By LuckyJimm

I'm still out of work but have been winning most days.  The swings are playing havoc with my emotions and I feel drained and detached.  My biggest win was Thursday before Easter when I won £455 across three sites.  That evening my Italian housemate came home with a bottle of wine and asked if I'd like to share it, since we were both going away the next day.  I said sure, and continued playing $1/$2 while talking to him and with a glass of strong Sicilian red in my hand.  I won a couple of big pots, and told him to change the password on my account until my withdrawal had gone through.  For once I did the right thing, and so I was able to pay off a big credit card bill.  My total is now +£700 across all sites since the start of the year.
 
I eat well last week, using the food from the butchers and greengrocers.  I went swimming a couple of times and felt much better for it.  I went to the fishmongers and struggled to cook a sea bream, which had been gutted but still seemed very messy.  On Friday morning I went home to my parents and didn't come back until Tuesday.  I left my laptop in London, intending a break from poker, and was pleased to get away from the Internet.  Instead I spent my time watching films, reading books, playing with the dog, eating, drinking beer with lunch, wine with dinner, and G&T in the evening, and talking to my parents.
 
I watched an old VHS copy of the devastating Jean de Florette and Manon de Sources, and read Mum, Can You Lend Me Twenty Quid, a mother's account of her twin sons' heroin addiction.  As well as showing me the strength of a mother's love and hope for her wayward sons and making me think how supportive my own mother is and how keen she is for me to find happiness, it made me aware of  the insignificance of my own patchwork of addictions, and how easily they could be overcome if I really tried.  
 
Meanwhile I've started smoking again.  I lasted 10 days without, for the first week of which I used patches and battled through the nausea and nightmares. Then late last night, my third day cold turkey, I snapped and went out and bought a packet of 10. I just couldn't handle the terrible depression - apparently this is a common part of nicotine withdrawal.  Being at my parents made it easy not to smoke, but it also meant I was eating too much and not exercising.  I feel bad to have smoked again.   I do hope I buy another packet of patches and try again.
 
The second book I read was The Hungry Years: Confessions of a Food Addict by William Leith, which I got through in half a day.  It's extremely well written and very funny account of the author's compulsive consumption of food, alcohol and cocaine.  He also describes a modern culture of excess where we are hungry for the things that don't satisfy us and crave the things that make us hungry. I loved this description of a childhood binge:
 
"I'm standing in my grandmother's kitchen, looking at the pie.  I begin chopping bits off, the chopping turning into hacking.  I know that I will get into trouble.  But for the moment, I am in an exhilarating new world; I have banished trouble. I hack, munch, swallow.  The apple, which has always had a pleasant mixture of sweetness and tartness, begins to lose its flavour.  It is no longer my grandmother's apple pie.  It is awesome, terrible, magnetic.  I press on.  I am like the murderer who, horrified that he has stabbed somebody, keeps on stabbing and stabbing, trying to reach the end of the horror."
 
He says he creates dramas by procrastinating and trying to do too much in too little time.  He describes rushing off a train that's about to leave, to the horror of his girlfriend, to see if he has time to buy a coffee from the other platform.   I recognised that impulse.  I used to live three minutes from a train station, but would always leave the house two minutes before the departure of the half hourly train.  Any earlier and I just couldn't leave; I needed that sense of urgency, to feel like I was risking something.  And I recognised so much in his stories of self-destructive binges.  The food, the drink, the coke (or in my case, the gambling) are all manifestations of the same thing.  Here, finally, was a book written by someone who's got the same problem I've got. 
 
Leith decides he needs help after waking up one morning caked in vomit and lying in a pile of CDs, having collapsed into a rack of them after spending the night snorting coke and drinking spirits.  The hostess walks in and draws the curtains, looking down at him contemptuously. The conclusion he reaches spoke clearly to me.  This is what he said:
 
"What I learned from seventy or eighty hours of therapy is that I'm frightened of certain emotions, and that I do compulsive stuff in order to stop myself from feeling these emotions.  In fact, I've got so good at doing the compulsive stuff that mostly I don't even feel the emotions.  The emotions, by the way, are responses to the rage and loneliness I felt as a kid.
 
But I'll tell you this. If you're a compulsive eater, or drinker, or whatever, you've probably been running away from emotions for most of your life.  And these are emotions you felt as a kid, when you were at your most vulnerable and powerless.  As an adult, you're not so vulnerable, not so powerless.  My advice: sit still, and allow the emotions to wash over you; they're probably less scary than you've always believed them to be."
 
This seems to be the explanation of all my problems, although I don't really know how to learn from it.  Leith wrote elsewhere "If you’re spiritually and culturally bereft, an addiction gives you a shadow-life — something to get up for in the morning, a network of acquaintances, highs and lows; it’s almost a job." 
 
That seems a very accurate description of the role poker plays in my life.  Perhaps in yours, too.