Nothing Left for the Inner Child

...I have no relief for my sources of entertainment. Nothing. None.

Ever since I left my concept of video games in the dust, I have no ground at all. Nothing to stand upon, nothing that brings me the joy that I once held from playing hours of video games. I find within myself a void, a longing for something that isn't there. (I would mention dieting, but I would need a more somber reference to base it off of...)

My life has become like the black screen of a television that lost power. However, I now face a dilemma that I would not have been able to observe had I been where I was three years ago: I can now look to see whether I want to stretch my legs and go for a walk, or try to find the reason for the television's cessation. This still leaves me with the question: Is there something out there that I can use to healthily replace my joy from video gaming? Where does my skill lie beyond the realm of the virtual? Is there a path to enlightenment that leads away from video games?

I have looked time and time again at reasons why I would not want to program video games:
- I would be destroying the very essence of others' time just as my own was almost destroyed years ago
- I would lead myself slowly into destruction again; I know that, were I to resume my video gaming habits, I would either repulse it again within minutes (by nature of ethics), or be enslaved perpetually. Nothing short of a miracle saved me from where I was, and making them would not only enforce me playing them, but spending hours upon hours working with them


I look at how my grades in college were affected by my choices to play video games, and I ultimately failed two courses that I should have excelled in: computer engineering, and physics. I saw many things that I now see as almost a self-brainwashing - I submitted a music CD to my English 1010 Class years ago, and all but two songs within the CD were directly related to video games. (Even one of the songs could have veritably been found within a video game, but there was only potential to become soundtrack material there.) And, yet again, I find myself reflecting upon my Missionary Farewell talk, which I found to be only two minutes long. I spent more time talking openly about video games in the M.T.C. than I did reading my 20-pt. font of a sheet of paper's worth of scripted material.

I needed to get away from my favorite haunt. There was nothing more dastardly than the path that video games were dragging me downwards with. I would not like to repeat what happened so many years ago, but I do know for myself that addiction to video games was not the end - I would have starved by lack of attention to bodily needs had that been the case. No, my spiritual needs were dying much faster, and had there not been (for lack of a better term) divine intervention, I would have been on the route to much more destructive habits.

Now that I have expounded a portion of my travels into the difficult past of my once demented memories, I can place before myself a question: What now? I don't know which way I can go to find something that would replace my natural capability for video games; only mediocre substitutes exist, which simply lead me to cups of happiness containing only drops of joy when I wander in thirst.

Please comment if you have any thoughts on the matter.

John