So long, farewell, auf wiedersehen, good night

On October 10th, of 2014 I joined SG. Today I must leave for a bit after just over 2.5 years.

Some of you may know me, and I know that for some of you I have developed a great deal of admiration and respect in that short time.

However, over the last couple of months I have been grappling with one of those bitter truths we never want to accept. I have a lot of faults. As some of you may know, I was a prison guard for nearly fifteen years. What most of you do not know is that the career (along with many other factors) drove me to drink excessively. That affliction cost me my job in mid-2012. It was the end of the Great Recession, and there was little work. That was especially the case for a recovering alcoholic - especially since I still had not accepted that I was an alcoholic and obviously was not yet in recovery. The handful of jobs I was able to land were short lived. Who knew people did not want you to show up sweating booze all day (yes that's sarcasm)? My family and I ultimately lost our home. I didn't accept my condition and begin sobriety until January of 2013. I finally found steady work again in July of that year.

So back to the bitter truth; after a year of full time employment I stumbled upon this site from a reference over at CheatHappens.com by a friend there. I got hooked pretty early on. Don't get me wrong, I like winning, but the real hook for me was giving. I loved the thought of some person I did not know at all getting a game they may have really wanted... and thinking that perhaps that made their day... or even their week. That's a large part of the reason I was usually pretty picky about what I gave away. There was a short period I veered from that goal, but the enjoyment I got was less. So I went back to trying to give primarily AAA games or games that were high on wishlist counts. Sadly though I have come to the realization that this giving (for me) has just become another alcohol.

There have been too many months over the last two years where I dumped money into GAs that should have gone to rent, bills, food, and other necessities. I'm not going to say that SG is my only vice (not at all), but what I have come to realize is that I am just replacing one terrible addiction with others, and those are causing just as much damage to my family as the bottle. What's worse is that since I've been sober the whole time I've seen all of it, but still kept going. Last year we lost our apartment because I kept going with my spending (again, not just here... but eating out, buying video games for myself... and other things that served to provide immediate gratifications). My family and I have fortunate enough that friends took us in, and those friends have been unfortunate enough that I have taken advantage of them and not stopped this train wreck.

Now it has to stop though, and part of that is stepping away from here. Again, most of you don't know me, and this message isn't really for you. However, to those of you that have been influences on me here I did want to say thank you and so long for now. With any luck I will return in the not too distant future and be able to participate in moderation, or maybe even just leech for a bit (doubtful, I still have an enormous backlog I'm trying to quash). Hopefully there will still be a place for me then... though I suppose there isn't really anything that could stop me aside from cg (whom I give a great deal of thanks to!)

I'm certain there are some that I'll miss here, so please forgive me, but I wanted to drop special thanks to the following for making this place a bit more awesome from my perspective:

View attached image.