It is often said that everything happens for a reason, whether we like it or not. Then there is the "everything happens for our good" and the "everybody that comes into your life comes into it for a purpose". I know better than to question the wisdom of the wise ones on these thoughts, but I have always thought, "What a load of crap!". In my not so years on the spherical planetary body called Earth, I have met quite several people, marked not for their numbers but as much as for their peculiarities.
Seth was a brother of a friend to a dear friend of mine. He was a weird one, but not the type I would have anything to do with on a regular day. I met him while visiting my dear friend, and since that was a regular occurrence that sometimes culminated in my sleeping over, I was forced to have interactions with this set fellow. Over time, one could say we developed a relationship of our own.
On a fateful day, he was on his phone doing something that seemed strange to me. Curious, I had to ask what. I received a crash course on sports gambling that day. The impulsive young man that I was, I immediately took a chance at it, and as you might probably imagine, it was a total failure. I lost my entire stake that day. I thought that was to be expected and went again the next day and the next and the next.
Image Source: unsplash.com
It wasn't long before I was now teaching my tutor different ways to Sportsbet, and playing far more than he was. In the following months, he would decide to stop betting together as he had concluded that the house always wins regardless of odds, prediction skills, or outcome. But I didn't, I kept the torch burning, and I kept playing. Months turned into a year and year into years, and with each one that passed, I was getting more enmeshed and addicted to this dark world of the financial bottomless pit.
In those years, I would lose so many things as a result of what had come to be a sports betting addiction. The future was looking bleak. I was in a mess, a pit that I couldn't stop digging, but I couldn't get any help from the guy who gave me the shovel, for he had left me a long time ago. This was my reality until I met a Godsent in the form of the one I now call my partner. She would patiently let me burn through my addiction, but when she thought it was enough, she intervened.
"Babe, why are you doing this?" she asked. I knew what she meant because this was not the first time she would brooch the subject. What do you mean, I replied. "Your gambling is not helping us. It is taking money that we so dearly need from us and giving it away, not to mention the psychological and emotional effect it has on you whenever you lose; which is almost every time by the way". "What hurts babe is not just the money you are wasting even when we are starving, but the fact that when you have lost, you become emotionally unavailable for the rest of the day or even the week. Is that how you intend to run our family" she said.
At that moment, I knew something had to change, not because she just wanted me to stop gambling, but the fact that despite my many flaws, she still envisages having a future with me, a family, a forever after. If she wanted that with me after all my failings, I was going to do everything in my power to be better, to clean this mess, and do right by the woman who loves me more than life.
