Twenty-two years ago, when my mother was dying, I discovered computer solitaire. In those days it was pre-installed on Windows systems and this was some years before I switched to Mac. I can’t remember how I discovered the game, only that I played it obsessively for hours at a time. It had a little clock and I got my time per game down to one minute ten seconds.
It helped to numb out the wreckage of the moment. It was something I could “win”. And no matter what, all I had to do was push a button and a new hand would pop up. In the end, I uninstalled it and never really thought about it again.
People often speak of an “addictive personality” but I am not sure that is quite correct. I grew up around drugs. And there were times when I would drink too much alcohol. But I was able to push these things aside when the time came.
When I moved in with my late husband in 1997 his house was what was called a party house. And I went along with it for about 3 months. At that point I set a date, August 1st, to just stop. And stop I did. I have not been in the presence of powder drugs since then. It took another 8 weeks to get all the tweakers out. But they did leave.
Alcohol was a bit different. I just slowly stopped bothering. I would ask myself what I really wanted, and it was always water and never booze. I will still have a small glass of wine in a social situation. I never get the urge to drink the whole bottle.
Process addictions are different. I don’t shop till I drop. I have no inclination towards addictive sex. But I know that gambling is a danger zone. I don’t really enjoy the casino atmosphere. It is meant to scramble our nerves and disorient us, and it does. If I let myself have free rein in a place like that I would be in deep trouble. I always took out exactly one hundred dollars in cash, and put any cards away. When it was gone, it was gone.
But the solitaire on the computer did not involve money. The only expense was the time wasted, and the mental effects that could be compared to a type of coma. I was able to just stop, cold turkey, and never think of it again.
Well, almost never. I am writing this now because in my news feed on Facebook an ad popped up several times over the last few days. It was for a solitaire app. I found myself following along and kibbitzing.
I searched for solitaire on Google and a plethora of free online versions popped up. It was 8 P.M. when I started playing, and 1 A.M. when I finally stopped. That was Saturday night. On Sunday morning I woke up at around seven and after drinking half of my coffee I thought I would play “just a couple of hands”.
The coffee went cold. I missed lunch. All of a sudden it was dark. I made a fire and had a plain dinner and there I was, playing “just one more”. My arm was getting sore. When I closed my eyes I saw cards. Patterns of red and black.
I know what draws me in. The numbing out is part of it, but so is beating the cards. So is the pattern recognition.
I deleted the search term from my history and will block that ad if I see it again. This one 24 hour experiment proved to me how powerful the urge for one more really is. I am going to buy a deck of cards and try playing that way. I believe the nature of the computerized game is a large part of the addictive property. It is worth testing my hypotheses. And when this long isolation is over I may just go looking for a game of poker (played with real cards and other people) to satisfy the healthier aspects of this interest.