Daily Story 69 - Mario Ruined My Life!

I like video games. I don't like shooting games that much, and I have troubles playing games where the main character is an idiot, because they force me to behave in a way that I never would, and it's just painful to sit through a lecture from the other characters even though I would have respected the rules if the game had given me a stinking choice *coughFinalFantasyXcoughcough* but hey, maybe that's just me. The ones that I like best are the ones that have some kind of plot, cute characters, and don't have some confusing as heck battle system that takes forever to figure out. The ones that you could swear were developed by a bunch of guys on weed are pretty awesome, too, because they appeal to my sense of humor.

I see a lot of the positive aspects to video games. So when I see articles like this one, I tend to get a little peeved. Not because I want to defend my precious video games, but because the argument it tries to make is flawed and could in fact cause parents to handle a video game addiction in a way that causes more problems than it solves. See, I haven't become addicted to video games, but I have had times where they have distracted me from more important things in life, but this isn't because I fell victim to the horrible addicting force of video games, but because there was an underlying Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder that made it difficult for me to prioritize. So, allow me to explain why I feel that this article does nothing to help children with gaming addictions, starting with the reasons that many kids are getting into hardcore gaming to begin with. First, let's look at what the article has to say on the subject:

"Greater amounts of gaming, lower social competence, and greater impulsivity seemed to act as risk factors for becoming pathological gamers..."

Look at it this way: if someone doesn't have the greatest social skills, then of course video games are going to be appealing. They're engaging, but they don't require incredible social prowess for the player to interact with the characters within the game. Your character's personality and response to others is programmed in, so all you have to do is go through and activate cutscenes. In other words, it's like being social with fictional characters, but the game does all the hard work for you. Honestly, how could that not appeal to someone who can barely get through a day at school without feeling like a social failure? As for that 'greater impulsivity' bit, yeah, video games are pretty good at occupying that bit of the human mind that impulsive people have a hard time getting to shut up. Without video games, this part of the brain would either remain unsatisfied or be occupied with some other semi-mindless task. For me, it's usually listening to music, drawing, or filling in coloring books that work the best at keeping this part of my mind occupied. Video games are simply an easily accessible entity that happens to be very good at satisfying that part of our brains that would otherwise drive us insane with its constant restlessness. And then that part about greater amounts of gaming... well, if you introduce something that is attractive to people with lower social competence and/or greater impulsivity, of course they're going to get obsessive over it if they get to do it a lot.

So, in short, someone like me would turn to video games because it fills a need that can't be filled in school or anywhere else. A need that already existed, not one that was created by the games themselves. Now, let's see what the article has to say about the results of constant gaming:

"...whereas depression, anxiety, social phobias, and lower school performance seemed to act as outcomes of pathological gaming."

Okay, so are we sure that this is strictly because of the video games and not an issue the kids would have developed regardless of whether they've turned into hardcore gamers? I mean, let's look at the risk factors again. Lower social competence and greater impulsivity. Last time I checked, both of those were related closely with anxiety disorders, so isn't it possible that the whole gaming thing is just a coincidence? Or, you know, also an outcome of the disorder that was already there by the time these kids started their hardcore gaming?

Now, you might say, "but what if there was no evidence of the children having this disorder before they became addicted to video games?" and all I can say in response is this: take two seconds to google 'anxiety disorders in children' and you'll see why this is one of those issues that gets me really riled up. Or heck, I'll save you the trouble and quote an article about anxiety disorders in children (link):

"According to the most recent data, the lifetime prevalence for anxiety disorders as a whole in adults is about 25%; the frequency in children is unknown, but felt to be significantly underreported and under-diagnosed. More specifically Social Anxiety Disorder has a lifetime risk of 17%, while Panic Disorder occurs in approximately 1-3% of the adult population.

"Although quite common, Anxiety Disorders in children often are overlooked or misjudged, despite them being very treatable conditions with good, persistent medical care.What does seem to be developing in the medical literature is the consensus that many “adult” psychiatric disorders likely have their first (although perhaps subtle or ignored) manifestations in childhood, and that if left untreated these anxiety disorders in children likely progress to adult versions."

