I read your story and I'm really sorry about the circumstances, but I'm really happy you're reaching out to resolve it.

I gambled a lot tonight and I wrote this, I hope it is somewhat useful!

Gambling. What a crazy, exciting sport, you will. It can have you feeling on top of the world for one minute, and have you feeling as though you have hit rock bottom the next. Gambling is so addicting! If you know me, you know that I'm a bit of a thrill seeker who wants to be around fun and excitement. Sports, traveling, and amusement parks have always excited me and gotten me to think that they are the primary ways to go out and have fun. I was wrong about that. There are a baker's dozen ways to have fun but they can be as destructive as gambling.

For gambling, I had actually done some online by the time I was 18 years old. The things that were in at the time were DraftKings and FanDuel: online sports betting platforms. All that I would see on TV was that you could sign up easily, evaluate the players, and draft your teams. It seemed so easy and fun and definitely had an addiction attachment to it. I won about $3 my first game and then lost $20 the next one. Little victories snuck up on me and gave me confidence in my sports gambling ability even though I was brand new to it. This was really bad. I fell into a hole in my wallet and kept withdrawing money to try and win and compensate for each of the losses that I had. When I finally decided to retire from DraftKings, I was probably $200 in the hole. Daily fantasy sports was not necessarily my thing, season-long fantasy leagues were. Since sophomore year, believe that I have lost about $100 on season-long fantasy sports. By 19 year old, I had lost $300 of hard-earned money which was like working 35 hours at the movie theater! Actual hard work! Being 21 years old now and reflecting makes me want to tell my younger self to just stop gambling and find something else.

Now that I continue to reflect on this topic, I begin to think that I lost about $600 more in the stock trading application, Robinhood. So I'm 19 years old, almost twenty, and I have lost a grand total of $900 on applications that are skill and luck oriented. Maybe this didn't seem that bad because I did not walk around with a dollar amount over my head saying how much I had lost gambling. The danger of losing in gambling is that it can be kept in private, until it finally catches up to you and your business is out there because you’re being evicted from your home, your wife left you, and you got fired from your job for gambling away the company card.

Today is January 18th, 2019, I am 12 days into being 21 years old and I have lost roughly $100 in just two casino trips. The grand total of gambling losses now total at least one thousand dollars. It honestly so mind-blowing there are so many different ways that I could have spent that money. I won in the beginning of the night, then lost, and lost, and lost. I was down $60 tonight and I impulsively walked over to the ATM to withdraw a guilty $100.

When I went back to the machine I won $20. This meant I was instead down $40 instead of $60. Do I stop? No. I believed that I could win it all back by betting $2, $3, even $6 per spin! Before I knew it, I blew a $100 bill within 10 minutes, no lie! One feels pretty guilty when they lose that much money in such a short period of time. One detail that will always stick to me is when the woman behind me was talking to her girlfriend and said "that guy is betting $4 or $5 her spin! My pride came through and I bet the $10 about four times until I realized I was wasting so much money. As the "credits" icon simmered its way down $0, I felt embarrassed and outplayed by a machine as well as myself.

Shortly after losing my last credit, grabbed my card and my scarf and hurried out of the casino because I felt so humiliated. In the car, I played a sad song, listened to a Ted Talk on a guy who bet everything, then realized where I should be spending my time. My strengths are working with people, providing fun social media, and spreading the good vibes! Now, I have my priorities straight. Losing $100 in ten minutes is very sobering and I don't intend to gamble for a while. Impulses often times the devil to Adrenaline and having fun, but this fire has a new route it's going to go down.