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Some things are easy to spot and (hopefully) fix. When you’re running late constantly and find you never have time to do anything, it’s not a big leap to figure out that you need to improve time management skills. What is not so easy are the little things that slowly erode you from the inside. Everyone I’ve met has at least one poison. Usually they break down into some form of self-deception, but like the mythical hydra, it has many different heads.
My own poison.
I have a history with getting impatient with the situation at large and then disappearing into a fantasy world. A hazard that comes with a large imagination. As I got older, this became a fixation with gaming, especially RPGs.
Eventually this led to playing MUDs (online text-based adventure or role playing games), and then EverQuest, a massively multi-player online game. The problem was that at the time I did not understand fully how much control I really had over my situation and so I would escape into my games. The “problem” that I kept running into was that a part of me would recognize that I was pouring time, energy, and money into something that would never really give me…. much of anything. Burnout was sudden and swift, but didn’t last. This pattern repeated for a couple years switching between games, thinking that it was the game that was the problem, not me. I didn’t realize what was going on until I decided to take stock of where my energy was coming from and where it was going, sort of like setting up a financial statement. This revealed to me that the game cycle was a huge drain on me and that in retrospect I’d been more fulfilled when I wasn’t gaming heavily.
Change wasn’t easy, nor immediate. I did have a relapse or two, thinking that “just a little” over the line would be ok. The first time I paid the price. The second time I had advanced enough to feel what it did to me right away and stopped.
Now that that poison has had some time to work its way out of my system, I’m a lot better off. I devote myself more to what turns out to be a much more interesting pursuit: My own life.
It is important to note that heavy gaming, especially online gaming, is a poison for me. I have no doubt that other people could play online games and not have them turn bad, but I’m “built” differently.
So, what is your poison?
Do you have a poison that you have learned to avoid? Please share it in the comments!
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(Thanks to brookenovak for the image.)
