WilderDaze

So this week I finally got the verdict on my ADHD assessment and it resulted in a diagnosis called combined moderate ADHD. It means that I have both the inattentive and hyperactive characteristics, and that it has a substantial impact on many aspects of my life. It didn't surprise me honestly, as I've come to realize through my therapy sessions that there were many signs over the years. It's honestly a relief to have a final answer to this question now. I look forward to getting to know myself better and to find the right tools to deal with addiction, depression, exhaustion and various other related issues. No doubt this has played a major part in my affection for video games. As I have a combination of autism and ADHD both of these have gained something from me being absorbed by the digital world. Games have been the ultimate arena for logic, structure, reward and constant wonder and exploration. These are things I seek in my everyday life and that makes me stay motivated, and it's not hard to see how video games could provide a concentrated form of this experience. Going forward I will apply for habilitation with an initial focus on addiction, as this has become such a big part of my behavioral patterns. I truly want to learn how to do things in moderation, if there even is a chance. If not, then I will focus on making strategies for a better life in a completely different sense. I have to realize that I might have to give up things, as with video games, since the cost of trying just outweighs the point of it all. I've never discussed this with a therapist in relation to ADHD so I hope it will lead to better guidance and a greater understanding of myself. I'm staying hopeful!

I've been struggling with my energy levels lately. I think my brain is trying to find homeostasis, after such an intense period of indulging myself. It almost feels like I'm having a cold, and I don't much like it. Work feels much slower and painful than usual and I mostly just want to get away and do something else. Most of all I don't want to socialize, which is very hard to achieve in my field of work since I work with a lot of people. My days off are mostly spent lying on the couch or going for simple walks. It will have to do for the moment. I've also been continuing my philosophical journey and came across a video by Alan Watts the other day. It's about staying true to oneself and don't get carried away by too much responsibility. In the end life is supposed to be playful and lived in the moment. Being an addict this seems like more of a challenge as we work so hard to try to learn responsibility and discipline. Our reality quickly becomes rulebound and very much controlled as we try to stay clear from pitfalls. But at what cost? Like he says in the video a cat never reflects on why it is chasing a mouse, it never evaluates how it can chase it better or what the meaning of it is, it simply chases the mouse because it is a cat. I feel like all this personal journey stuff has taken a toll on my more playful side, and it hurts me to realize this. I know that I can't let go completely, because it will probably lead me down bad roads where addiction eventually follows. Though I wish I knew how to get to the core of myself sometimes without feeling like I'm afraid to make the wrong turn all the time. It feels like I'm constantly fighting against something, as opposed to welcoming that which is nurturing and good. I know that I feel the most alive when I just become one with my surroundings and let my curiousity take me somewhere unexpected; when I just forget about what I have to do and just allow myself to feel. But it is so hard to achieve that autenticity in everyday life, as so much of it is occupied by mundane responsibilities.

It's been a while since I last posted. I've been occupied with work and various other challenges in life. Right now I'm trying to save as much money as possible so that I can pay off some debts in the near future. I think I've decided that I'm going to move sometime within the coming two years. Having visited my family this summer it has become clear to me that my life would improve in a lot of ways if they were closer to me. They also reside in the southern part of Sweden which is a much better location to be in if you want to make use of several airports for travel. I would save a lot of money and the threshold for actually stepping onto a plane and go somewhere would be lower. In terms of my daily struggles I've sadly started watching porn a lot these past two months. It started when I visited my family this summer as I was a bit overwhelmed (as usual) by the change of environment and all the stress surrounding it. Constant socializing, not having my usual safe space, not knowing all the locations etc. It usually starts with me breaking my food habits, and after that masturbation usually follows. Of course gaming was a part of this as well back when I gamed. Having removed gaming from the equation my other addictions of course become more alluring. Currently I'm on the right track though, having been off my addictions for a couple of days now. I notice that it becomes easier and easier to get back on track as my decision to live more in harmony is being further reinforced. I just have to learn how to manage these feelings of stress and anxiety that come sporadically. I know it will do me good if I can power through them and just await the next day.

