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I went to a casino. It was only my second time playing blackjack. It was fun. I won some money and ate a chocolate shake. 

I’ve been watching YouTube Tutorials and movies about casino games. “21,″ “Molly’s Game” and I’m watching “The Gambler.” 

As a debut poet, my collection, “If My Heart Could Talk and Other Poems” by David Sanford is self-published and available on Amazon.

My dream has never been to a millionaire to squander it on lavish, materialistic things. I just want to sell enough books to make enough money so I can start my own life. Have my own adventures without any parental control. I’m not some young teenager or college kid wanting to rebel against my parents, I’m a 30 year old man who wants to have independence and be financially stable on my own terms.

My fellow readers,

I decided to delete my Twitter and Instagram. Let me just preface this by saying my only intention for joining any platform, all the way back to Myspace, was to market myself. As a heart patient whose undergone five heart surgeries by age 10, I reached out to meet and communicate with other heart patients to compare notes and hear stories of growing up with something unique. For those of you in the dark, 1 In 100 babies a day are born with some form of Congenital Heart Defect. The psychological stress that one has to endure, constantly worrying about their health, let alone the heart, the most important organ in the body, can get exhausting. 

Despite my heart condition, I’ve had amazing experiences. My family is a Marine family. My father served for 25 years until I turned 18. Swimming with sea turtles is by far my favorite childhood memory. Climbing two volcanoes, meeting a Holocaust survivor in college, acting in plays before I was a pre-teen, wasn’t all bad either. I did all that without social media, and I enjoyed every minute. Never caring to post my so called perfect life for the world to see. But as the world evolves we humans do as well. So I got sucked into the digital scene. 

I never cared for politics. It wasn’t long after Trump won in 2016 that the vitriol came his way and anyone who supported him. He was a man in the public arena for decades and no one seemed to have a problem, including the Democrats. But 24 hours after announcing his candidacy, the media began assassinating his character, trying to convince Americans he was a particular type of person. 

Hearing the negative narrative of him for four years, most of it BS, caused mental health challenges for me. I couldn’t partake in the constant brutal slaying and stay on top on every new story.

A quote on a Ted Talk crystalized it for me. Bailey Parnell said, “In social media, we are the product.” Why do we teach ourselves and children to be independent, intelligent, ignore negative comments from bullies, and form their own identities, not allowing others to dictate who we are, and yet the opposite is true for social media? We post 37 pics of the same thing before posting the “perfect” one and then seek validation in a like, a nice comment, and a group who thinks like us? If we don’t, our self-esteem is fractured. I’ve come to see it’s all too time consuming and co-dependent. We are feeding a monster. A toxic relationship which is hard to break away from.