I would definitely recommend reading the entire article, because it explains the issue of anxiety disorders in children very well, but I'm just going to focus on the lines I bolded in the above paragraphs. Notice the theme here? This kind of disorder doesn't always get noticed. Heck, I went through a full-on psychological evaluation in middle school and I didn't get diagnosed with an anxiety disorder until I was in college, after I had taken a basic psychology course, learned about social phobias, realized how closely it matched up with my own life, and began counseling with the anxiety theme as my focus. And yet, all my teachers would comment on how shy I was and how that was impeding my ability to participate in class. In other words, it was painfully obvious, and yet it didn't get diagnosed until I was an adult. So really, I wouldn't be surprised if some of these 'hardcore gamer kids' already suffered from an (overlooked) anxiety disorder before they developed their gaming addiction. Correlation does not always imply causation, people.

Also notice that the video game article says about 9% of the children studied were hard-core gamers. Looking at a few different pages about anxiety disorders (and mental disorders in general) it seems that at least 13% of children have an anxiety disorder of some kind. I'm willing to bet that there's some fairly major overlap between those two groups. Keep in mind, too, that anxiety and depression tend to be strongly associated with each other (read here for more info).

And now we come to my favorite part of the whole article: "And researchers connect the dots by saying the risk factors and behaviors could set the stage for long-term mental illness."

Because clearly these kids weren't headed on that path already. Yes, it's all Mario's fault that these kids are struggling with anxiety and depression. This has absolutely nothing to do with the way the child's brain is wired, it's all the fault of those pesky games that teach children horrible, horrible things that can never be unlearned.

Now, I am by no means arguing that video game addictions aren't a problem. They are. Personally, I've forgotten to eat meals because I was too busy playing a game, and I could give a few more personal examples showing how it can be a bad thing. However, whether video game addictions exist is not as important an issue as the reason video game addictions exist, and I am a firm believer that pathological gaming is not the cause of mental illness, but rather the result of mental illness. If your child is becoming a video game addict, then you would be doing a far greater service to your child to search for any underlying causes that might exist, and while it would be good to limit your child's access to video games, taking them away entirely or punishing the child for their excessive gaming habits is only going to make things worse, because as I've said before (link), having an undiagnosed disorder is painful. It makes you feel like you're not good enough because you can't behave the way people expect you to behave. So sure, taking away a kid's Nintendo might stop them from going on 10-hour gaming sprees all the time, but it's not going to change the way they feel about themselves. To solve the problems that result after excessive gaming, you need to address everything that could have caused these problems, which includes the gaming addiction itself and anything else that could be happening in the gamer's life, including whatever might have caused the addiction in the first place.

Just because you can't see a disorder doesn't mean it isn't there, and just because most disorders aren't diagnosed until the patient is an adult doesn't mean it didn't affect them as a child. My disorder is as much a part of me as my skin tone and hair color, and it's time we stopped blaming outside sources for inside problems when in reality, it's almost always the other way around.

Disclaimer: This is my own view on the subject, and as such some of the information used in my argument may not be 100% accurate.

Daily Story 32 - Happiness is a Difficult Choice

(Doing something a bit different today. This is in response to this video by Shay Carl, because while I understand completely where Shay's coming from, I feel like he needs to hear this, along with a lot of people in the world. So Shay, if you read this, I hope it helps you understand why so many people got pissed off at your last video. I'm not mad at you (well, maybe just a little :P), I just want you to see where we're coming from. Anyway, on with the show.)

Don't let it get you down. It's up to you to make your life as good as you can make it. You're the one who determines your own happiness. Don't let others influence your decisions.

I was in elementary school when I first started hearing this kind of advice. At that point in my life, I had no idea that I had an attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and a generalized anxiety disorder, and the adults in my life didn't know about it, either. In fact, I was only diagnosed with ADHD when I was in sixth or seventh grade, and I wasn't diagnosed with anxiety until my sophomore year in college, which is strange, because looking back on my life, it was painfully obvious to see the signs. I was quiet in class. I cried a lot. I didn't ever speak up for myself, even though there were some days that I just wanted to scream at my classmates until I lost my voice.

