Present day circa 2 hours ago and I’m filling up my car with gas. I turn my head to the busy street beside me and get hit with the bright sun. I quickly close my eyes and scrunch my face. Is this what I’m doing to the metaphorical light that shines on me everyday?

Yesterday night my wife and I went to a comedy show along with her cousin and his wife. As I’m driving us she has loud music going and is singing along with it. She’s done up very nice and looks like a dream. I can’t help myself from yawning and feeling guilty about surely not being the husband she wants. My hair is a good bit longer than I’m comfortable with and I never really know what to do with it regardless of length. My skin is pretty bad from a more than average amount of acne as a teenager.

If you have pronounced scarring like I do and are self conscious about it, I’ve found that dermarolling gives really good results. I don’t really do it anymore at all for few reasons. 1 is it’s painful, I mean you’re inserting needles into your skin to the point where you’re bleeding after you’re done. 2 is its really hard for me to do quickly because I need to stop after each individual roll to sneeze. Something about the process drives my nose insane. But those 2 things I can and have looked past before. It’s really the 3rd reason that keeps me from continuing. If I’m trying to come to the point where I 100% believe I’m not my body, then participating in the whole idea of dermarolling or any thing that modifies your appearance proves mental unwellness.

There’s a reason monks shave their head/eyebrows and all wear the same outfit.

Still it’s very much hypocritical of me to not dermaroll because I’m not my body but still be very self conscious of my appearance. I tell myself it’s not ME being hypocritical, it’s just the person/mind I’m observing.

That doesn’t help at all on this drive to the comedy show. We’ve arrived but parking is hard to find. It’s dark and there are a ton of cars meandering around hoping for the parking gods to bless them. Just like me. Finally find somewhere and walk a bit to the entrance of the theatre. It’s bright over here and everyone is dressed nicely. I just wore a t shirt and basketball shorts and feel under dressed to watch SOMEONE ELSE perform as weird as that sounds.

The line moves quickly and we get seated very close to the back of the theatre. Joss initially sits down and looks up to see a tall man with hair that is impossible to see over. I switch seats with her and am more than happy to be on the end by myself instead of having to sit next to her cousin and his wife and wonder if I’m laughing at the right spots or even what my laugh will sound like to them. I don’t even mind having to contort my body uncomfortably for 2+ hours to see the performance. How insane is that? I would rather be physically strained than mentally bothered. I believe, well I HAVE TO believe that at the very least, the awareness of this insanity is the beginning stage of overcoming it. The more time goes by, the less I even want to be myself anymore. I don’t like it. The overly critical, self conscious internal prison.

Isn’t It A Pity?
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It’s been about 7 months since my last post. For complete transparency, I have given up on this thread. I’ve thought about it here and there, maybe at most once a month. Maybe less. When I’m sober I feel like a fraud, a fake. To post anything, especially thinly veiled advice. My wife Joss recently got her tubes tied. I drove her to the hospital, with our son tied up in the car seat in the back. I drive us there there in her somewhat new Jeep. (She traded in our newly paid off Chevy Cruze to offset the new vehicle.) Yes I did pay off 95% or so the old Chevy Cruze but this was 6 years ago.

Maybe I’ve already shared these details before. Maybe that makes me feel better about myself.

I’ve still been grinding at the 1/3 in Fresno I mentioned earlier. I’m at about 1100 hours played. 27.11/hr. I used to be proud of a number like that. Especially the first time I moved to LV to “make it”.

Anyone who grinds the smaller stakes I’d love to hear if you’ve hit the same wall. I used to love my game, I used to sit and have 100% confidence in my game. Drop 9 buyins? I dont give a ****, I’ve done my work in Flopzilla, everyone undercalls OTT. I barrell 100% until someone shows downs a lighter call down range than I estimated with the program.

Now I’m worried about balance against a guy who’s playing 70/15.

I try to remember that “everyone is just an aspect of myself, that as I give, so shall I receive”. I give at the very least 2.5/bbs per hr in tips per hour, if not more. I just felt every online grinder shudder, I know. But these are good people, they work hard. If their personality tells themselves that they are supposed to be a poker dealer, what am I supposed to say? Eff you?

