cammyhammy

Hey. Just checking in after a few month hiatus and came across your profile. I'm sorry you're dealing with depression, it sounds terrible. I'm glad you've come to the realization that escaping to video games is a symptom of a deeper problem than video game addiction. That's an important breakthrough. I wish the best for you, Mattso.

This is tough. I'm back for probably the fifth time because it's the weekend and I'm facing some emotions I don't really like. I feel so alone. This is a serious problem. I just hung out with my friends last night and hardly twelve hours later I feel this terrible pit in my heart. The true problem at the core of these little emotional symptoms is probably my emotional repression. I've been thinking about it a lot lately. Even though during the school day, I hang out with my friends for hours, and outside of school we hang out quite frequently, I still feel so alone. I really don't know that there's anything wrong with my friends. Reading through my last couple of posts now, I realize I may have over-exaggerated their negative features and not given enough consideration to all their positives. They're interesting. They're funny. They're not entirely without conversational ability or emotional intelligence. I think the problem here is probably me. I'm really not just saying this, I just feel (ironic, I know) that right now it's my feelings that are screwing me up in life. I don't really feel a connection with any other human being alive. I feel as if I'm living in a bubble, cut off from everything that could provide me the fulfillment I need to survive. I look at my family (who I still dislike, but not as bitterly as I seemed to a few posts back) and I feel very, very little. Sometimes I think that if my parents died, I'd be a bit sad, but that's about the extent of it. My little sister is constantly bordering on being intolerable. She is irritable, over-sensitive, lazy, deceitful, and somewhat addicted to her tablet. She has her moments where she's not bad (by most people's standards), but the problem is, once more, my emotional repression. When she gets really excited about something, I just can't get myself to feel the same way. At some level, I'm even irritated by her childish excitement. This is unreasonable and potentially destructive, I know. I really should be able to 'vibe' better with her (and with my family as a whole, honestly). I did some very cursory research on emotional repression and I fit so many of the symptoms it's almost certain (to me, a non-psychologist, to be fair) that I have serious emotional repression issues. I: - rely on escape hobbies, like binging YouTube videos - struggle with feeling intimacy - have serious self-esteem issues - feel lots of mental fog and a lack of clarity in my thoughts - cannot stand being alone - don't feel certain emotions (namely love, human to human connection, sympathy, and empathy, to give the ones that I can think of now) except for tiny snippets - have parents who very rarely show genuine emotion and who suffer from self-esteem issues I'm going to look for some books on this because I am underage and I do not want to get a therapist. I KNOW a therapist would be the best option, but I don't trust my parents enough to let them in on how I feel. If any of you have gone through something like this in the past and have overcome it (or just want to talk about it), please comment below. Hope you guys have a good week (<-- should mention that I say this because I know it sounds nice, not because I legitimately hope you have a good week. I cannot bring myself to care about how your weeks go, sorry.)

Hey, John. It's been a minute (or a month) since you've posted. You doing alright?