Today I deleted the last data I had on my phone, my laptop and my stationary PC concerning gaming. It was a big relief, but also felt a bit scary. I think the hardest part was deleting the long list of games I had put together in my notes app. I really made an effort organizing it and coming up with various interesting games of different genres. To me that was half the fun of gaming; just organizing and checking off boxes. I know this is a slightly autistic thing as I do the same for various other things in life. As long as it doesn't become the main priority of engaging with stuff I don't see any harm in it. I also went and saw the new horror film Weapons. What a refreshing surprise that was! I can strongly recommend it to anyone with the slightest interest in the horror genre. Especially if you like creative and disturbing horror, in the likes of Hereditary and Us.

I've been slowly migrating to Youtube Music these past weeks, having used Spotify for over a decade now. Partly because I wanted to try out something new (and to get rid of the damn commercials) but also because I noticed that so much of my library and history consisted of gaming soundtracks. Even though I deleted that stuff from time to time I still had to deal with the Wrapped playlists and what not. It just felt much easier to jump over to another platform and wipe the slate clean. So far so good. Song quality is better (to my ears) than Spotify, and there's also a lot more songs to search for. I like that you can basically convert any video to a music track and put it in your YTM library. I miss some features from Spotify of course, like some of the sorting options, but it's not that it's worse, it's just different. I'm excited to explore the app some more over time and build a new library of favourite songs. 🎵

It's very hard to look at yourself objectively and to make the right kind of conclusions. More often than not you need the help of others, and most importantly professionals. I never even entertained the thought of being diagnosed with something up until I reached my late 30's. But this was also because I was living in a bubble most of the time, where all I did was to sit in front of a screen all day and losing myself in entertainment. Even acknowledging those activities as problematic at the time took a lot of inward searching and effort, and today there is no hesitation at all that they were very destructive to me. But this insight also came from seeing myself outside of the bubble for the first time, and the slow realization that there was a fundamental issue that created the bubble in the first place. Most of my family are still in their bubbles. Some of them try to break free, and when they do you can see that it takes a lot of effort to not just repeat the patterns in new problematic ways. My mother is open to the discussion of diagnoses, but she's also in a lot of denial and has perhaps the most apparent bubble of all my family members. When I visited her this summer we actually watched a program about autism and ADHD, and she recognized a lot of things in herself. She just has her own way of expressing them, like complaining about bad memory, being unable to gather her thoughts or general sensitivity to social interactions. She's just completely clueless on how to act on her knowledge, and how to start breaking the patterns. 60 years of living the same way will do that to you I suppose, seeing how hard it was for me after "only" 30 years.

What i boils down to is managing my energy input/output in the best way possible. Even though I can excel at the work I'm doing right now, in the end it's simply too draining for me. I cannot keep up with the demands put on me for so many hours a week, especially if it involves a lot of social interaction (and it almost always does). I had my peak during my university days, where I could work on the weekends and then put everything aside the rest of the time. It really made me shine, as I could concentrate my energy a lot more and make the most of it. I was also very happy with it as my self-image got a great boost. But this is also the ongoing struggle with my brain. I can't seem to be satisfied with anything in the long run; I always want a change of pace or a new environment to explore. This is why video games never became boring to me, because they always offered that solution, for better or worse. Finding a new kind of job is less about finding something that I'm very good at, and more about finding something that gives as much energy as it takes from me. At the moment it feels like I might have to explore the possibility of working two different jobs simultaneously, or to shorten my working hours to maybe 75%. I need the extra time off, and I need the variety of both mentally and physically exhausting tasks.