It’s weird, it’s like the more I work on my game, the less I feel sure of myself. Sure I know I have an edge on the guy playing 70/15, but when he x/r’s the turn it’s very hard to pitch an overpair. I don’t wanna be exploitable against the worst guy at the table. I don’t have many poker friends at all. One at most, I’m sorry if I’ve already said this I just don’t remember the stuff I’ve written before.

I’ve given serious thought of becoming a plumber. I work and work and work at my theory game and it’s just so much to remember, even when I try to simplify situations. Poker was never my number one option and I think I still suffer from the mindset that I don’t need to learn much because my other interests will come through soon.

I went back to Commerce a few weeks ago. I played in the 5/10 on a Friday. It was a pretty rough game for a at best 2/5 grinder like myself. There was a few spots throughout the day but it was incredibly hard live opponents that I’m not used to. I bought $1000 despite the regs knowing it’s a $1500 max. I’ve only studied solvers at 100bbs so there ya go. Of course did the classic “barely studied strategy live grinder” of only 3b or fold unless button or BB. There was a 3 way pot that ran out TT554. Got checked to river and I have 33. I 40% bluff river guy, spot calls and MUCKS AT SHOWDOWN. Later I see spot sitting at 10/20. I guess mid limits live is still live AF but tougher than the average player expects.

I go through stages of clarity. I have times where I completely understand what we’re here for. Psychiatrists would for sure call these delusions. They are unfortunately few and far between. Especially if I remain “sober”. I try my best to remain neutral but it becomes more and more difficult the longer I remain sober. I get a longing, a lot of the time fueled by guilt when it is at the end of the day. A lot of people have reported the same feeling at same time of day.

I got into “A Course In Miracles” a few months ago. I’m always on the lookout for the next spiritual “high” because if I’m being honest with myself, that’s always what it is. It reminds me a lot of GTO, in that it is very extensive and extremely difficult to apply in real time.

Open A7cc UTG to $15. 2 weak passive players call. Flop J52ssc. Definitely a board that needs to be followed through on if you choose to cbet here. Unprofitable as a single bet bluff even against 1 rec player let alone two. I have a losing image so I check. Checks through. Turn 8c. Kind of the same situation as the flop, if you choose to bet here I think it’s closer to profitable than flop but on the whole I’d say you still need to bet blank rivers and bet large to turn a profit. I check, the first loose passive player (Mike) checks and the second loose passive player bets $25. I call and Mike calls. River 3s completing front door flush. I check, Mike bets $30. The other loose passive player folds.

I’ve played with Mike for 2 years now, sometimes as often as 6 days a week depending on how much I’m showing up to the casino. He’s the kind of rec player that you just love to have in the game. Doesn’t make many bets of his own, is happy to check call big bets on flops and turns with naked draws and never bluffs missed draws. When he does choose to bet he falls in to the bad habit that so many rec players have at small stakes, he sizes according to hand strength. Big bet is nutted hand, small bet is middling hand. Often will block bet oop if previous street was checked. He loses at a frightening clip in this game.

I quickly peek at his stack. He has about $220 left. This happens often in these small games. I will be mentally checked out of a hand, waiting for my turn to fold, and am woken up by a sizing tell. Had no plans to turn this into a bluff on the river and am sure this would be suicide if you plugged it into the solver. I assume solver would prefer to mostly fold but call once in a while with this hand to bluff catch against smaller missed flush draws. Our solver approved bluffs I think would have to be AsKx, AsQx, and our smaller missed flush draws sometimes.

The scouting report I gave on Mike is because I want to paint a picture for you. You’ve played against this guy. He’s everywhere at the small stakes. You’ve probably made a lot of money off of guys like this. You should be check jamming this river against this sizing. These spots are what makes your winrate 12bb+/hr in games where the rake and tips are absolutely killing you. This is exploitative poker at its very core. His sizing tells you he never has a flush here. He has a middling jack. He can’t call a jam.

