Nyla

I'm Nyla. I'm a 24-year-old female. I live in South Africa. I've been gaming for the last five years. I've never thought it was that bad because I compared myself to a family friend who spent the whole night gaming. I only played games during the day. I still managed to do basic daily activities and socialise with my family (who I still live with). It started in 2018 when I got a new desktop computer at home but I had just started studying in another city so I only could play on it when I came home on the weekends. I crammed those weekends with as much gaming as possible. It wasn't the worst. I was still managing to get most of my work done. Later in the year, some personal struggles relating to my severe anxiety popped up and started to derail me. The next year, I managed to get a new powerful laptop that I could bring with me to university. I was in a bad space that year. I played games and watched YouTube to avoid the unbearable anxiety and loneliness but in hindsight, it only kept me back from seeking actual help. Year three was me just trying to redo all the subjects I had failed in the second year but then Covid hit and we all had to go home. That was when I started playing multiplayer Minecraft on a specific modded server. It was a small community but they were rather nice. I did take a break from MC after a few months relating to some internal conflict but hopped straight over to Sea of Thieves. I had, in this time dropped out of university and told my parents that I would get some freelancing jobs where I could design websites. This never really happened. I got a small part-time job the next year but all I was thinking about at that time was getting home and playing games. There were so many things I wanted to do with my life like program some software to help build imaginary worlds, build up my company and become independent but gaming was so much easier. I stopped working a year later and was just gaming when I felt like it. I got back into Minecraft and started building some mega bases which several months to complete. I was always thinking: why haven't I been playing since I was younger? I would have achieved so much more. This year I started studying again. It started out fairly easy but the projects are getting harder. A few weeks ago I decided to swap the thinking about regretting not playing more into regretting not wanting to achieve my real-life goals of programming. I thought: what if it was the thing that I wish I had always done? I managed to let go of Minecraft and started my 90-day detox. I started to realise how out of control my anxiety is and how I use gaming to calm me down. I also couldn't figure out how I managed university projects and gaming. It just takes up so much time. I also started to replace it with other things like watching more YouTube. I had set a limit to only watch two videos a day but that wasn't going well. I had a relapse a few days ago after the stress of the large university projects got to me. So here I am back to day 1 but more determined to work through my stress, addictions and dreams for the future. (Well done if you managed to read my entire essay xD) ~ Nyla