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me after the rage i can t really explain it somehow all the negative things i d been saying to him about my marriage suddenly seemed strangely inconsequential to me by the time i crawled into bed in the dark early hours next to my wife who had been my companion for more than 25 years now i had stopped doubting this was something worth saving it was worth making an effort she deserved giving our marriage my best shot even if my best shot right now might turn out to be a dud i knew now that i was going to try july 11 came and i had made my deadline by the skin of my teeth i cannot describe the relief i felt while we were rolling north toward the coast three weeks on the beach lay ahead of me the pressure that had become my constant companion was finally off my wife seemed to have noticed that the wheel had begun to turn she d started to believe in us again of course there would be no sl for 3 weeks either i was amazed when i realized that this didn t bother me at all i still didn t want to give sl up but staying away from it for a while was not such a scary prospect anymore sl wouldn t be going away while i was gone after all and afterwards when we got back i would be able to make a new start with a clean slate during the vacation i made two small but important decisions regarding the way i would re order my daily routine after my return they sound ridiculously simple and maybe they are the first had to do with my realization that one of the things that had caused me to want to escape from rl had been exhaustion so i decided to lower the bar a bit i reduced my daily quota a little not much just a notch but that notch made the difference between just a bit too much every day which translated into a burnout over the long haul and a very manageable amount of work the other decision was that i would no longer log on to sl first thing in the morning i set myself a rule no sl or other distractions until i had done at least half of my quota this sounds like a no brainer and indeed the idea wasn t new but now i saw a chance to actually stick to it i can t claim a perfect score but on the whole i kept the rule my work got done every day and within weeks it even got done in such good time that i had plenty of time left for other things boy did that feel good being in charge of my life again after feeling powerless for so long was one of the best experiences i ever had and it s still a great feeling even after i got used to it within months our bank account showed distinct signs of recovery too and the depressing cloud that had lain over our marriage for so long gradually dissolved after a year it now seems like a bad dream i still don t want to leave sl although the thought of leaving isn t really scary anymore what keeps me there is my friends especially my best friend renn and all the wonderful crazy people at the shelter my beautiful home at kingfisher island and the playful creativity but it no longer feels as if my identity is bound up with it dylan is here with me now so i can be whole without sl i don t make jokes about rl anymore though i d like to end this posting by sharing a song lyric that sums up how i approach every day nowadays and which i hope will be an encouragement for you i m not sure who wrote the song there are several versions of it around but i first encountered it in tommy emmanuel s beautiful a cappella version it s called today is mine when the sun came up this morning i took the time to watch it rise as its beauty struck the darkness from the skies i thought how small and unimportant all my troubles seem to be and how lucky another day belongs to me and as the sleepy world around me woke up to greet the day and all its silent beauty seemed to say so what my friend if all your dreams you haven t realized look around you got a whole new day to try today is mine today is mine to do with what i will today is mine my own special cup to fill to die a little that i might learn to live and take from life that i might learn to give today is mine with all men i curse the present that seems void of peace of mind and race my thoughts beyond tomorrow envision there more peace of mind but when i view the day around me i can see the fool i ve been for today is the only garden we can tend today is mine today is mine to do with what i will today is mine my own special cup to fill to die a little that i might learn to live and take from life that i might learn to give today is mine this is as far as my recovery had gotten by the summer of 2009 when the first four parts of this series were written i don t want you to stop reading here though as it turned out this was not the end of the story at all and if you stop here you will leave with a very false picture so please continue and read also part v bringing the story up to date and to a close 44 comments the slunkie factor tagged addiction second life sl slunkie snowglobe virtual reality virtual world permalink posted by dylan the slunkie factor part iii losses and gains july 2 2009 continued from here or start right at the beginning so it was time to take stock what had my second life cost me what had i received in return had it been worth it the most obvious loss was the financial one 2007 was the year in which i felt the full impact of my addiction from beginning to end when i tally up how much money i lost in that year alone by not working properly the bottom line is a five digit sum in euros and i m afraid the first digit is not a one add to that the last three months of 2006 and about the first two or three of 2008 and i m getting close to 30 000 before taxes maybe more if someone had shown me that number in early october 2006 and told me that was what i was going to pay for that free account i was about to open i would have thought only a madman could do something like that and that s only a number hidden behind that number are some of the most humiliating and devastating moments of my life starting with the moment i had to confess to my wife that there was no money coming in because i had been slacking for months the moment i had to tell the people at the tax office that i couldn t pay my taxes after their regular direct debit had been returned by my bank because of insufficient funds the moment i had to explain to my children that we weren t going to go on vacation in the summer of 2007 the moment i sat in my bank manager s office telling him i had been going through some difficult times but things were going to get better now the moment things hadn t gotten better after all and the tax office finally lost their patience with me and blocked my bank account the moment i shook the hand of the bailiff on my doorstep then in december 2007 came that final humiliating phone conversation with an insurance employee in which i had to insist that i really really had no choice but to cancel my life insurance which was the centerpiece of my old age pension scheme while he was trying to be helpful and made all sorts of alternative suggestions which couldn t work for me for reasons i didn t want to explain to him it wasn t just that i didn t work you see i also didn t open any letters if they looked like they might contain some official business or a bill or something all my affairs were in a state of total chaos and the worse it got the more apathetic i became and the more i escaped to sl where i didn t seem to have to feel all those negative emotions the second big loss was a little more