He’s never made a light call for his stack in 2 years against me. I’ve printed again and again and again in spots exactly like this against him. I pretend to think for a few seconds and move all in. Mike takes around 30 seconds, puts all his chips into one stack, and pushes it into the middle. He shows J6cc and drags in a healthy pot.

I’m somehow not surprised. I’ve been getting snapped off for a month straight. I start to regret showing so many of my bluffs to the people I play with everyday. The rote nature of playing a game that I haven’t had true passion for in a long time causes me to try to find excitement and validation in any way possible at the poker table.

My last post was the first one I’ve made in close to a year and a half. 5 months ago my now ex wife filed for divorce. There’s stuff that I learned a little while after about her having another person involved. That’s what really shook me. I’ve written in here about how we had been on the rocks for a while. It was less about her leaving and more about the betrayal of trust. We’ve broken up before, sometimes even by my request. But never any shady behavior by either of us. It’s like she became a different person overnight. I assume that’s around the time she started being serious with the other guy. Towards the end I would ask her a lot about if there’s another person. Why she’s making sure she looks like a 10 everyday before work. Why it doesn’t feel like she loves me anymore. Of course that’s a hell of a hypocritical question when I would find myself holding her and feeling nothing. And then feeling the guilt wash over about how I’m so lost emotionally I don’t even love my own wife anymore.

You can feel when something shifts especially when you’ve been with someone for 10+ years.

I spent the first two months of the split living sometimes at my moms, sometimes at my dads. I would take 2-3 showers a day at my moms and just lay in the fetal position and sob quietly while the warm water would sprinkle on top of me. I was fortunate to have poker in the sense that I could take a lot of time off without having to ask anyone or risk losing my job. I didn’t play one session in those first 2 months.

I don’t think I’ve ever felt worse about myself than when I did then. I have always been a thin guy but I had ballooned up to 185 the last year or so of the marriage. I’m 5’ 9” so while that weight would be great if it was muscle, it just being fat classified me as overweight. For reference my kind of “normal” weight is 150. Looking back it’s easy to see how depressed I was but I never would really acknowledge it to myself except in fleeting glimpses.

I saw that my hairline had been steadily pulling back the last couple years and started to feel really gross and ugly. I had become a disgusting person. I dressed like shiiit and felt the same due to my horrible eating habits. My self talk had become unbearable the last 3 months of my marriage. I would often tell myself how boring and uninteresting I am as a person, how I have nothing to offer to anyone anymore. I had been feeling like a shell of a man for an extended period of time, even before my ex decided to leave me. It’s no wonder she started to see me exactly how I saw myself.

That’s the only way anyone can ever see you.

Rereading some of this thread is painful. I was obviously a very lost person. Don’t get me wrong I’m still lost. That hasn’t really changed. But some of the posts don’t even make sense with how I’d throw together entries after many drinks.

I end up losing 40 pounds in under 2 months after the split. I couldn’t eat anything. I would go days without anything more than a small apple. Which I would only eat to make my mom feel better about me. She and my sister helped me so much during this time. They patiently listened to all the stuff I had to dump on them day after day. They helped me feel better about myself.

I first was staying at my moms house but after a few weeks I knew I had to figure something else out. She has a small place, a one bedroom apartment, and is used to living alone. I knew I had to go to my dad, hat in hand, even though I had made a conscious effort to intentionally cut him out of my life completely a few years earlier. It was an incredibly humbling experience but I had no other option. I kept telling myself there’s a reason all of this was happening and that I should do my best to accept it.

At this time I had made the decision to join the police academy. I was trying to win my wife back. I wanted to prove to her I could be a grown up, the man that she wanted and needed. This was before I found out about the other guy that she continued to deny existed at all. I told my dad the academy was gonna be 6 months long, but the next semester didn’t start till August. This was probably near the end of May. They don’t pay you while you attend and I asked if I could stay with him until I got hired. I offered to pay rent and help with utilities every month but he wouldn’t hear of it. The one thing he takes the most pride in is being a provider. Even to his disappointing 31 year old man child of a son.

