Ryan's Second Journal (Post 90 Day Challenge).

[RyanGQ]

Wow. It's been a while. A couple of months, at least.

If you're an old timer here, you may remember me by reading my older journals, or maybe I hit you up on the forum personally. If you're new here, you probably have no idea who I am, as my older journal is most likely buried somewhere in this forum.

Anyways, I was planning on making a big comeback onto this forum to explain my whereabouts, but it just got pushed back for a while. And a while became more than a while after enough time had passed, to the point where I just forgot about it. Or maybe I didn't forget; maybe I just didn't have the willpower to sit down and actually prepare to expand the mental energy that it takes to really put yourself out there. 

I wrote over six pages worth of explanation over the past five months of my life, starting from the roots of how I came to quit gaming and what happened after the challenge ended, but I never put it up. Part of me felt like it was too long, part of me felt like it was just bitching, and who really wants to read that? Part of me felt like I was just going on and on about my story that nobody really wants to hear, but now, I figure that if nobody wants to hear it, nobody has to read it.

I would have posted this is my old journal, but I can't stand the obnoxiously long title that I gave it. Plus, considering the sour note that I left that one off on, and the time that's passed since then, it'd be better for me to just start fresh.

Anyways, I'll just go ahead and post what I wrote beforehand. I'll edit in notes for explanation where they're needed. For formatting purposes, I'll have to do that in a second post, so gimme a sec, lol.

Edited May 8, 2016 by RyanGQ

[RyanGQ]

Hey. My name’s Ryan. Before I start this video, I’d like to say that I’ve never been in front of a webcam before, so forgive me if I come off as awkward or unexpressive, because I’m not used to talking into a camera lens. My throat also hurts right now, so bare with me here.

Some of this will be more improvised, some of it will be more scripted. Bare that in mind.

 

EDIT: I did shoot this all as a video, but after editing it, it just kind of came out soulless and bland, since I was reading everything like a script. Since I tried to squeeze in so much information into this, it basically just came out as 20 straight minutes of me talking into a computer screen. Trust me, if you're at all interested, you're better off just reading this yourself. Also, I apologize for any grammatical mistakes spell check doesn't pick up.

 

Anyways, I’m making this video because 5 months ago, I decided that I was going to embark on a journey to quit playing video games, in an attempt to see if video games were actually making me happy, or if it was time for a serious life change. I didn’t know what I was getting myself into, and it’s been a vicious ride of ups and downs that has taught me more about myself than I ever could have thought possible, so I’m here to tell you guys about my experience, and give my take on the 90 day challenge to quit gaming.

 

EDIT: It's still been about 5 months; I only finished writing this eight days ago, so only a week has passed between the time I wrote this and now. Some exciting escapades have happened between then and now, so I'll be sure to write about those as the post goes along.

 

I should start by giving a little backstory about myself.

I’ve been playing videogames for as long as I can remember, literally. My first memory of being alive is of my mom and I playing super mario on the N64. Don’t ask me how i even gripped the controller with my little three year old hands, because I couldn’t tell you.

I was brought up with video games from a young age, and I never let go of them. I literally became a hardcore gamer at the age of three.

It all started with the N64, with games like super mario, mario kart, mario party, LoZ:OOT, and super smash bros, and then I moved on from that to playing on systems like the gameboy advance, the gamecube, PC MMO’s and from there I moved onto the xbox 360, wii, and nintendo ds, and finally found myself playing games on the PC, which I would remain playing until I quit playing games entirely.

No matter what was going on in my life, the biggest constant has been video games. Moving from school to school, from house to house, video games were there. When my parents were fighting, getting arrested, and getting divorced, videogames were there. When I was lonely, bored, and depressed, as no child should ever be, video games were there. They were all I really did, all I thought about, all I cared about, for years.

I played sports here and there, like swimming, tennis, gymnastics, and soccer, but none of them really stuck. By the time I was in middle school, I had quit all of them, and only gaming remained.

I was also never particularly socially isolated, but all of the friends that I had were gamers, who were into gaming just as much as I was. Some of them are still my friends to this day, and some of them moved on far before I did and are doing completely different things with their lives.