So I'm starting an ADHD screening tomorrow, finally. I think all the time I spent with my family this summer really made me see things more clearly. I can see that many of my siblings, as well as my mother, are struggling with keeping balance in life. They either have attention issues, difficulties setting boundries or burn out from stress easily. We all cope with life in various ways; my mother watches a lot of TV and play mobile games, my older sister likes to clean her apartment to an obsessive detail, my little sister gets emotional shutdowns from too much social activity and my brother has a habit of talking too much and always being restless, which makes him hard to be friends with over time. It's kinda tragic when I see how much of this might've been resolved, or at least brought to the surface, if we just connected the dots earlier. Lots of our relatives have varying degrees of ADHD and/or ASD, so the signs have always been there. But as kids we were always just within the boundries of normality that the red flags never went off. And even though we have learnt to cope with life as adults, I still think it would've helped us immensely if there was a known pattern to refer to in order to create more realistic strategies. I heard someone say that the later half of life is about dealing with the first half of life. Maybe this is true in this case, or for me at least, because I've never looked back this much on how life has treated me. From my addictions to my social mannerisms, or what truly makes me feel meaning and happiness. I think this is the first time I've realized that I might've chosen the wrong path in terms of what I work with. I have no doubt that I have a great skillset for what I do at the moment, but my current field just takes too much energy and flips the switch on me in too many scenarios. I used to think that having a vehicle-related profession was too simple of a life for me, but If I look back on my childhood this is what always caught my interest. Even this summer, when I went with my nephew to a local farm place, my attention was brought to some of the tractors and digging machines there. This is why I love motorsport so much, and why the only thing that really appealed to me when I was working in the industry was driving a forklift. I'm excited to explore some of these new realizations in conjuction with my upcoming ADHD evaluation. I'm learning how to find my balance more easily and to stay focused on what really motivates me in life. All without fixating on a sense of prestige or trying to force myself into someone elses image of me. At the end of the day I want my brain to feel invigorated and not fully drained from my tasks. I want a reality that feels predictable but stagnant; where there is still exciement over new things, but the stress of going out of my comfort zone is within my limits. At the moment I can see myself working with youth on certain weekends, and driving a truck during daytime. If I can create a reality that looks something like that I think I will be very satisfied. Hopefully I'll get a chance to explore it soon enough.

So I'm sitting on a train now, heading home from a 4 week trip to my family. It's been real fun visiting everyone and there's been lots of activities going on almost every day. I'm a bit exhausted, but overall really happy. I think I'm closing in on my decision to maybe move here one day. It really helps my healing to be close to people a lot, even though it can also cause me to need a lot of rest in between. I haven't thought about gaming much at all, which is not very surprising. When I went on my 9 month streak it lasted over the summer and I had the same feeling back then. As long as I'm occupied with something meaningful there's simply no room for gaming. And I also knew it would help me a lot to overcome the long train ride without a game to sink into. It stressed the hell out of me initially, as I knew my past travels were made "shorter" with gaming to occupy every minute. But as with anything I've experienced previously with overcoming this addiction you just need some perspective and a change of environment from time to time. I wasn't bored to death during the train ride as I expected because I had planned for it and had plenty of other things to occupy myself with. I watched a movie, read a book, sorted my pictures on my phone and made some crossword puzzles. The time went by just as fast, honestly. I'm currently starting up a pretty major challenge where I want to try to eat healthy and stay away from porn for at least a year. I've learnt a lot about the psychology of addiction these past months and I think I've got enough things figured out to be able to transform my life for the better. I really want a lifestyle where I value myself and my health in every situation. I hope it will feel very natural and effortless after a while, because I know by now that I will need more than willpower to manage this long term. It will be a complete change of my identity and what I stand for, and despite the hardships I will inevitably encounter on the way I will feel so good about myself in the end. In fact, I long for that feeling already!

It's kinda crazy how caught up we can truly become in this imaginary world. I recently saw the tv show Severence, which immediately made my top 10 list. It explores the concept that humans can detach the healthy part of their persona and make it live a separate life in an isolated place, while the one carrying all the trauma continues life as usual, unaware of what is happening to the other. The idea is that, as long as we know that some part of us is living a happy life, we will accept that the other one is carrying the weight on their shoulders. But the problem then is that you cannot really separate a person into two different enteties, as they will most likely always find a way back to be together in order to be complete and to heal properly. Of course this made me think a lot about gaming, and MMO's specifically. I was not really aware of it at the time, but my life kind of worked like Severance. I woke up each day in this gray reality where I had barely gotten any sleep, where I dragged myself to a job I hated, and where I always felt exhausted and unfulfilled. But whenever the day was over I almost ran back home in order to log in to that imaginary world where my other persona existed. There I felt I had some sort of purpose; I was socially capable, I had goals, I loved exploring and I forgot about the hardships of life for a couple of hours. But just like in Severance I eventually discovered that real life had to be dealt with and I could not grow the other person while excluding the other - they both had to be maintained. But as I grew the person outside of the game I became more aware that this was the one giving me the most satisfaction and feelings of fulfillment in the end. Especially when I discovered love and I could see that the outgoing and loving person I was in the game also existed outside of it. In many ways I think love saved me from MMO's, because the connection I felt with my girlfriend at the time was WAY more potent than anything I felt when I gamed. It's perhaps the only thing in life that can truly make my mind completely forget about video games. 💛