I went back to my moms after getting the approval from my dad to move in my few belongings the next day. He apparently saw how low I was because my mom told me he called her and said “Shane really needs our help right now.”

u need to get sober man that should be your focus, rehab, therapy, psychedelics, w/e. get sober then get pissed at yourself. somewhere in u is a man that is pissed off for being where u are. channel that ****. sorry for being harsh but I relate to your thread and am also talking to myself

No need to apologize man. I haven’t drank since the day my ex left me. I have a counter on my phone that reads 164 days sober. I hope you treat yourself kindly and with love even if it’s just for 30 seconds every day.

I look around the room I’m staying in. It’s my childhood room. The same one that I used to put my headphones in and play my guitar in front of the full length sliding mirror closet door. I would imagine myself on stage. Many of the songs that would come on I wouldn’t even know how to play. I would just mime it so it looked believable. Sometimes I would imagine I’m playing in front of my school, like at a pep rally or a talent show. And people would see me in a different light.

I pick up my acoustic guitar and start playing quietly to myself. I don’t want my dad to hear. He isn’t really into music. He caught his first wife (the woman he was with before my mom) cheating on him with a musician. He’s very much right wing, Fox News every night with dinner. Keep your hair short, pay your bills, don’t show your emotions. An old school man’s man. He was born in the 50s if that helps set the stage. Like I mentioned way earlier in the thread, I’m adopted. So he’s not my actual father.

I have to think we’re two of the most opposite people who have ever been forced to interact with each other for decades now. Still, I appreciate him helping me in such a bad time of my life. The least I can do is strum quietly.

I have a few melodies and half written things I’ve come up with over the last few years just messing around. I think to myself they must be alright if I haven’t forgotten them. I start to have a thought that maybe I should try to record this stuff. It’s not like I have anything else going on in my life. It would be nice to have a project to take my mind off the fact that my wife threw away our family and left me for someone else.

I order a mic online that my friend Patrick recommends and drive down to Guitar Center. Get all the stuff I need including an impulse buy $800 surf green Telecaster. I rationalize that it’s ok because I’ve never splurged on myself musically. Even when I played in my band years ago I never spent more than $100 on a guitar. Would just play janky Squiers. Had no money back then. As I’m getting rung up at the register, the two guys who helped me joke that I should remember them when I’m famous.

I start writing a lot. I feel like we need things to happen to us to squeeze out anything creatively. Whether it’s “good” events or “bad” events. Well this stuff was pretty clearly a “bad” event, at least in the short term. And I took full advantage of it. I wrote a lot in a short time, most songs dealing with the subject matter of my divorce.

I use the new equipment I have available and am less than pleased with the results. I don’t know how to mix anything, I can set levels decently but everything just sounds amateur and like shiiiiit. It’s still super helpful to be able to work with multiple tracks at once, learning harmonies for my vocal lines and stacking different guitar riffs/rhythms on top of each other.

I do believe in the songs I have whether that’s optimism or delusion. After roughly tracking 4-5 full songs and quick demos of the others I realize I can’t do this on my own. I tried watching some YouTube stuff but to be honest I have no interest in learning how to mix/master music. I’m just a songwriter albeit a novice one, all I want to do is create the song, track it, and have someone else bring the full vision to life.

Around this time, each day is pretty difficult to get through. I try to lift light weights and do a lot of running to prepare for the academy fitness test. Id just been sitting on my asssss for a decade at this point playing small stakes and refusing to follow my dreams out of a blind loyalty to who I thought was my soulmate.

Start looking around for studios to record my songs at. See a place nearby that looks perfect and try a phone call. No answer. Leave a message. 2 days go by. No response. Send an email. Nothing. Okay, that’s fine look a little farther, eventually find somewhere close to the casino I play at now. Set a day to come in. All of sudden the first studio finally calls back. I tell him I’ve reconsidered and will get back to him if I decide to record.

Just read through this thread! Wow what a journey. Can definitely relate to some of the things you posted. Wishing you all the best in the next phase of your life. Will poker be in it?