Also, I think it goes without saying, that I was never popular with girls.

i distinctly remember my first game on xbox live. I was playing halo 3 social slayer on valhalla, and when i heard my teammates talking to me, it was one of the most life changing experiences ive ever had, to this day. i still remember this one guy in the game, after i told him that it was my first online game ever, told me something strange. he said, “welcome to the club”. Or something like that.

I wouldn’t realize until years later that I had overstayed my welcome in that club for way too long.

After online gaming became part of my life, mostly everything fell apart. Keep in mind, I’d consider myself pretty intelligent, and school has never been a struggle for me; I’ve always been an A/B student in the highest classes possible, but socially, i went dark.

The halo, call of duty, gears of war, battlefield, pokemon, and skate series became my life all the way from third grade to eighth grade. I was going through a lot of family problems at the time, and I found it easier to stop hanging out with my neighborhood friends, and instead lose myself into online games, where I had my online friends, most of which were way older than me, who I shouldn’t have been talking to, and my friends from school, who I would frequently “hang out with” over the network.

I never felt lonely, because I always had someone new to talk to. I still think to this day that relationships held between people online are real relationships, and can be beneficial, in some cases. Without xbox live, I think I would have gone insane, like many other kids do who come up in families that fall apart. When my family basically lost everything after the 2008 housing market crash, I had a second family, of people who I had never met before.

For the longest time, I had always considered myself to be a “gamer”. That’s how I defined myself, up until the end of seventh grade, when I became friends with a kid named steven. Even though me and steven had hated on each other from a distance for a year or two before, we had met through a mutual friend from school over xbox live, while we were playing skate 2.

I had no interest in skating at the time, and only played the game because i remember playing TH:PS3 as a kid, and I had heard from a friend that the game had tons of funny glitches that could be screwed around with. when i mentioned to steven that i wanted to learn how to skate in real life, he told me that he knew how, and we went to the skatepark together for the first time.

The first time i went down a ramp, and busted my ass, i was hooked. I was now a skater, and I always thought, from then on, I would be.

Fast Forward some months later, to 8th grade, and I felt like I was at the top of the world. Steven was always one of the popular kids in school, because he was cute and played a ton of sports. For the first time ever, i became friends with girls, had something i was passionate about outside of school and gaming, and had a social circle of friends and was excited about my life.

Unfortunately, this was short lived, when we all discovered a game called starcraft 2.

8th grade was a great year. I skated, had lots of friends, talked to girls, got good grades, but man, did we all love starcraft. all of my friends, steven included, used to play that game like crack. we were hooked.

I got into the game from a friend named dorian, who was a platinum leaguer at the time. Over the next year, I would almost make it into platinum league, and he would get into masters, and ended up forming one of the largest master level clans on the EU server in the world.

when highschool started, something shitty happened. I broke my arm at the start of ninth grade, a week before my birthday, skateboarding. That was the day that everything changed.

to this day, i still wonder how my life would have been different had i dedicated more time to skateboarding, and less time to starcraft. would i have not have broken my arm? would i have ever actually been any good at skateboarding? would i have more friends? would i still be playing starcraft?

the next couple of months were a long, painful period of walking around in a cast, with metal plates in my left arm, drugged up on painkillers and valium, typing with one hand, and binge watching anime and manga, because i had nothing else to do. it goes without saying that I had to quit playing starcraft, as well as skateboarding (which i would be depressed over for an entire year afterwards). when i came back to SC2, i sucked, and just gave up. going back to the bronze league / silver league was too hard for me to deal with putting all that work into just to get back to where i was.

for the remainder of 9th grade, i just played games casually, and the relationship between steven and i slowly died, as we realized that skateboarding just wasn’t in the cards for me anymore, after my parents decided they could take the risk of me being injured again.

the summer after 9th grade, i started playing a game called counter strike. i had already transitioned solely into PC gaming after i had found starcraft the year before, and i had already built my own 1200 dollar gaming pc in february, after my arm had healed up.

for the next year, in 10th grade, i was pretty numb. almost miserable. because for the first time in years, i felt that i had “regressed in life”. i had quit skateboarding, lost my best friend, stopped talking to girls entirely, and ended up gaming more than ever before. CS:GO became my life. I was managing multiple clans, trying my hardest to rank up, and i had basically given up on my prospects of being social in real life. I had been rejected by the first girl who i ever thought i actually had a chance with, i ended the year with my first C, and the summer after sophomore year, all i did was play counter strike, and game called dark souls, which has become what i would consider to be the best game of all time.

this all lead me up to the decision i made on december 8th, 2015, when i joined the gamequitters community, and decided that it was time for a change. you can read the introductory post I made on the night I decided to try it out here:

http://forum.gamequitters.com/topic/353-hey-im-ryan/

Since I started the challenge, almost five months have passed. A lot has happened, and I can definitely say that my life is in a completely different direction than it was before. So I’m going to do a little re-wind of the last five months of my life.