I agree wholeheartedly. Before I even begin to think about having kids of my own I am going to take a good long look at myself to see if I'm fit to do so. I refuse to burden my children with self-esteem problems that stem from my own insecurities. Staying away from gaming has been pretty easy, to be honest. It's not one of my bigger vices anymore and I've played maybe an hour or two in the last six months (got bored really fast, video games are no longer appealing to me). I'm sorry it took me so long to respond, I haven't been here in a while... I'm feeling pretty low right now so I figured I'd post. It's the weekend and Jesus Christ do I feel lonely. I hate this. I hate the weekends. I used to look forward to them every day of the week because weekends meant video game binging time and escape from real-life problems time, but that's no longer the case. Now I just sit in my house with my family (who I have problems with, refer to my last post) and do absolutely nothing of value (or at least it feels that way). Every once in a while, I feel really bad about my life as a whole, like I do now. It's times like these when I come to this forum to rant. I know few people read my posts, but it feels nice to vent. I'm pretty sure I need to find a new friend group. I've been thinking about this a lot lately, and it seems to me that I've become complacent with the friends I currently have. I've been friends with them for three or so years and it's just so much easier to stay friends with a group that you don't really like than to form a new friend group. There are a few things that have contributed to this realization. 1. My friends are toxic. I don't know if I've mentioned this in previous posts, but I am a teenager. I don't know if it's a normal part of teenager friend group 'culture' because I haven't had any other real friend groups, but my friends can get really toxic. We (and yes, I mean we because they've influenced me to do it as well) call each other terrible names and say it's comedy. One 'friend' will tell another 'friend' that he is shit, that he should shut the fuck up, that he is socially retarded (this is one I received a couple weeks back that hurt me). We laugh on the surface, but there's only so much laughing you can do at jokes like this before it starts to permeate your brain. Even though I know they don't REALLY mean it, it doesn't help me to become the person I want to be when I'm constantly told I'm in some way insufficient. We also gossip behind peoples' backs. We spread rumors and lies and deceit under the guise of entertainment, never acknowledging that our chatter can hurt people. I should mention, my friends aren't always toxic. We aren't constantly being mean to each other. However, almost NEVER are we kind to each other. When I was young I heard that friends were supposed to be supportive and kind. That friends were supposed to be there for you when you needed them. That doesn't happen in this 'friend' group. I think we're a loosely connected group of people who have similar tastes in humor. 2. We hardly even have real conversations. We just make little jokes about one thing or the other and it's really not a cohesive means of communication. Oftentimes we'll just sit at a table and we'll all be on our phones because we're not good at making conversation with each other and don't know what to say when we get on to any topic that isn't a joke. One of my BIG goals (values? I don't know how to categorize it because it doesn't have a definite end) is to be really good at making conversation. I think to be a good conversationalist is to be good at making connections with other people. This is something I've been working on lately by randomly having conversations with people at school. That said, it really doesn't help me to improve when my entire friend group (who I spend 90% of my time with) doesn't make normal human conversation. I feel like if I had a friend group of normal people with whom I could regularly make normal conversation, I would be much better at it by now. 3. They're immoral. I really want to be a good human being. I've lately been using a test of 'would I be happy with my future daughter dating a guy like me?' to determine if I'm on the right track. The answer right now is no. Not because I'm a bad human being, but just because I've conceded too much. I've conceded to having a friend group I don't like. I've conceded to staying where I'm at in my life and not going up. I've conceded to doing a lot of things when I deserved better. To get back on point, it's really hard to be a good human being when all your friends are not good human beings. A few of them shoplift. One of them just got in his third accident. They pay so little mind to their schoolwork and their academic success that it's appalling. They are constantly looking for the easy way out. They say that you're the average of the five people you're closest with. If that's true, then I'm in trouble. On a related note: 4. I don't have connections with any of them. I think this is related to the fact that we never have real conversations with each other, but I don't really feel emotionally connected to them. I call them my friends because we joke around and we spend time together, but we're nothing more than that. I think friends are people who you joke around with, but more importantly, I think they're people you support and are supported by. I think they're people you care for and who care about you. I think they're people who notice when you're not acting like yourself and ask, without judgement, what's wrong. I want a friend group that motivates me to succeed. I want a friend group that inspires me to be the best version of myself I can possibly be, and my friend group right now just isn't that. They don't motivate me. They have no motivation themselves. This post is my way of recognizing that if I continue to surround myself with people who don't want to improve themselves, it will be significantly harder to improve than it needs to be. As usual, there's significantly more I could write. I am constantly thinking such things about my life. The trouble with this one is that it's not easy to make new friends, especially when you've become so entrenched in your current friend group. Despite this, I am determined to try. I'm not sure what concrete steps I could take to achieve my goal. Perhaps I should begin by making a list of people at my school I feel I have the potential to connect with. If any of you have any advice, please respond below. I hope you are all doing well.

