Hello, everyone.
I welcome you to my blog and another wonderful edition of the hive learner's featured post. Addiction, I think, is something many of us have had to deal with at some point in our lives, and some of us have been able to come out of it, while some people still battle with it. Doing something at your own will is the best thing that can happen to you and self-control is underrated until you have something you are addicted to, something you cannot control when and how you do that thing; rather, something else takes charge and gets you to do that thing whether you like it or not.
People are addicted to different things; some are addicted to gambling, some to alcohol, some to hard drugs, and so many other things that one can actually be addicted to. Addiction, in simple terms, is simply not having control over your urge to do something; it is more like whenever that urge comes, you can go to the extreme to just see that they are satisfied or their demands are met, or else you will not know rest or peace. Addiction can ruin a life, which makes dealing with it before it gets out of control very important.
I had to deal with being addicted to sports betting some time back; it was so bad that I could stake both my school fee and my house rent on a game. One time I lost my school fee to sports betting, and I had to raise it back on my own because my parents would not want to hear any excuse because they know they had already settled that. I suffered through that session, but funny enough, that suffering was not enough to deter me from sports betting; even after all the suffering, I was still fully engaged in it, and whenever it is the weekend, any money I have on me, whether it is mine or not, must be deposited to any betting platform just so I can place a bet.
Sometimes before the weekend I can swear not to do it, but once it is the weekend I find myself even doing more than just betting, but betting recklessly and placing multiple bets, and in the end I lose all of them. It got to a point I even started borrowing money to bet because of that urge and the fear of missing out. Once addicted, you hear that voice that tells you to place a bet this weekend and you can recover your losses, and with that, you find yourself wanting to recover your losses only to lose more.
It got to the point of borrowing from my younger brother, who was the fourth child of the family, and at some point it started leading to some form of disrespect, and that is when I started coming back to my senses. If I was borrowing for a good reason and getting disrespected, it would have been a completely different story, but I was borrowing just to gamble, and it was at that point that I started advising myself and also realized how much hurt and harm sports betting was doing to me both emotionally and financially. If I lose, I start to feel my heart beat way faster, then my finances keep going down instead of going up.
I started withdrawing slowly without even waiting to be told to do so, and slowly I started regaining control of when I gamble and how I gamble, and today I don't even do it anymore. So I think addiction only has power over us because we let it, and the moment we decide to take back that power, it loses control and charge over us. It is a choice to let addiction rule over you and a choice to take back charge.
Images were generated using chatgpt.