__________

The feeling of wanting to quit video games is one that builds up inside you.

For the first couple of months of junior year of highschool, i had been falling out of love with video games. I wanted to quit, but didn’t ever have the drive to. I didn’t see the point. Part of it was because I didn’t know what else I was going to do with my time, part of it was because all of my friends, the few that I had left, were gamers, and part of it was because I identified myself as a gamer. It’s who I was and it’s what I’ve always done.

But if you’re like me, you were raised on video games. It wasn’t even a choice; I was fed a controller from a young age, and held tightly onto it because I was too scared to let go when everything else around me sucked so much.

But there came a certain point in my life when I realized that I had overstayed my welcome. It’s not something that just hits you, it’s a feeling that builds up. Like maybe I had played more than my fair share of video games for one lifetime, and it was time to find something new to do. Getting my first girlfriend and also seeing the end of highschool and the beginning of college start to creep up on me were also motivating factors in getting my shit together.

I was here for a reason. If you ever have the thought that you should probably quit playing video games, that’s a good sign that you should.

I watched Cam’s TedX talk, and was surprised at how his points were actually rational and well thought out, instead of just attacking gamers for being the antisocial losers-by-choice that they’re made out to be. For the first time I had hope of actually getting my life back.

So I just did it. I didn’t think about it, I just acted. I deleted all of the gaming content I had access to. ALL OF IT. And it started there.

I started writing in the journals on the forum immediately, and, if you’re interested, you can always go back and read through them. I had already made a habit of journaling privately a number of months before I had started the challenge, and I continue to do so, so I was writing a shitton during this period. Everything was going great in the beginning; I didn’t have any drive to play games, I was making good grades (in fact I ended with all A’s and one B at the end of my first semester), and I had a girlfriend who I thoroughly enjoyed being with.

But all of that came to an end about 30-ish days into the challenge during winter break. All starting on Christmas day, I was informed that my Dad, who I haven’t talked to since around last November, had officially moved to florida, and my Girlfriend, who I recently discovered dumped me for a guy who I would have considered not to be a friend but definitely closer than an acquaintance, ignored me for an entire week before dumping me over the phone two days before new year’s eve. Life essentially felt like was fucking over.

I was depressed for about two weeks before I started to gain some perspective, and even looking back on the relationship now, I can see how inexperienced and stupid it all was, and how fucked the entire thing was from the start, mostly because of me, admittedly. I was in no position to go into a serious relationship, which I was absolutely unprepared to deal with, during a time when my entire family life was fucked beyond repair, not to mention, pressuring me to act towards my girlfriend and my relationship in a million different directions, when I just wanted to keep things light and casual, which is probably part of what scared her off to begin with.

After my breakup, the new year had started, and I got more involved on the forum and with the challenge, and took my first shot at writing a book, which is “finished” now, but I’ve still yet to go through and revise it. I’ve yet to do so because it’s actually a book about breakups: writing it really helped me sort out my thoughts and such, but going back to it really just keeps me in that “breakup” zone mentally that I was trying to move on from to begin with. Not to mention I’ve gotten a lot more in touch to the nature of why my girlfriend actually dumped me, and going back to the “me” who, at the time, actually bought into the blatant, bullshit lie that she dumped me because she had “too much baggage” and “wasn’t ready for this”, just makes me cringe at how stupid I was. But at least I’ve grown a lot from the experience, and that’s what counts. I might actually go back and finish it once and for all after I edit and upload this video.

 

EDIT: I did finish editing the video, but I don't feel like actually putting it up on here, if I even still have it. Maybe on day I'll come out on camera, but that day is not today. And I still haven't gotten to editing that book. Schoolwork has got me busy as it is; I'm only taking this short break to write this and then it's back to reading this damn book.

