’s progress not perfection - ODAAT

I logged onto the diaries last night & discovered that Duncs had been upset by the removal of 750 posts from his thread 🙁 Didn’t initially give much thought as to who the author was as I was hit by the irony of how much I missed my all time favourite “Tips for keeping busy thread” which is now as extinct as the Dodo. As a long time advocate of leaving posts be, I was as disappointed as I always am when something is banished & couldn’t agree more with Dunc’s sentiments...When words are given to us, who is the author to remove them & equally, what about those of us who have left a part of us within their respective pages.

Once it occurred to me who had done the dirty deed, I was surprised to feel I didn’t give a rats rear end especially having been subjected to a recent attempt @ manipulation when her user name was changed to my dead sister’s initials. I did muse the irony of previously being called “way too selfish” by said author but thought nothing more of it as I rolled over to sleep. However, a restless night, resplendent with re-occurring nightmare ensued & out I sprang, very un-me like, from bed, an hour before I needed to this morning having been awake since half 3, entirely ready to rip the head off of some Jelly Babies. I have no idea what the dream means & having had it so often, when it is playing through, even the scenes of devastation are entirely manageable plus my sleep tracker shows over 3 hours of deep sleep & so I knew I had 2 options...Take it with me into the day or leave it in my past. I don’t quite know how to do that yet so here I am writing it out but what I do know, by not staying in bed trying to squeeze in a few winks in the dying embers of the night I’ve been proactive. The sleepless night may well be due to the oncoming working ‘week’ & I may now have a 13 hour day instead of the rostered 12 as no point sitting @ home doing nothing when I can get in @ let ND go & I can’t believe it but I feel ok.

As my GA friend Brian would say: my recovery journey is much lighter & easier when I don’t carry my past with me.

Have a calm, gamble free day fellow travellers (past & present) - ODAAT

I’ve stopped worrying why...I don’t need to know why I have blue eyes or why I suffer with hayfever, knowing why doesn’t change it, I just do. I could wonder my life away: why am I a girl not a boy, why do hairs grow all over my body when I’m not a cuddly toy, why is one foot bigger than the other or why do my hands look like they belong to my Nan, it doesn’t matter why, what matters is what I do about it. Nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing or nothing, shave, buy bigger shoes, moisturise...Whatever I choose doesn’t change me, it just changes the way I manage me.

Periodically I have tried to figure out my gambling/recovery why...Why did I think it would make me rich (when I 1st started recovery) to what was I running from (the latest concern) but all that seems to do is confuse me, complicate my life! The orange book aka my GA bible says some people never know why & it’s ok for that to be me! I’m not exactly a thinker (although I’d be lying if I said I don’t choose thinking over acting), I accept that Elvis is dead & perhaps more importantly that the World is round so why get hooked up on something I know nothing about? Why try to make sense of it when ‘it’ doesn’t need sense making, it just is!

Recovery isn’t about making my life harder, it’s about keeping it simple, stripping it back to the here & now so that I’m not harbouring resentments & hurts from my past or catastrophising about my future. I don’t need to focus energy on the why’s until I get to that page of my recovery chapter & when I do, I’ll actually know what the question is rather than just asking what I’ve heard other people do.

I’m sleeping less & doing more & some days doing more is nothing other than taking the dog for a walk but just like my early days on here when I patted myself on the back for nothing more than a gamble free day, I’ll take it because recovery really is about progress & not perfection - ODAAT

Hi, thanks for the lovely words on my diary, I’m sending you the biggest cyber hug there is. You are a truly amazing person and helped and inspired me so much in beating the addiction. Don’t try to over think things, enjoy every minute of every day. X x

I'm thinking that maybe recovery for me has been mostly learning about what it means to be fully human and then learning how to accept my humanity and the humanity in others. The beauty of being "us" is that we have the capacity to glide on the top of the water. I'm picturing the water skier here under the blazing sun with one hand waving free singing "Vacation" by the Go Gos. We can also don our skin divers suits whenever we want to and venture into the deep. The coral reef can certainly appear confusing if we attempt to dissect it like a marine biologist or maybe we can just marvel at its beautiful complexity. I'm rambling on your diary today because I enjoyed your post and the spirit of it moved me to ramble. Enjoy your Saturday my friend.

Just cried my way through a DIY SOS (Birmingham) where a lovely family had very poorly twins...In bodies aged 4 1/2, they had the capacity of 12 month olds 🙁

I know we never get the whole picture on these programs but aside from peels of laughter & the loveliest 9 year old brother in the whole world, we just saw a family living in the now. No nasty resentments, just 2 incredible parents who wanted nothing more than for their boys to “be the best they could be”!

These programs, where people turn out to give their time & skill for strangers always humble me but my emotions are raised more so than usual with this one because I could completely align their way of coping to what I have learned on my recovery journey. Off of the back of an SVU where organs were being harvested without consent it was an incredibly sobering reminder of how amazingly fortunate I am in life.

I’m not sure it’s my place to ask God to do anything especially given my fickle relationship with him over the years but I don’t have anything to offer on anywhere near the same scale so: God bless everyone!

JFT I’m going to be the best I can be!