See, here's the gist of what happened in my childhood. I grew up in a small town and had about 23 other kids in my grade. A few of them were growing up in difficult family situations, and like a lot of kids do, they took their frustration and misery at their home life out on their classmates. For the most part, that meant me, the girl who preferred ska and Star Wars over anything the popular kids liked, the girl who still liked to bring stuffed animals into class, the girl who cried about everything instead of fighting back.

But here's the thing: I wasn't stupid. I was told from the beginning, when the bullying had only been occurring for a little while, that it wasn't my fault. I got the whole "it's them, not you" speech and I got the "if you ignore them, they'll leave you alone eventually" speech. And, of course, I thought that ignoring them would be easier than trying to stand up for myself, so that's what I did. I tried to ignore it, and after a while I got relatively good at it. The only problem was they still made me cry.

This is where things get complicated. I knew that the biggest of the bullies (we'll call him 'Taco' for now, though I'm pretty sure anyone who knew me growing up will know who he is right away) wasn't acting like a jerk just because he was an incurable douchebag (or, since I was incapable of saying cuss words until sometime in middle school, a big meanie-face). Hell, Taco had proved to me on several occasions that he could be really nice and considerate of my feelings. I can think of at least two times where he and I talked about how we were sad or frustrated with our lives, and there was one point in middle school where he invited me to be in his group for a class project, which meant a lot to me because I was terrible at asking to be in a group. And later on, when there was a death in his family, I honestly felt bad for him, even though most of the time I hated the way he treated me. So I knew that he was just acting like a jerk because he was struggling with his own life. I also knew that I was supposed to ignore it, not let it show that what he did bothered me, and not let his actions get to me, because he was just doing what most kids would do in his situation. So, what did I do? I stopped talking and tried to make myself learn not to cry so damn much. Because seriously, I cried about damn near everything. I never changed who I was, I never stopped liking the Aquabats or playing elaborate games with my stuffed animals, but I knew I would get teased about it if I mentioned it so I stopped talking. I stopped trying to interact with my classmates. I just withdrew into myself and fantasized about telling them off or proving that I was better than them. But they still made me cry.

So what was going on there? If I knew that I was supposed to just brush it off and not let it affect me, why was I crying and escaping to the school psychiatrist's office on an almost daily basis? Why was I still miserable even though I was trying my best to be happy?

I thought about this every time I heard someone saying that "you shouldn't let other people get you down." After all, I was doing my best to keep them from getting me down, but they were still succeeding. Was I just not doing a good enough job of it? Was there something wrong with me? Was I just a pathetic loser who couldn't deal with the real world? If ignoring bullies was the best way to make them stop, why were they still dumping on me? Why couldn't I do a better job of ignoring them? Everyone kept saying it wasn't a big deal, so why did it feel like such a big deal to me? Why couldn't I be happy?

Everyone experiences anxiety at some point in their life. For someone to be diagnosed with an anxiety disorder, however, the anxiety has to be so extreme, so irrational, so crippling that it literally makes it impossible for you to live a normal life. To give an example, I just finished a year abroad in Germany. I lived in a dorm where sixteen people shared the same kitchen, and for most of that year I starved myself because the idea of being in the kitchen and having to face my dormmates while I cooked my food was horrendously terrifying to me. Now, you might wonder, how the hell is that kind of thing terrifying? That's not scary at all. Well, that's why I was diagnosed with an anxiety disorder.

See, I'm not very good at small talk, and while I was in Germany, I had the added difficulty of having to do small talk in German. And when you share a kitchen with fifteen other people, odds are you'll be cooking a meal at the same time as someone else. This means you're in for a very awkward 10-20 minutes of silence unless you make some small talk while you wait for your food to cook. Now, when you're not very good at small talk to begin with, and you can't understand what the other person is saying or respond without sounding like a moron, you get to the point where you'd rather not have to participate in it at all. So, for me, going into the kitchen meant either spending the entire time trying to act like I was too busy cooking to talk (which is damn near impossible when you're just boiling water) or struggling through a few minutes of painfully awkward conversation. I didn't like that feeling, so I chose to avoid it altogether by only using the kitchen when it was empty. In other words, waiting until two in the morning to make myself some dinner, or surviving on candy and sandwiches bought from the store across the street.