 

So the rest of the challenge, really, these last couple of months, have been a blur. In short, I hit a low point. Many of you may have noticed that I haven’t written on the forum since the challenge ended, which was for a number of reasons we’ll get into later, but it was, at the time, mostly because I hit a SERIOUS depression. Probably the worst that I had ever been through. I’m not saying that I’ve been clinically diagnosed with depression, or that I’m constantly depressed, but there have been times in my life where I’ve pretty much matched every symptom to a T, including bipolar mood-swings and thoughts of suicide. Maybe that’s just being a teenager, but I think it came down to a gigantic conjunction of dealing with my father basically telling me I can fuck off, having way too much free time and not knowing what to do with it, dealing with my alcoholic mother who constantly pressures me into knowing what I should be doing with my life, and a host of serious self-confidence and self-image issues that, for a long time, made me distance myself from everyone that I cared about in my life, and a lot of those people ended up cutting me out because of that. That in turn made me feel lonely a lot, which is something that I’m still dealing with, but trying to break out of, even though I will say that it’s fucking tough to make new friends. It’s something that I have to rely on a lot of hope and willpower for; but breaking out of my comfort zone as an already shy guy who’s now at a loss as to where I “fit in” has lead so far to nothing but a series of failed attempts, letting myself down time after time, which scares me because the school year is over in 25 days and I’m running out of time.

 

EDIT: I'd like to say that things are looking up, I think, as far as meeting new people goes. Tomorrow, if things go according to plan, I should be introduced to a girl that my friend hooked up with last week. Originally, he was going to try to hook me up with this girl, but she came over to his house to "study" and things just ended up happening. So he promised to introduce me to her as friends, so that I can get in with her friends, many of whom are very attractive and seem like my type. And, of course, if things don't move forward between the two of them, according to the bro code, I'm always free to move in, but that's ONLY if he gives me the go ahead. That's assuming the even likes me (then again, the entire reason he was trying to hook me up with her was because she was "perfect for me", so I've got my hopes up that she has some cool friends because if not, I'm kind of screwed: the clock seems like it's ticking 10 times faster than usual.

This is all assuming my friend hasn't gotten busted by his strict catholic parents for selling weed and hooking up with her to begin with, because his dad (a complete lunatic) did walk in on him, and he hasn't responded to me since we hung out last Friday. Yikes.

 

So what’s happened since the challenge ended?

Well, my grades are pretty solid: I’m not failing anything, and they’re looking like they’re going to turn out exactly how they did last semester: all A’s and one B. Family tensions have calmed down, although I know in my family that only lasts for so long, and I’m looking towards getting a car soon, which should have a serious impact on my social life, assuming I don’t crash it. The most optimistic part of me wants to say that things are actually looking like they’re going to start going well soon.

 

EDIT: I shouldn't have procrastinated on some of my school projects, but over yesterday and the rest of today, it looks like I'm going to get a lot of work done. And one of my big projects that I thought was due on Tuesday happens to actually be due on Thursday, so I'm hyped up that I have more time to grind on that, since I didn't actually read one of the books I was supposed to (Catcher in the Rye).

 

One thing that I need to definitely touch on is my relapse. I went back to gaming. I actually think I put in around 3 consecutive days of gaming, if you count dark souls 2, 3, and counter strike.

I played dark souls 2 just a week or so after the challenge had actually ended. It was fun going back to gaming, but I didn’t even stick with the game long enough to beat it. I really didn’t even like the game very much, I just wanted to play it in anticipation for the third game coming out.

I played CS:GO once, and discovered that I still had zero drive to play it whatsoever. In a way, I just had to make sure that I was done with it. And it turns out I was right.

Dark Souls 3 on the other hand, I played a lot. From the day it came out, I grinded it out over about two weeks, and put over 40 hours into it. I have to say: I don’t regret it, it was the best game I’ve ever played, and as the last game I’m ever going to play, it was a seriously fantastic one to end my gaming career.