It's been a while. Here to rant a bit, complain about some of the things that I feel aren't going so great in my life, maybe talk about some random subjects. I've been feeling pretty isolated lately. I'm in one of those funks where I dislike my family intensely. My father is apathetic, stupid, and has anger issues. His self-esteem is absolutely terrible; he agrees with my mom on every subject because he's afraid to give out his true opinions. When he's ordering something or explaining something or really engaging in any kind of speech with people outside his immediate family, he uses a higher pitch voice with an odd and aggravating inflection. I don't know the purpose of him using such a tone (perhaps he thinks it makes him sound more article? more professional?), but it is indicative to me that he does not feel fully comfortable speaking as himself and has low self-esteem. He really is no father figure at all. He provides no real guidance, and any tips he does dispense are given to me and my siblings as if we were very slow children. God it fucking irks me to hear someone who is so much less intelligent than me and so much less aware (and so much less modest haha) speak to me so condescendingly. I realize I shouldn't let him aggravate me and I'm working on becoming calmer and less reactive to outside forces, but at present it really is painful to interact with him. As for my mom, she has low self-esteem as well. Literally every time she speaks to anyone who's outside our immediate family, she laughs after every sentence. It's fucking disgusting. You don't want to laugh. You don't find whatever you said or they said funny. Why do you laugh? She tells me and my siblings all the times that she "tells it like it is" while lying through her teeth during every interaction she has with a stranger in order to curry favor with them and to coerce them into forming a favorable impression of her. She's hyper-protective of my little sister and tells me off whenever I make even the lightest tease. I genuinely feel bad (or probably should, see my paragraph on emotional repression below) for my little sister. She is allowed to eat very nearly whatever she wants and is being shielded from the real world. The odds of her having low self-esteem are enormous. She already confesses to having insecurities about her body, telling us that her "belly is so large" and that she's "so fat". As for my friends, the more I hang out with the more I realize just how incompatible we are. They're the "bad boy" kind of guys and although I have no problem with breaking rules, I still feel so inhibited around them; I feel like I can't be myself around them. We hung out on Tuesday and it just didn't feel right. I didn't feel liked by them, I didn't feel socially ept. I know these are just remnants of my now lowered (but ever-present) social anxiety, but it's hard not to buy into them when none of your jokes land and none of your conversations with your friends feel right. I think I may want to branch out and find new friends I can relate to more. It'll be hard, but I think it'll be worth it. The more introspective thinking I do, the more I realize how bad my emotional repression is. I feel so inhibited in my day to day life. I cannot remember the last time I felt love, sympathy, or any real deep emotion besides hatred in real life. It was my dreams that made me realize I have been repressing my emotions (though how I repress them or when I began is beyond me). Very rarely, only a few times a year, I will have dreams in which I feel so much emotion it's overwhelming. Just the other night I had a dream that a friend of mine died, and I weeped and moaned and sniffled for a long time. I felt genuine pain because he was dead. When I woke up, I tried so hard to cling to the emotion, but within minutes it had slipped from my grasp. Even when the emotion isn't happiness or anything of the sort, I want to feel it. There is a queer joy in feeling any emotion at all. Without emotion, I feel very disconnected from the people and things around me. I seriously have no clue what to do about this. It feels like I've entered "get a psychiatrist" territory, but I'm not comfortable asking my family to do that for me for a number of reasons. I've been using my laptop a lot lately, and I know it's not good for me. I've been splitting my time about half and half between coding and watching Youtube. Even though I know coding is an intellectually stimulated process, there's something about staring at a screen for long periods of time that's just not good for me. I get this terrible mental fog in the back of my head that makes everything more frustrating than it should be. After I write this, I intend on doing something besides staring at a screen for a while. Anyway, I hope you are all doing well in your lives!

This is probably a big factor in our development and our recovery from addiction. How many of us can honestly say that we have a supportive family or supportive friends who are willing to give us strength while we improve ourselves? I'd wager not too many. The unfortunate caveat of having been addicted to video games is that those closest to us likely saw us devolving into addiction and allowed us to do so. This means they probably don't realize the severity of our addiction or how badly we want to make ourselves better and they aren't going to support us because of it. I'm glad you've come to this community, Fawn. I hope you find some of the support you desire through our posts and replies. If we cannot find people in our lives that, to use your words, are strong and who can show us the positive way forward, perhaps we're duty bound to become those people ourselves. It's a struggle, no doubt about it, but I think it's a struggle we have a responsibility to endure if we want to help people like us.