I struggled with two major MMO's back in the day so I know how it feels to get lost in some of the more prolonged gaming experiences. I think any game however becomes uninteresting to me when there is nothing more to achieve. Sure, you can always create a new character, or go for the really hard achievements, but that to me just feels like squeezing the lemon for two or three more drops. My brain just doesn't seem to bother with anything that has become too predictable or unrewarding. I want to move on to the next "big hit", because I know it's always around the corner somewhere. The biggest challenge though with was the deletion of the persona that I created in that fantasy world. I had plenty of gaming friends who knew me as this warm and outgoing person online, which was the complete opposite of my real life persona. But ironically enough it was my friends who made me quit those games eventually, as I could see how much they sacrificed to be in that imaginary world. One of my online friends really got stuck in one of those games and continued to play many years after I quit, which made me feel really sad whenever I thought of him. I was out there getting an education, hanging out with real friends, and he was stuck inside grinding away yet another day. I met him at one time in real life, and he was such a fragile and awkward person. Some of it came across online, but I could never tell how serious it was until I finally met him. Whenever I think of the extent of the issues that games can cause I always tend to think of him.

Watching a couple of these videos has got me wondering if I have ADHD. It's been circling in my mind for quite some time, but it feels like I can see myself more clearly than ever before. Probably because I've taken a step back from so many less productive activites lately and dared to confront myself with more than just the video game issue. I'm gonna see if I can get an appointment soon and get some professional input. I'm open to anything at this point, as I feel more lost than ever in whoever I'm trying to become. I just can't seem to understand how to set my boundries properly, beyond the obvious stuff. On a sidenote, I really like to read your well put answers. You have a way with words that speak a lot about your deep insights and your literacy skills. I'm curious btw, are you struggling with one specific game or several?

I watched a great video yesterday with a conversation that really stuck with me. It's in essence about the feeling of happiness, and how we in modern societies have fabricated happiness into a desire that has to be chased and collected. In reality however it might be the other way around; happiness comes when there is no longer any desire, when we get freed from the chase. And this of course translates to activities such as gaming where we are caught up in a fantasy of always chasing the next big sensation, never feeling fully satisfied. The ultimate question then poses itself: if we teach ourselves to feel happy and content in our most passive state, will we not then gravitate away naturally from these activities that so often comes with a false sense of fulfillment? Video games to me just seem like one piece of the puzzle. It is a sympton of a larger issue, which seems to derive from the constant chase for happiness. Remove games from the equation, without dealing with the root causes, and another desire will most likely only present itsef. We are so caught up in this strive for constant betterment and perfection, where everything is some kind of promise of a better tomorrow. In the process we seem to lose track of the present and the marvelous sensation of just existing, without constanly moving forward.

I can sort of relate. I myself have a very lively imagination and I often think about video games while experiencing other kinds of media, like music or movies. It's only natural I believe as the mind is used to vivid images coming from so much media exposure. You can see this within the gaming industry itself with many developers taking a lot of inspiration (for better or worse) from blockbuster movies. It's all part of the same corporate machine that wants to occupy as much of your mind as possible. I think over time these images will start to diminish as you stop having new experiences with games. But you will have to face the fact that it's impossible to block yourself from this influence completely. In the end you'll have to learn how to deal with having thoughts about gaming, but not surrendering to the urge to play them. I also suggest you seek some council perhaps regarding your anger issues. It sounds destructive to have such uncontrollable outbursts, and obviously it's costing you lots of money. I've had some anger issues myself related to competitive gaming so I know some of the emotions you're going through.

So today I got a reprimand at work for a situation that my boss took offense with. It felt painful initially and put a spin on my mind for a couple of hours. But I also noticed that I was quite comfortable with carrying these conflicting feelings, and I didn't want to suppress or numb them immediately. My mind started to wander towards the usual self-soothing stuff, like gaming, junk food etc., but I let it run its course and managed to find some focus eventually. I later called my boss and apologized and we had quite a good talk about it where he explained that his intention was to not make "a big deal" out of it, which felt comforting. Overall I'm surprised at how well I reacted to this. Usually I like to just hide and forget about my bad feelings, but here I faced them head on and felt quite good about myself in the end. It's been a couple of weeks since I really engaged with a video game so I suppose my brain is now adapting and finding new sources of strength and motivation. Feels awesome honestly!