The Chip in My Hand

Only writing this because I'm three years clean now and my sponsor said it might help somebody else to read it. Had a gambling problem for about six years, the kind where you're not even trying to win anymore, you're just trying not to feel what happens when you stop. Was eleven hours into a session at the tables, already lost everything in my account, had a chip in my hand about to put my rent money down too. And my hand just stopped. Wouldn't move. Not a decision I made, not a thought I had, just frozen there for maybe ten seconds that felt a lot longer than that. Got up and left the chip sitting right there on the table, couldn't make myself touch it again even to cash it back in. Drove home without any idea what had just happened to my own hand. Three years clean since that night. Anybody who knew me before would tell you that's basically a different guy talking. Been to meetings, done the work, all of it real and all of it hard, I'm not saying a frozen hand is the whole story of getting clean. But something stopped that hand before I'd done a single day of the work, before I even knew I needed it, and I've looked for a normal explanation. Never found one.