Many times I’ll spend a day doing nothing, just to see if doing nothing will actually somehow contribute to what makes me me. I couldn’t tell you how many times I have stayed up all through the night and then see if I can go back to a regular sleep schedule the night after I stayed up and went to bed at 3:00 p.m. on purpose. I have been known to make my own life into a game. This game has not just left me bewildered to the very person I am, and have been, but has left me open to extreme opinions of myself. I tend to take easy things and make them extremely hard; the same way I try to take something extremely hard and try my hardest to make it look simple, and miniscule.
This nothing has led me to know a few things and lose a few things about the body I am in. When I don’t work, I am the laziest person alive; but when I work, and am working I have come to the conclusion that I am near unstoppable. I can do anything…if only I’m just doing something. If only I was something. I was eleven, you know what my hobby was? Playing text based games, and trying to adopt a new personality over the internet. At eleven I had more 20 year old friends than I do now. I had triplet girl friends that I named their kids! I gave a relationship a new composure, I held a marriage together, I got phone numbers from girls I had never met, nor did I want to, and that was my hobby. My life consisted of, well, living an alternate life. It was my hobby. It was how I ran away from what mattered.
The alternate person I was at eleven: I was a man named Adam. I got my picture off of google images, and I turned it over to people as my own image. I spent my time on AIM chat being a reverse pedophile (not in the sexual way). I was an underage kid pursuing 20 year olds and up, and I was getting a jolly out of making them think I was a mature adult, when really in them falling for it I should’ve seen that people were not to be trusted in any fact of the matter. My goal at eleven was to get through this sort of mythical online world without pictures, and see every second in my head; From “Under the Rabbit Hole” to “Beginners Peak”, From “Morwin” to “Achilles”. I still remember the basic map of the town square, and I still remember fighting books in the library in the game. I spent so much time on it that I ended up having a personal relationship with two of the creators of the game, and three of their friends that were just there.
Little did I know that my life was the game, and every second I spent on it I learned to be that person! I learned to be TheKiller, Dragoon, Orion, and Leo. I became them. I became the very people that I created with no image. Same with any game I have played. I played through Final Fantasy X five times straight, just because I became the main character. I fell in love with his love interest, and I lived the battles. I would wake up in the middle of the night from a bad dream looking for my weapon, ready to depart, actually thinking that my life was theirs. I was that dork. I was that nerd. I was so depressed and pathetic that I went to video games to try and find out who I was, to forget who I had been. Video games weren’t a game. Video games were a chance to be someone else. I was not Cameron Orion Hatfield. I was Orion. I was the symbol. I was like prince, but without the fruity hair and the record deal. Well….maybe the fruity hair.
I had gotten into it so much that I developed a game for myself in high school from it. Go through every social circle, and back again, and try to keep the friends from each when leaving to another, and then come back and leave again. I went in high school as a prep, turned punk, to emo, back to prep, to punkish, back to prep, to country and I managed all this with a three color uniform policy. I tried to get a girlfriend from each circle before school was over, just to see if I could. I went from punk gf, to prep, to dancer, to plain jane, just to say I did. Yes, I regret it now, but the question still remains: How pathetic really was I? Who was I? Lastly, who am I?
No, I have never been that much of a handsome guy, and no, I’ve never been the skinniest guy, or the athletic guy, or the smart guy. I was always the guy that found happiness in spending my time achieving what nobody else wanted to achieve or could achieve. I found myself striving to achieve nothing, and in that I achieved everything. I spent two years in high school getting 4.25 gpas. I spent two getting less than half of that. I spent my high school career seeing how bad I could possibly do without getting below a B average, and while still being a teacher’s pet. I look back at half the things I wrote, and I don’t see me. Even with of of my exes I made a completely fictional me to try and be interesting and cool. I have been through a lot, but I made it a game to see how bad I could try and make my life seem to her, by adding in a lot of stuff that never happened, and make her praise me for changing so much, when I really hadn’t changed at all because I didn’t have to.
One other thing I found myself making a game out of is diet and exercise. I had always made my body a game. I went from a large to an extra small in about a year, to a medium, back to a large, back to a medium. I made fun in seeing how much weight I could lose, and how little or how much I could eat while doing so. Was I ever depressed? Oh, by far, and I had a reason to be, but did it really affect me to the point that I did half the things I did? Not really. I was actually quite numb. I couldn’t feel anything. I didn’t cry. I didn’t say the word love for 4 years, better the less think it. Now, one way it definitely did ruin me is in the same way the way it could’ve made me…it made me drink, do drugs, and get in extremely precarious positions that did make me find myself, but that is a whole different reflection.