than one year of my marriage i was lucky enough not to lose it permanently in the end but for about fourteen months or so it wasn t really a marriage one side of it was that my wife was despairing over my lack of responsibility and the financial mess we were in and on the brink of giving up on me for a time she had given up i think and of course she couldn t help noticing that my whole emotional life was happening elsewhere she never knew any details of what i was doing in sl but the outcome of it all was that i had withdrawn from her and she knew that all too well sometimes she had hope that all this would change other times she didn t what kept our marriage together during those times when she didn t was just the thin thread of the circumstances had we been living in a rented flat without kids i m sure i would have found my suitcase on the landing one day outside the door equipped with a new lock the other side was that for a while i didn t feel any motivation to save my marriage there were moments when i was secretly hoping she would throw me out i mentioned earlier that i had buried inside myself a feeling of being trapped and one of the things i felt trapped by as grossly unfair as that sounds was my marriage that feeling broke loose from its hidden depth with the fury of a volcano when i came to sl in her comment on part ii my friend riall hinted she was going through something similar and said sl was just an accomplice in that which certainly was true in my case i tended to use the word catalyst when i thought about it those destructive forces didn t come from sl they came from deep inside myself and sl was just the tremor that shook the rock cover from the hidden magma chamber i say destructive i had a friend in sl who tried her best to convince me that those forces were really liberating not destructive for a while i was really torn between those two ways of looking at it from where i was there seemed to be two roads into the future in terms of my marriage breaking out or hanging in there and trying to make it work and for a while i really couldn t tell which would be the better one each one seemed to involve throwing away a whole world of possibilities today i think it probably was both liberating and destructive it was a good thing that these feelings broke loose because otherwise i might never have been forced to face them and deal with them but i m really glad that their fury was contained my choice in the end was not so much about which road seemed to promise more satisfaction for me as about what sort of person i wanted to be ironically taking that road is proving to be a very satisfying thing that brings me to the third big loss the way i felt about myself the way things were i couldn t be good at anything in rl anymore i couldn t work i couldn t provide for my family i couldn t take care of my affairs i couldn t be a good husband i couldn t be a good father i was a total failure i felt dirty powerless worthless i don t think i was really suicidal but i was thinking a lot about suicide in those days i didn t talk about it or make plans or even seriously wish for it or anything but i thought about it i saw possible scenarios in my mind meanwhile old dylan in sl was successful charming popular true to my propensity to pursue good feelings and avoid negative ones these feelings drove me more and more to prefer sl to rl and so the spiral kept turning there were other losses too that summer vacation in 2007 that we had to cancel i wasn t reading books anymore i wasn t playing the guitar anymore i wasn t going to the movies anymore i d given up the volunteer work in my church which i had been very committed to before i came to sl my whole spiritual life took a major hit which it still hasn t recovered from as i wasn t even doing my work any thought of pursuing my own writing seemed ridiculously out of reach it seemed as if my life was reduced to feeding this body keeping it reasonably clean and grudgingly granting it a minimum of sleep all in order to drop it in front of the computer again as soon as possible so i could let my soul be sucked into the colourful pixel world in view of this huge price i paid for my sl you may be wondering why i would even ask the question whether it was worth it how could anything be worth paying such a price but it won t do to act as if sl had given me nothing in return after all there are people who are paying a similar price for nothing but drunken stupor compared to that i certainly got a better deal first of all i met a lot of wonderful people in sl and with some of them i feel i have formed lasting friendships you can t put a price tag on that then sl gave me opportunities to playfully pursue creative activities like making animations working with textures and pictures building scripting writing this blog that i would probably never have thought of without sl and above all sl taught me a lot about myself that i didn t know as i ve said before becoming dylan brought things about myself to the surface that i never thought were in me the impact of it could easily have been my undoing but nevertheless i couldn t ever wish these things would have stayed buried inside me maybe asking in hindsight whether it was worth it is the wrong question after all it s not as if i ever made a choice to pay that price knowing what i would get in return this is just how it played out a lot of it was my doing some of it wasn t many things i do regret some things i don t i had to grieve these losses like you grieve the loss of a loved one then my next task was to translate the question into the present moment is what i m doing right now in sl worth losing what i could or should be doing in rl right now and the task was to bring dylan back into my rl all the things about me he had brought to the surface they weren t going to be any use to me if they stayed sealed off in sl in a nutshell i had to find a way to make sl work for me instead of against me continuing in part iv a quantum of freedom 1 comment the slunkie factor tagged addiction second life sl slunkie snowglobe virtual reality virtual world permalink posted by dylan the slunkie factor part ii staying hooked june 27 2009 continued from here so i sat down and wrote some goodbye notes to my closest friends in sl i imagine writing a suicide note must feel a bit like that i d met some people during those few months who had become really good pals and in some cases i became aware just how dear they had become to me only while i was writing those notes it was a harrowing experience at that time i was in a very close relationship with a lady the particular nature of that relationship added greatly to my feeling that i wasn t in control of things anymore as if i had ever been and that i needed to break free she was living in northern europe so we were both in the same time zone she worked for a big it company but she called in sick quite frequently often spending weeks off work because she was suffering from severe stress symptoms at the time so she was both going through a very vulnerable time in her life and often had plenty of time on her hands during the day she also had some rl contact information so she could reach me even when i wasn t in sl for a change the result was that even on those days when i made some effort to stay out of sl and do my work instead most of the time i would receive a message from her sooner or later letting me know that she was feeling awful and needed my company usually i ended ...