It's funny, I thought I'd post more once I got a laptop. Seems I was mistaken. I fear I've been making the same mistake with programming I typically make when getting into new hobbies; I invest too much time too quickly and become disinterested. I'm used to applying myself to easy challenges and making progress quickly. Perhaps it's a remnant of my time playing video-games when I could "achieve" great deals within hours. This is not the case with programming. I am frequently confused by programming concepts when I first encounter them and in order to make complex programs I have to spends hours doing research and going through the trial and error process. Programming feels less fulfilling now than it did when I first started. I think I need to take a step back and keep completing small challenges before I make large scale programs. I'm so glad I got a job. The other day I made lots of good conversation with my coworkers. Not good because it was super in-depth or personal (I struggle with getting to this point in conversations), but good because I expressed myself well and felt comfortable not only with making conversation, but also with being myself and not engaging them in conversation when I didn't want to. I've read some books on making conversation to help myself improve, but I dislike and disagree with the philosophies of the books I've read. They really seem to promote the idea that "the world's best conversationalists are the world's best listeners." They focus so much on how you should ask questions and prompt them to speak more about themselves, but even when I ask open ended questions and try to relate to people so as not to make the conversation feel completely one-sided and interview-like, I am not successful in conversation and I don't feel like I'm expressing myself well (I come off as boring, plain, unoriginal). I'm told that people like talking about themselves, but christ if most people don't eventually get bored speaking just about themselves. I need to inject more of myself and my opinions into conversations instead of asking questions and feigning interest in them. If anyone has any good books on conversation that aren't centered on the "just act as if you're interested in other people and prompt them to speak about themselves", PLEASE recommend them.

Thanks, fawn. I appreciate the support. That said, I'll keep this one short. Got a laptop, partially because I want to bring it to school to learn programming during my free periods, partially because I want privacy to go onto forums like this and pursue self-improvement without fear of someone watching over my shoulder. Found out there's a term for what's happening to me in the nofap community. It's called "flatlining" when your libido just goes down the drain. They say it's because your body isn't used to not having the dopamine porn provides and that eventually you will break out of it. I am still a bit worried about this, and it doesn't help that a few of them said it took them years to break their flatline. Yikes. I need to stop buying things. I bought art supplies then got bored of art, I bought a guitar then got tired of music, I bought weights then got tired of weightlifting. I've wasted a lot of money and now have plenty of things to do. For that reason, as soon as I buy wallpaper engine today, I am not going to buy ANYTHING unnecessary for a year. Exceptions - when I go out with friends and we get food, small gifts for others, etc. Besides those, I will not purchase anything I do not NEED or that is above $15 until 8/24/2019. I have plenty of things to do, plenty of materials for getting into hobbies. I need to stop buying. Hope you guys are having a good and productive week. ?

I absolutely agree with this. Addiction is in the eye of the beholder when it comes to things that don't seriously negatively impact your life. I've often found that my reaction to my addiction is more damaging for my mental health than the addiction itself. Video games weren't good for me to play. They made me angry and dissuaded me from engaging with other people. However, video games weren't the ones that called me stupid and weak and undeserving of happiness. That was me. I shot my self-esteem in the foot, not video games. If you really think you're overdoing something, don't do it as much and don't make it out to be such a big deal in your mind. You're right, ordinary people get addicted to things all the time. The difference between us and them is that we consciously recognize our addictions and often hurt ourselves because of it. GL, brother.

Where you @, Mattso? It's been a couple weeks, you doing alright?

I love how to the point your posts are Mohammad, but know that you're free to explain your feelings about gaming or your journey in greater detail if you'd like. Good luck!

Come to a bit of a realization regarding addiction lately, thought I'd share. I've been struggling to improve my relationship with my phone and to decrease my phone use. I haven't been very successful in the long-term. I made my phone gray-scale so I'd be less interested by colors, I removed games from my phone, I set limits for my usage. None of this helped for more than a few days, if even that. Then I figured it out: physical obstacles are not cures to our addictions. Making a physical barrier between me and my phone, even if it was as extreme as locking it in a safe for a month, would not solve my phone addiction. In the aforementioned hypothetical example, when the month was up and I took my phone out, I would've just become addicted again. Instead of trying to physically remove my access from my games, my phone, or any other vices I have, I should instead seek to understand why it is I am addicted. I understand that phone addiction and video game addiction and porn addiction are wrong for me. I can give you reasons. It's by a lack of awareness and thought that I pick up my phone, play video games, and watch porn. For this reason, I'm now trying to establish a habit of mindfulness in connection to these areas (phone and porn usage especially). I've gone so far as to take my phone lock-screen wallpaper and write "why?" on it to remind me to question why I'm picking up my phone every time I do. Unfortunately, I feel I may struggle with breaking my porn addiction so far as this strategy is concerned. Hormones literally change the way my brain operates. Every time I break my streak, I think about if I should beforehand and convince myself with logic that appeals to my desire in the moment that porn isn't that bad for me, that plenty of successful people watch it and do fine. Of course now, when I'm thinking clearly, I understand that porn is bad for me, that it warps my perspective on the value of women and that it rewires my dopamine receptors. It's difficult to remind myself of this when I want to watch it, though. Rode my bike this morning before work, felt good man. Starting coding a bit, learning Python. I'm struggling with it right now and it's hurting my ego. I can't help but feel stupid when there are tons of people on forums explaining issues I don't understand (like the use of the self argument in classes, for example) with what is, to them, the simplest of language and I don't understand it at all. Think I might be diving in too deep right now. I'm gonna tone it down and learn more slowly so I don't get discouraged. I'm sorry this post is so long. I know a lot of my posts are kind of long. The wall-of-text discourages people from reading my writing. In fact, if you've read through this entire post, I commend you on being one of the few that did. I want to have thorough, constructive discussions on recovering from addiction and on general self-improvement, but I never really have. Half my motivation for writing these posts is to make my thoughts more clear to myself. It's easy, being addicted, to get stuck in a grey area where you're not sure if you think your addiction is wrong, but don't know why. I write these posts as reminders for myself, my reasoning for quitting video games and for doing the things I do. I wish I had a friend that is committed to self-improvement like I am. All my friends couldn't care less about self-improvement. If any of you are in EST and wanna keep each other accountable for our habits (i.e. not playing video games, meditation, exercise, whatever), let me know and we can set something up. Hope you all have had a good week! Anyone got plans for the weekend?