I’m not proud of going back to gaming, but I feel now like it was a good thing that I did to prove to myself that the challenge did its job. Cam argued in a video that he put out that “there’s always going to be one more game”, but I don’t think that’s entirely true. Other than the Dark Souls 3 DLC coming out, that I don’t plan on playing until its full release which won’t even be until 2017, I have no desire to play anything at all, and maybe by that time I won’t have any desire to play that either. The largest part of letting go of gaming for me was the online competitive aspect of it: even between all 3 dark souls games that I’ve played, I never even put a third of the time I did playing those games combined as I did counter strike.

So I’m basically back at square one. During the challenge, I discovered that it made me really productive. I was writing all the time, getting my grades together, and really had high hopes. It gave me a sense of purpose. When the challenge was over, I didn’t really have much to point myself in the right direction and keep me from gaming again, so I did. Now that I’ve cemented in my mind that I really am done with it, I’m ready to give the productivity grind a second shot. And yes, that includes me going back onto the forum and interacting with all of you guys again.

When I finished the challenge, on top of being depressed as all hell, my mindset was that staying on a forum about quitting video games would only perpetuate me identifying myself as a “game quitter”, when, throughout the challenge, you really start to learn that it’s not at all about the games themselves, but about getting your life back. One thing that I really want to stress to anyone just starting the challenge is that quitting gaming WILL NOT improve your life automatically: it just leaves you with a blank slate to work with. I learned that the hard way. I thought that making new friends was going to just automatically happen for me, that my grades would shoot themselves through the roof, and that I would find a new girlfriend instantly, but all of those things have proven to be a lot harder than I would have expected, and it’s going to take a lot of time and a TON of focus to actually make it happen.

When you play video games all the time, you forget that being able to form relationships with people, being vulnerable and outgoing, and maintaining those relationships takes a lot of courage and time dedication, and the more you isolate yourself, the rustier you get when it comes to fixing that area of your life, and the same can be said for anything else. Lucky enough for me I take a weightlifting class in school to stay in shape, and I’m going to be doing that as well as aerobic cardiovascular training next year, because if I didn’t, I probably would have gotten out of shape pretty damn quick.

So that’s where I’m at. I’ve got a lot of goals in mind that I want to start working towards, I’ve learned a lot, I’ve got a lot more to learn, and I’m ready to take my life back once again. I’m going to start slowly frequenting the forum more often, I have been writing in my personal journal but not as much as I should, if I’m being honest with myself, and most importantly, I’m going to start chopping away at the projects that I told myself that I was going to do after the challenge and never got to out of either misery, laziness, or procrastination. I’ma be sure to update everyone on everything I’m doing to keep myself accountable in a new journal here on the forum.

So the last thing I want to include in this video is a jotlist of the things that I’ve learned through doing this challenge, so here they are:
 

You don’t actually play video games for the games: you play them because you don’t know what else to do, and they’re manufactured to trigger your desire for accomplishment. This is pretty straightforward.

Expanding on this, you find in quitting that the more you gamed, the more you wanted to game. You’re like a drug addict who can just never get the same high, so you take it more and more until it destroys you. Some people can handle themselves, but if you game for long periods for days on end, you’re pretty much a “gaming alcoholic”.

Your time spent gaming wasn’t “wasted time”, it was an important time in your life and you shouldn’t discredit it. Gaming is what made me into who I am today, and I’m proud of myself, and I’m continuing to seek out and realize ways that I can keep that true. But if you want to move forward, you have to step outside of your comfort zone.

You can only really feel “passionate” about gaming, if you don’t have anything else better to do with your life. It sounds harsh, but it’s absolutely true. I found in quitting that the feeling I get of creating something myself from my own imagination, feels much more accomplishing than winning games of CS:GO ever did.

Don’t mistake having fun for being happy. While the game might be stimulating, if you have that feeling of guilt and emptiness after you turn it off, you’re not actually happy, similarly to what porn does. Even with Dark Souls 3, the best game ever made in my opinion, I felt that guilty feeling after I was done with it.

You start to realize that it was never the games themselves: it was the fact that you had nothing better going on in your life. You made something as trivial as an imaginary game the biggest priority in your life, which can’t leave you with a feeling of fulfillment, no matter how hard you try.

