Ronale's 100 Day Journal

[Ronale]

Journal Entry_001

04.23.2017

Day 7

 

This is weird. Writing a personal journal about my own life is not something I ever thought I’d do. But here I am, sitting in a coffee shop, writing this shit down.

So what am I doing here? Why have I chosen to even visit this forum and join it? I love playing video games. It’s been a staple of my life since I was 6 years old in 2002. I’ve spent over 2/3rds of my life doing something I loved. I started friendships and have managed to keep them since 2000, specifically 2 of them. We bonded over our love of videos and have discovered more and more ways to play and more games to experience together. So why do I want to remove something so large from my life that strengthened relationships with my 2 closest friends and others I’ve made along the way?

I honestly had no intention of quitting video games prior to a week ago. I haven’t had any relapses from past attempts or made any efforts to quit before then. And that’s because even though I have my fair share of issues and problems that everyone else here has, I didn’t see gaming as a contributor to that. It’s always just been something I liked to do; it was a hobby.

Or so I thought….

Time for an unneeded history lesson. So 6 years ago, when I started high school, I was chock full of motivation. I went to high school that was out of my former district so I knew nobody, which meant I could make a name for myself and have it be whatever I wanted. Naturally, it was someone who was smart and played lots of videogames. Then slowly it became the smart gamer who liked to slack off in school, then the one who had to take summer classes for failed courses, to finally the one that had a real chance of not graduating despite having ACT scores that were highly above average (32 if I want to be exact). I was the embodiment of someone who was smart but didn’t bother doing anything with it. My GPA suffered immensely. I graduated with a 1.9 and was rejected by my state college that had a 97% acceptance rate. Up until now, I had never had a blow to my self-esteem as large as this. But even still, I never considered video games as an issue despite spending hours every day playing.

For the past two years, I did the same shit I did in high school. Went to class at a community college, did the bare minimum and spent the rest of my time playing video games. And as before, my GPA is mediocre at best. Now the thing about high school is that you see your friends every single day so socializing wasn’t a huge issue. But once college starts and everybody starts their path to a career, you don’t see your friends every day anymore. And when you spend your days just gaming, you spend much less time with them and those friendships start to fizzle.

I could go two weeks without seeing any of my friends. Just classmates and co-workers. But I had gaming, so that was enough dopamine for me.

But something started changing over the past year. Videogames became less of a hobby and more of a habit. It was just something I did now because I was used to it. But then I started noticing that when things wouldn’t go my way, I’d get more and more frustrated. Then I started getting mad. And then things started to get thrown, and smashed, and punched, and kicked. I used to be someone carefree, someone who could go with the flow no matter what happened. Whether or not things went my way, I could see a way out. But I just get mad now. I get mad at the simplest things and I truly realized this when I threw my controller at my fan the last time I played Halo 5. I broke the fan and the controller.

Right after I picked the controller up and saw the sticks on it were broken, I realized that I truly hate myself now. I hate who I’ve become and what I’ve done to myself. It was like that realization of what I've become hit me like a 2-ton pickup I wasn’t like this before and thought long and hard about why I’m like this now. My family had been saying I had an addiction for years, but I always dismissed it thinking they didn’t understand that I just loved gaming because they had never touched an Xbox. It was exactly 1 week ago that I looked at myself and finally accepted that I had an addiction.

So I quit. Immediately. I found a subreddit called r/StopGaming and lurked, reading posts about people in similar situations and ones who got themselves out, realizing more and more that this is who I am and this is my situation. So I’m 7 days “clean” now.

I don’t know how I feel about this situation to be honest. I have so much time now. I literally don’t know what to do with it. I don’t exactly know where to go from here, but I’m confident I’ll figure it out soon. I’m just glad my days are going slower now. Maybe I'll go catch up with some friends.

Christ, how’s that for a first journal? The only time I’ve written this much was for essays. Hopefully I’m doing this right.

Anyways, I’m glad I could join this community and hopefully I can stick to my guns and see this through.

 

We’ll see.

[Cam Adair]

Hey Ronale, great to have your journal up here. Really good first post and you have shown tremendous courage opening up not only to us here but also with yourself. That's the biggest key. WE're here to support you.