First and foremost, I'm sorry if what I wrote a few days ago or am writing to you today seem like attacks. I really don't mean for them to come off that way, it's just hard for me to consider the way someone might interpret my writing. That said: I'll agree with @JustTom in that if you believe your usage of what I called "weeaboo" language is okay, you should continue doing so. Your opinions and perspectives, so long they are founded on reason and have been carefully considered, should always trump that of other people, especially concerning your own well-being. That said, I stand by what I said and still think you shouldn't use it. I really have no statistics or names of psychological conditions to back up my claim that it might be negatively affecting your growth, but I can't help but feel as if it is. For one thing, anecdotal as this is, every person I know that uses language like you do is legitimately socially stunted. I am not joking. The people I've met at school that use language like yours are the people who never raise their hand in class, never communicate with anyone outside their 2-3 person friend-group, never really grow as a person. Perhaps using such language is a symptom of a larger issue and not the cause, but I'm not sure what the cause would be. Another thing I have against language like that: the gamequitters philosophy is really based on becoming less "escape" prone in your life. We are here because we use video games to escape from problems we have in real life. Your language is a reference, I can only assume, to anime communities and anime itself. I know this is a controversial opinion, but I think by using words like yours you're subconsciously indulging the fantasy of anime worlds. You're "escaping" in a sense to a universe that's brighter and simpler than the one we know. By using the language as if it is a standard, you're getting away from your real-world mindset, if only while writing your post. I could be completely off. I don't know you in real life. I don't know how you feel or if you have fantasies of living in an anime world. However, if you can relate to at least one piece of my thinking, take some time to consider why you use words like "uwu" and "hehe". Think about how you feel when you write those words as opposed to how you feel writing more accepted words. It's awesome that you've decided to take up a walk in the morning. For the first time in a while, I went on a bike ride this morning before work. It was really refreshing and nice to appreciate nature and to feel so connected to the world around me. Fingers crossed that both you and me can keep it up.

@fawn_xoxo checked out those Socratic worksheets, I'll try one out the next time I find myself polarizing an issue (like gaming, nofap) that isn't quite as one-sided as I'd like to believe. I appreciate the advice. There's this belief central to Stoicism that it's our reaction and our interpretation of things that is the cause of our problems instead of the things themselves. I think this is especially true for those of us trying to break our addictions. Whatever we were addicted to was likely bad for us, given that we were trying to rid ourselves of it. However, by criticizing ourselves when we relapse and by being harsh toward our past selves for being addicted we make the problem much worse than it likely is and make it much harder to quit. Too bad it's not as easy to implement beliefs like that into our daily lives as it is to type them out, eh?

Congrats on starting your journey to recovery. One piece of advice I might want to give you: I think it might be wise that you stop using what I'll call "weeaboo language" for lack of a better term. Randomly interjecting phrases like "hehe", "ehe", or "uwu" makes it hard for me (and maybe for others, I haven't heard anyone else nag on this so I don't know) to take your post and you as a person as seriously as I would like to.