There’s nothing wrong with gaming. It’s a wind-down activity. Games are there for, and should be used, by people who need to cool off after working really, really hard at something that they’re actually passionate about, to avoid being burnt out. Gaming should never exceed more than 10% of your free time, if that. It makes no sense to say that it’s OK to make art, but never ok to experience the art of others, so game away: but you have to put boundaries and divvy up your time, especially if you’re a person who can relate to everything I said thus far.

You’ll find that by actually divvying up your time, and playing games for fun and not taking them so seriously, you enjoy playing them more, and don’t need to play them for as long, either. You have to let your brain settle down from the massive amounts of stimulus you’ve been giving it.

In quitting entirely, you may even find that you have no real desire to game anymore at all.

At the end of the day, nobody is going to make this choice for you, so don’t make the excuses of “oh, but I payed for all of these games on steam and I haven’t played them yet”, or “but I’ve already put in so much time into gaming, if I quit now, it would all be for nothing!”. That’s a bunch of fallacious horseshit. Cut your losses and move on.

Finally, realize that it’s all up to you. You aren’t going to rub your PC and have a Genie pop out waiting to grant your every wish after you quit gaming. After you quit, you’re going to run into a lot of emotional ups and downs. You’re probably going to have a lot of free time that you don’t know what to do with. You might end up feeling lonely. Maybe you feel all of these things. But there’s a silver lining.

If you gamed a ton before you quit, that means you probably have a TON of free time to experiment with after you quit. If you feel lonely, that’s an opportunity to go out and meet new people. In life, everything is in a state of mind.

The most important thing that I can tell any of you listening this far is that, as stated by one of my mentors Arash, “if you don’t give up, you’ll be ok. If you do give up, I can guarantee you won’t be ok”. It’s that simple.

Thanks for listening, I hope all of you on here find what you’re looking for. Special thanks to everyone who listened to me and interacted with me over my own challenge, and of course Cam, for making all of this possible.

END.

 

EDIT: I want to put in a quote from the book that I'm currently reading. It's become one of my favorite quotes, and it's from The Things they Carried by Tim O'Brien. It's about courage.

"If the stakes ever became high enough—if the evil were evil enough, if the good were good enough—I would simply tap a secret reservoir of courage that had been accumulating inside me over the years. Courage, I seemed to think, comes to us in finite quantities, like an inheritance, and by being frugal and stashing it away and letting it earn interest, we steadily increase our moral capital in preparation for that day when the account must be drawn down. It was a comforting theory. It dispensed with all those bothersome little acts of daily courage; it offered hope and grace to the repetitive coward; it justified the past while amortizing the future."

I feel that this quote is something that we all have to remember in life. Confidence is a feeling of trust (if you actually break down the work, you'll find the word "confide"). It's a trust that's built within yourself over the course of keeping all of the little promises that you make to yourself every day. When you let yourself down, you're not just making yourself feel bad: you're letting your brain create a reality in which you believe that you cannot be trusted. And if you can't trust yourself, you can't trust that you can accomplish anything in life. And that, my friends, is a self fulfilling prophecy. 

Yeah that's about it lol.

END.

Edited May 8, 2016 by RyanGQ

[Dannigan]

Well thought-out summary of your life so far, RyanGQ.  I read it all.  Too many great points to list without making it sound redundant....hehe.

I'll try to follow your journal, and read it when I can.  I am practicing time limits with online browsing, including posting and reading GQ journals. 

Welcome back to the forums. 

Sincerely,

Danni

[Mert Gunes]

Hi RyanGQ. I can relate to many of the things you said. Your jotlist is very helpful, so thank you for that.

I just want to say that I was very impressed when reading about how you wrote a book about your breakup. Putting aside its emotional connection for you, the time and effort you must have put into actually writing is admirable since you did it during a time before college when life can be both demanding and uncertain. I am not even mentioning the overarching circumstance of the detox you were going through.

Also, it must be exciting to be getting a car soon. I recommend that, if you ever have the craving to game again, just take a time-out and drive your car aimlessly for a while. Go somewhere with a nice view and perhaps listen to music on the way. This is the recipe for contemplation and it can be your shield against relapse.

[RyanGQ]

Thanks Danny and Mert! I'm glad I could share some of my insight with you two. I wrote some really in depth analysis of my thought process during that time in my life, and it's all still somewhere in my older journal, if you dig for it. Also, I plan on sharing my book with the community when it's finished, so stay tuned!

