Month: March 2014

Video Games: Check!

World of Warcraft
Warcraft

One major coping addiction I have had while recovering from bipolar was video gaming. Though I have played many games, the biggest culprit of them all was World of Warcraft, where I accumulated well over a year’s worth of playing time alone (yes, logged in and playing the game time, or /played). My video game addiction lasted for years, and I brought out two things from that: 1. I met a few fantastic people online as friends, 2. It kept me out of more serious trouble.

However, the aftermath is hard to deal with. I’ve always liked video games since I was a kid, and the more I played them, the more I wanted to play them as well. Feed 60-80 hours a week of game time for years and that desire to play grew uncontrollable. However, I do not wish to talk about breaking the addiction. I want to talk about where I’m at now.

On occasion, such as these past few days, I get bit by the video game bug. I came home from a wonderful trip out of state to visit my sister and was a little depressed about life after reality sunk in. I found myself playing a lot of video games and started to panic, as I didn’t want to end up back at square one. I decided today I needed to journal about all of this, first of all, and meditate second. Both seem to help and we’ll see how I maintain these next few weeks in avoiding too many video games.

Long sessions alone playing video games only has one benefit: Fun/escaping. However, when I play for a long time, the game can become mind-numbing and lose its appeal… yet I still keep on playing. However, the longer I play them the more nothing is accomplished. Nothing to put down on a resume, to share with other friends outside the game, and they cause many serious problems if left unchecked.

 

I need to remind myself some things about what happens when I let the video games spiral out of control:

-Employment troubles

-Breakdown in fitness and activity, poor health

-Stuck in the house a lot

-Lose friendships, shallow and strained relationships

-Lack of pursuing interests and writing

-I start to live in my own little world

-Disrupted routine, sleeping, and eating patterns

-My inability to move on in life

 

And, what do I want in life that video games could easily kill?

-Financial independence from my parents

-Employment

-Continue pursuing my writing ambitions

-A steady routine

-The ability to travel and go places, to do and experience more

-Have good friends and relationships

-Enjoy everything that comes with health and fitness

-Self-discovery, personal development

 

I realize this is not true for some or perhaps most people who indulge in video games. It is a reality for me, however, and I must be careful. I have more self-restraint in this area than I give myself credit for. I just need to be wary and keep it under check.

photo credit: Sergey Galyonkin via photopin cc

The Key and My Heart

Key

The key to understanding my psychotic breaks as well as much of the physical universe is understanding the fallacies behind infinite regression and infinite progression. The universe, including you and I, started somewhere and are going somewhere, and those somewheres were the true mysteries that my mind has been exploring.

***

For one, the key is a skeleton key to understanding everything in our experience. It unlocks whatever door you want to open and puts it in a frame of reference: the mysteries of the mind, heart, the self, existence, consciousness, mathematics, distinct objects, behaviors, the past, present, future, all within the known physical and everyday universe – and more. I’ve gone into specifics before in my journals – how the basic idea is necessary for our sort of existence out of endless possibilities, going from completely unstructured to structured and unstructured at the same time, and infinite to finite and infinite at the same time.

It is also a skeleton key to understanding my psychotic breaks. The concept applied to everything my mind could conjure while in those episodes and gave reality a frame of reference. The key kept me from slipping over the edge in my breaks. It was always there and prevalent that everything is significant and contributing to the series of events unfolding before me in my mind, starting from the Big Bang. Everything is significant and is tied together. One example: there cannot be a single person or tree without the metaphysical existence of the number 1 in its essence tied in with each individual person or tree, or each atom that make up the person and the tree. All of these things came from somewhere at a certain point and end up beyond the event horizon at some point.

***

During  my 2nd break in 2009, a care worker on the ward, whom I identified as a Christ (many there were a Christ) asked me, “have you read?” He handed  me my Bible, and I sensed to open it up towards the back of it and Revelation showed up. I read on about the scrolls and the key of David.

The care worker pulled out in his hand a physical gold key, identified it as mine, and he used to unlock the powers of God. He used these powers to fix my heart and the heart of a young woman I fell in love with on the ward. The heart I had in the other realm nearly exploded in my chest from beating so hard. I almost died. I remember clearly, after a thunderstorm brewed and became violent in that realm, an awful lightning strike happened while that worker was restraining the woman. As the worker looked in my eyes, sacrificing part of himself, there was a jolt to my heart when the lightning flashed in the room and a crash of thunder at the same time. I heard the woman cry out in joy, “You fixed me! You fixed me!” I had no idea how important that moment was. My heart no longer threatened to explode. It calmed down in my chest and hurt a lot.

The worker there, who was himself in Christ in that realm, strode over to my side of the ward and forcefully asked me, “Who fixed your heart?” I wanted to take credit, or give credit to that woman, my parents, or that he did it… I could feel the frustration in his mind in my own. He yelled at me, “GOD DID!… God did…” There was a long pause. I thanked the worker after he said, “You’re welcome.” It hadn’t sunk in yet. I climbed into bed and got some precious sleep. I was never the same after that incident.

photo credit: ul_Marga via photopin cc

Book – Connections by: Mike Hedrick

A book I ordered from Amazon arrived today and I enjoyed a read of it. Connections: The Journey of a Schizophrenic by Mike Hedrick. The book can be found here:

It provides a genuine glimpse into the mind of someone with undiagnosed schizophrenia. Connections were everywhere in the book, from colors to Facebook posts to random music on his iPod shuffle to people and events. All of them may be small and insignificant to the naked eye, but in his world, everything has meaning, often a double take, behind it. Every move he makes is watched, every thought monitored and the government is pulling the strings around him. A sense of desperate purpose and an unknown mission drives him blindly forward.

It’s a terrifying, fascinating world that Mike Hendrick brings the reader into. I could relate to a lot of what he described right before my two psychotic episodes, and it brings out the schizoaffective part of my disorder along with my bipolar. It is a vivid illustration of another person that was like me!

It’s truly inspiring to see a work like this published. I will be rereading it for sure, and it gives me a lot of things to think about with my own work.