Should I stay or should I go?

Again let me start off by apologizing for another rambling post.

So it's been a few weeks now, since I've put a stop to me playing FFXI. And for the most part its been going smoothly. I've been going out and experiencing life away from the game. I even had a few friends convince me to go to, what they call a lan party, which I've never heard of until now. A party where everyone brings their laptops and plays games all night, kind of similar to what I used to do.. only the games they played were mostly first person shooters. Which I horrendously sucked at, but it was still a lot of fun. I did get some respect back when we played Starcraft, since I had more experience with that game.

However, every night when I get home, I look over at my computer and still have that desire to log on. To join the fantasy world of Vana'diel, to get on and connect with a completely different group of people. People who I've known and played with for years, my friends who I'd be happy to see and (most of them) I'm sure happy to see me. It's hard not to log on, just yesterday when I was briefly on to deliver some gil, it's hard to ignore my friends saying they want me to come back. It's hard to walk around for awhile and not wish I could be part of it again. It's hard listening to people asking for help and knowing full well I could be the one to assist them but resisting the urge to do so. And this all happened during the 15 minutes I was on that day.

I mentioned this in my last post

"Play casually? That's not possible. There is absolutely no way I can play FFXI without being hooked and wanting to play more. Even when I tell myself I want to stop, I can end up playing into the late hours of the night and into the next day. The game just has that much of a hold on me at times."

I still agree with this to some extent. But I have begun to wonder, maybe it is possible to balance FFXI and the other things in my life. If I can not log on FFXI to play for this long (3 weeks now), it shows I do have some willpower against the game, even though that desire to play is still there. But between work, going out, and once September comes around, school, will playing FFXI even be an option? If I can stop myself from playing FFXI now, I should be able to do it once school comes around if the need arises.

I don't know anymore. I knew by not playing, it would make me want to play more. But I always thought as I began to do more and more things away from FFXI, you know in that so-called real world, I would want to play less and less. For awhile that was exactly the case, but now I seem to have regressed back to an earlier stage in the withdrawal. I'm beginning to think I should just start playing again until school rolls around this September. Then work on getting off the game so I don't make the same mistake I made last school year. But we'll see.

Doc and I sightseeing atop the mountain in A. Chasm