[Cam Adair]

Yo Ryan! Welcome back man, great to have you here again. I was thinking of pinging you the other day so maybe my psychic powers worked there magic.

I only caught glimpses of your epic post, but the forum really is about much more than just quitting games, and it's about what it means to live a meaningful life. I shared this in another post recently, but the only reason the forum community feels more focused on quitting games right now is because members who succeed in moving on from games end up moving on from the forum - instead of sticking around to continue to share their journey beyond gaming. As more members (I hope you're one of them) stick around and share about the new things they are working on after gaming, the more the forum will take on that conversation as well.

[AlexTheGrape]

Hi Ryan, welcome back! I certainly remember you, I suppose I'm one of the old timers you mentioned. Thanks for keeping us posted on what's been happening in your life and the summary of your life. I'm sure it'll have helped you flesh out what you would like to change or do differently in the future, if not then it's a good opportunity to use it for that purpose.

I'll do my best to follow your journal but I am very busy with my schoolwork. All the best for you and your new journal!

[Cam Adair]

I suppose I'm one of the old timers you mentioned.

Think that should be a new forum title lol.

[AlexTheGrape]

I suppose I'm one of the old timers you mentioned.

Think that should be a new forum title lol.

Perhaps it should. A group of people that seemingly have more prestige by contributing to the community may be an incentive for newer users to stay with the community (so that they can eventually join in the 'old timers' forum. I will be likely one of the youngest old timers in existance

[RyanGQ]

Alright. It's been about a week since I made that huge update, and I've got a quick sec to post before I got work to do.

The next week of school is going to be finals prep week, and the last three days after next weekend will be finals. Then, summer starts.

It's strange. This year went by pretty quick. Thinking back on it though, it's been the most transformation year of my life. I got my first girlfriend, went through my first breakup, wrote my first book, quit gaming, came back to gaming, quit gaming again, and now, I'm about to be going into my last year of highschool. It seems like this next year is going to have to be my last effort to make things right, before going off to college, or whatever I end up doing.

So I've got a lot to focus on right now. It's all been pretty mentally overwhelming. I've got a car now (mom bought me one w/ tax return), so I've got to get a job soon to help pay her back for it, plus pay for the crazy insurance that comes with it. I had to get a car soon no matter what, since my area got redistricted for next year and I am NOT about to go to a different school during my last year of highschool. So I'm stoked about that. By the start of summer I'll be driving it on my own, once my mom trusts me behind the wheel. 

Everyone keeps telling me that life changes dramatically once you get a car. I hope they're right: I need to start getting out more. That'll all hopefully start this summer. As for the next three days, I've got a huge language arts project to work on. But at least it's my last one, so that's pretty hype.

Over the next week, after this project is done, I'm going to start planning out my summer, practice driving, try to hang out with friends, and look for a job. I've also got a big summer reading assignment I just found out about, so I'm going to try and knock that out during the beginning of summer, opposed to the end of it, like everybody else. Better to get it done ahead of time than cram at the very end! So here's to that.

This past week has actually been pretty tough emotionally. I went through another fit of depression and mental-fuckedupedness, but like always, it passes in and out within a couple of days. I've got too much to look forward to to let my emotions and self pity keep me from chasing what I want. Earlier, I actually went back and watched the original Tedx Talk that Cam made that put me on to the gamequitters movement entirely, and when he said "if I could actually change my situation, make new friends, go for what I want, would I?" It really struck a cord with me. I had to ask myself that same question today. If I could actually change what's going on. If I could make next year my best year academically, if I could start being more outgoing and make new friends, if I could get a job and start learning how to manage money, if I could move forward with the projects that I've had laying around as little more than ideas for weeks and months on end, would I? The obvious answer has to be yes. So here's to that too.

Anyways, that's about it for this one. Thanks for everyone tuning in. Next update will probably be around next weekend, which will mark the start of not having to deal with endless end-of-the-year school drama and the beginning of finals and summer planning! Peace out.

END. 

Edited May 14, 2016 by RyanGQ

[Cam Adair]

I still remember getting my first car. Been with me every since, all around Canada and the U.S. Huge change in my life.