Hello all. I'm a 22 y/o student from Sweden.
Yesterday I decided to fix my life. I intend to keep a 'progress' journal on this site both to keep myself honest and as a way to not forget why I'm on this journey. Written below is a rambling summary of my experience with games, and how I fell down into what today seems like a near bottomless well of my own creation to drown in. It is my intention to make daily updates to this journal for the foreseeable future. Should I fail, then I hope that some others can use this as a record of what not to do. For I fear that there are no second chances for me this time.
I've been having a love-hate relationship with games as far back as I can remember. In the beginning it was mostly love, in the last 5-6 years of my life it has decidedly turned into a most sour and bitter relationship. To find a starting point for where games began to take over my life is impossible. They have been with me my entire life, yet as I should have grown out of them I learned that I couldn't. Games and escapism made me fall behind on my grades in pre-highschool and landed me in a bad highschool. Gaming during highschool almost sabotaged my chances to get into university. The state exam we have here in Sweden allowed me to slide into one of the more prestigious engineering schools (KTH or Royal Institute of Technology) without having more than middling grades. It has never been my ability to perform that has been the issue, but my tendency to procrastinate, escape into games, putting my head in the sand, and what seems like a will-to-self-destruction have made me always fall short in most things in life.
In University, I promised myself to turn my life around and to become something. I tried to leave games behind and largely succeeded at this. But instead of studying, making real friends, getting into fun and productive activities I replaced games with endless scrolling through fanfiction websites. When asked by others how I was doing in school or life in general, I made up lies to hide my lagging grades and other failings. At all points, I had a plan on how to fix my life; yet I never acted on them for more than a week at a time and the mountain of lies kept on growing. To keep up the illusion of all going fine, I moved out with little in ways of supporting the new expenses. Almost immediately after I moved out, I returned to games and it devoured me. Still, I told lies and pretended things were fine. Lies to my family about how I was doing. Lies to the friends I didn't deserve at University, where I pretended to be someone I was not in an attempt to fit in. Lies to myself, where I pretended I was on top of the world when in reality I was only stacking the house of cards ever higher. Eventually the house of cards fell down, as they always do. Had to quit University early into the third year after I hadn't even finished the courses for the first one. The small trust I was given by my parents to help me when I moved out had been spent on bills and all manner of unhealthy activities. I managed to get into about £10000 of debt with the state in an attempt at keeping the charade going. My grandparents who lived in a different province took me in even after my behavior and record of failings, which I did not deserve. There under their supervision, I managed to get a semblance of structure and stability back in my life. After a few months, I obtained the prerequisites in order to start attending the same university again last autumn in pursuit of a different engineering degree. I moved into a new apartment, this time living on handouts from my parents. The idea was to achieve the prerequisites to get back on the state's student loan program and fund my living expenses by these. I succeeded on that point, unfortunately that allowed me some breathing room from reality and I took the opportunity to get into games again.
Here I am, about six and a half months later. Back into my old habits, the first opportunity I got to procrastinate was used to plunge myself head first into destructive habits. From my previous unhealthy 92kg of weight I've gone up to 101kg. I lost the right to student loans again due to failings last semester. My apartment for the last five months can best have been described as a miniature junkyard. My friendships have completely sizzled out. Family relationships are damaged. My studies are almost down the drain. Finally my finances are at the spot where I can only keep the apartment and food on the table for another month. As you and I can see, this is not a good situation. A situation entirely of my own making. Sporadically I scream out of nowhere, I sometimes think I am going insane. I'm not sure if I hate myself, sometimes I think I do but to be honest, I'm not sure if I'm able to summon up the necessary emotions to hate myself for long.
I've decided that I cannot go on like this. That change is required in my life. Today I've taken the first few steps to stop the inpouring of water into the ship. Tomorrow I'll do my damnedest to plug the holes in the ship and see if its course can be corrected before it hits the rocks. I hope you'll forgive the poor formatting and storytelling-ability in this first journal entry; it is 3:00am here in Sweden and I'm not sure if it'd be wise to wait for tomorrow to write.
Things done today:
Cleaned the apartment (mostly).
Cleared away the mountain of dishes.
Payed outstanding bills.
Blocked fast food delivery websites (so I start eating healthier).
Deleted all my games on my laptop and phone.
Sent in request for the deletion of all my gaming accounts.
Made the first of hopefully many journal entries.
Best regards,
A Fellow Addict