Another Brick In The Wall

All my life I have fought certain types of addiction. Some in my family had a love affair with alcohol, and yet others had their affair with prescription drugs. With addicts is a certain type of behavior, I call it the compulsive behavior, that desire to do something to extremes. Although my addictions have never been illegal items, nor items like gambling, my addictions still affect everyone in my family on different levels. Because of these compulsive habits I have a hard time staying focus long-term on one thing, I have trouble balancing my life. I’ve learned to force myself to stop certain items when I find my behavior extreme compulsive, generally I found I lost balance because my family has started nagging me :grin:. Right now my addiction is games I like playing online games, I belong to Shockwave where for approximately $5 per month I get to download and play a variety of games whenever and however much I please.

My game addiction has actually been around for several years, pretty much since I started being a stay-at-home mom and wife. I’m not sure why but the games offer me a kind of mind numbing entertaining time. I turn on the television, but unless it is a good movie during the daytime there really isn’t anything on I want to watch. At night I play games because everyone else picks a television in the house, unfortunately they enjoy watching items I don’t. My youngest is 9 years old, loves watch the Disney station and Nick, there is only so much Sponge Bob one can take. Another television is taken usually by the now 18 year old, she likes to watch things like Rob & Big, The Real Life, and The Hills, all television that belongs to the teens. Now my husband and I have some shows we enjoy watching together, then there are those shows he enjoys that I don’t like everything on the Military channel. So what has transpired is that they watch television while I play games on my computer, I get to spend time in some way with them because my computer is in the front room with the main television (for another week or so at least). I do go through times were I am not as interested in playing my silly computer games, then I am compulsive about a sewing project, digital scrapping I want to get done, or a remodeling project. The crazy thing about me is that I generally do something compulsively, spending hours doing it with all my gusto, then the motivation dies, and the project and/or item sits until I drum up interest again! When I am in-between gusto on projects again I always have my computer games

I also find my computer games when life is brothering me, when I am tired of thinking about issues, problems, and items that include raising teenagers. For some reason my computer games offer me that sweet comfort, not requiring any real demands on me, only the chance to conquer them, because of course I want to win! I like winning, my kids tease me about the enjoyment of the game not the winning of the game, but I must find the strategy to win the game! Is that saying something also about my addition, is it something I know I can win at when I feel I am losing at other things? Now that might be consideration! My favorite games are action/strategy games along with word type games. In the concept of winning it does make sense that I play to win, to conquer, as once I’ve won the game it is rare I will ever play that game again! An example is all the Diner Dash games, I enjoyed playing them all, even got expert on the majority of them, but once I won the game I was done with the game. Once I am done with a game I am on a search for another good game that needs my attention to win! I’d actually spend more time playing PlayStation games if I had a television available to actually play, but then again the games to me aren’t as much fun as the computer games I do like most the racing games, especially liked the Underground series of games for PlayStation.

Maybe someday I will consider more about my addiction to games – I never had this addition until being a stay-at-home mom – don’t tell me it is boredom because I have plenty to do! I do have other addictions you know