Recent content by DublinDegen

saw those messages thousands of times over seven years... not once did one of them change a decision i was making... not once... the specific thing i remember about them: they existed in a different register from whatever i was doing when i saw them... like they were aimed at someone else...

interesting question because it exposes something i don't like admitting... if money was irrelevant i don't think i'd bet... not because the sport doesn't interest me... but because the thing that drives me isn't the prediction... it's the action... the stake... the skin in the game... the...

i'm the person these checks are designed for... so i should probably say something honest about whether they'd have helped... at my worst i was losing money i didn't have... proper amounts... credit card money... borrowed money... would an affordability check have stopped me? probably not...

no... not genuinely happy... excited yes... relieved sometimes... temporarily less bad occasionally... but happy... thinking back through the whole thing... the cheltenham afternoon in the pub with the moon horse... that was close... but the happiness was the pub and the people not the...

yeah... should have asked him how he did it... genuine regret about that... just a conversation i didn't have because i was too busy being contemptuous... cost me more than any losing bet...

yeah... the room being empty is its own kind of problem... working on filling it with something... slowly... different kind of something than more bets...

the lad from the shops... successful quiet winner i turned into a fraud in my head... he never knew... just kept quietly winning while i quietly resented him for it... all that energy... could have just asked him how he did it...

watched most of my losing bets alone... that's probably relevant... no counterweight... just me and the loss and the in-play market... nothing in the room pulling attention toward anything that isn't the outcome... makes sense that the in-play thing happened as much as it did... filling...

that's uncomfortable but probably right... my contempt for the consistent winner was about not being able to imagine being one... if i'd been capable of it i'd have just tried to learn from him... instead i made him a cheat... much easier...

the bet being live somewhere in you regardless of where you are... that's the constant state for me during bad periods... not just when something is actually live... even between bets... the low level monitoring never quite stops... just waiting for the next thing to be live so the...

felt contempt for a winning bettor once and it took me years to understand what it actually was... bloke i knew from the shops... consistent winner... not flashy about it... just consistently came out ahead... felt something toward him that i told myself was skepticism... he must be...

i watch everything... every second of every losing bet... can't look away... part of me thinks if i look away it definitely loses... if i watch there's still a chance... which makes no sense obviously... but the watching feels like participation... like i'm still in it... the worst is...

yeah... been thinking about the after for a while now... the number would have been easier... the after is harder... but i think the after is the right problem to be working on... slowly...

never had a shared number with anyone... but the therapist question is sitting with me... what would fill the space... slowly getting some answers to that... small ones... but more than i had before...

therapist asked me about a stop number once... i said i didn't have one... she asked what i'd need to feel like stopping made sense... sat with that for a long time... said i'd need to feel like i had enough of something else that i wasn't leaving a gap... she said that was the most honest...