Now, what is the meaning of all this? Honestly, I don’t know…just something that popped up I guess. I just honestly wanted to reflect, because when I do write I remember, and when I remember I can document. Now, on to present day I guess.
Who am I today? What am I? Who could I have been? Why am I not as such?
Well, one way to get to that is by going through the what if’s.
What if after 12 or so years of forced sports I kept it going? What if I kept being athletic and got involved in sports? Big deal, I get really involved, I get into the more popular group, and then what? I start partying a little earlier? Maybe find myself through that a little earlier, by losing myself earlier? I go onto what? Maybe getting a sports scholarship to school, and being an easy major just to pop through by doing sports to end up in a dead end career as an alcohol abusing wife beater, because my strength had gotten me places before. It would’ve gotten me a big education, what’s saying it wouldn’t make me think that that would be the answer and continue doing so. So I end up in jail…for 15 years. Get out and then work as a janitor somewhere for the rest of my life or commit suicide, from valuing myself and making a God out of alcohol, and worshipping it as such?
Now, what if I had focused all on scholastics? I get involved in all kinds of stupid extra curriculars I’ll never need? I try to validate myself as smart my having a NHS plaque on my wall? I waste my time all through school getting good grades and having no social life? I get a scholarship to a college, graduate, but in that I still keep myself in all the extras through college focused on straight A’s still, because well, I’m smarter than them. I was rank one in my class, who cares? I go to work spend 16-18 hours a day at the job to buy stuff I don’t need and become the stuff I don’t need? I don’t get married or have kids because I never had the chance because I was too focused on meriting myself through money and my own proclaimed intelligence? I end up committing suicide from lonliness, and because through being smart I learn to value myself over my faith.
Am I saying I took the right path? By no means! I’m saying just the opposite. I’m saying that I was such a pathetic little kid, and I valued such stupid things that all I am is what I believe and nothing more now. I never spent time developing me. I spent time developing who I could have been in my games. I spent time being a mediocre gamer, and lost myself through it. I was literally a wandering soul on autopilot. I was walking through my life doing nothing, being nothing, and I was…well…miserable and happy all at the same time. I valued my hate for myself because it propelled me. It fueled my fire. It led me and made me happy because, congratulations, you made it through high school doing a double digit number of homework assignments, and just going off of doodles in a notebook, and basic knowledge that I had already. I got through high school achieving what I wanted to, nothing!
I know I am not that person I once was, and I don’t know how I even got to the places I was or where I am. I just know that the only things I can think of is that it led me back home, for a good reason finally. I know I haven’t been led back for no reason, but that I am being used. There has to be a reason I went through what I did, and saw all I did. I will probably spend a little while finding that out, but the fact remains that I need to focus on present and eternity, and stop focusing on past and future like I always have. The fact remains that now I am finding myself, but how remains unanswered. After living my life as a game for so long it’s hard not to live it like one now. It’s so hard not to be it. It’s so hard not to lose yourself in miniscule things. Congrats, you searched youtube for three hours, where did it all go?
Where have my last 18 years gone? What good came from it? I will spend forever contemplating what good came from all of my numbness and pure lack of self knowledge and identity through those years? I guess to give me an Identity in Him now. I couldn’t tell you. And where did the years go? I don’t know. What did I accomplish over the last 18 years? I read a hundred plus books and beat a few hundred games, pressed “stumble” 30,000 times. If I just spent 5 minutes on each site I wasted 2500 hours, 41 days. Forty-one days…sitting in front of a computer clicking sites? Not including my video games and stuff? It’s absolutely ridiculous how much time we spend not valuing the life we had. I can guarantee you that I have spent years of my life wasted on miniscule stupid things. Doing nothing. Valuing nothing. Being nothing.
If I had valued those years where would I be? Who would I be? Where would I be? Think about it. If every second we spent doing things that don’t matter on working for a charitable group, a church, or anywhere, how much impact could we have had on the world? Those hours you racked up on video games…if you spent it working…..If I spent those 41 days on working… straight working at minimum wage it would be a new car fully paid for. Now think of all the other hours wasted, maybe that you have wasted. What could you have done? What kind of impact could you had?
What if Martin Luther King Jr. spent the years of his life focusing on just little time wasters like we have?
What if Edison, Bell, Franklin preferred chasing ladies, and drinking instead of inventing?
Where would we be if our forefathers lived like we do; Spending hour after hour sitting in a dim room clicking…and clicking….and clicking, Tapping on our phones like zombies, being nobody and having pride in it?
Friends, this world needs a change. Our world needs hope. That hope does not lie in a Celebripresident. That hope does not lie in the computers we play on, or the phones we toil over. I regret that I spent those years not affecting the world…not giving people hope, but living for me. How can’t you?