Now, before you say anything, let me point out that I knew that I was being irrational. It's much smarter to suck it up and deal with some awkwardness than to starve yourself, so why was I choosing the latter? Well, that's the thing. I know that the former would have been the better solution, but I couldn't force myself to do it. To me, it wasn't worth that horrible feeling of dread in my stomach that came every time I thought about what could happen if I went into that kitchen. Not what would probably happen, but what could happen. See, my imagination likes to run off without me and come up with the most horrible scenarios that I can't get out of my head no matter how hard I try, and for whatever reason, these scenarios hold more power over my mind than plain and simple logic. I know that logic should be the winning power in this case, but when I'm standing at that kitchen door, sheer logic is nowhere near powerful enough to make me go through it. It's stupid. It's frustrating. It's confusing. But it's what happens, and it's incredibly difficult to change that.

Of course, that's not to say I haven't tried. In fact, I've been trying to overcome my anxiety for several years now, though before I was diagnosed with anxiety I thought of it as trying to overcome my shyness and become more outgoing. And the good news is, I've been succeeding. If I take where I am now and compare it to where I was in middle school, I can see how many things that used to take a lot of courage for me as a teenager are now things that I do without a second thought. For instance, I remember wearing one of my sister's t-shirts to school one day. The shirt had a picture of a monkey in a ninja outfit and the caption "ninja monkeys are meeting as we speak, plotting my demise" written on it, and when I wore it to school, I wore a zip-up sweatshirt over it and had to work up the nerve to unzip it and show it off to my friends (I couldn't even dream of showing my classmates). Nowadays, half my shirts use that same kind of humor and I don't even think about how other people might react to them (except for the one with the duck and the martini glass, that's one I'll never wear to work, but that's because I work with 2nd graders and the teachers probably wouldn't appreciate it). Not only that, but I don't have to spend twenty minutes working up the courage to speak up in class, or to ask a friend or acquaintance how their day was. I haven't started crying in class just because of something a classmate said to me. I've improved so much over the past eight years, but I still have a hell of a long way to go.

Having an anxiety disorder isn't a choice. It's not even close to being a choice. After all, what reason would I have to keep doing this to myself? It's obvious that I missed out on a lot by letting anxiety rule my life the way it has.

Except I've never 'let' it rule my life. Saying I 'let' it rule my life implies that I'm just not trying hard enough to overcome it, and that's where I get pissed off. I know that it doesn't make sense to be so anxious about the stupidest of things. I'm painfully aware of that, because people have been telling me it's stupid for years. Trust me, I can tell when I'm being irrational. And yet, it still happens, whether I want it to or not. Does that mean I'm just not trying hard enough? I don't think so. I've pushed myself to the limit trying to make myself be brave. The trouble is, for me, and many other people who have been diagnosed with a disorder, trying your hardest just isn't enough. And that's not our fault. We're fighting an uphill battle here. Our minds have faulty wiring that makes doing completely normal things ridiculously difficult. Think of it as being born without any thumbs. You can see that other people can do all these things with their thumbs and you know exactly how to do it yourself, but you're still stuck having to do things the hard way because your thumbs are missing. But nobody is going to look at you and say, "Stop letting your lack of thumbs keep you from holding things normally. You're just not trying hard enough," because it's pretty fucking obvious that you can't hold a pencil right if you don't have any goddamn thumbs.

Of course, while you can't increase the digits on your fingers, you can always increase your ability to overcome anxiety through logic, so one might argue that it's unfair to compare a physical disability with a mental disability. So, let me offer this alternative: telling a two-year-old to start speaking in complete sentences is not going to accomplish anything, and most people would see anyone who tells this to a two-year-old as a complete moron. The two-year-old is more than capable of learning how to speak in complete sentences, but it's going to take a few years for them to master that skill, and no reasonable person is going to condemn them for it.

Now, let me finish by saying I don't think it's right to go around being a pessimist just because you have a disorder. I think that "happiness is a choice" is a perfectly reasonable statement, but for someone like me, it's nowhere near as simple as it sounds. Yes, I have chosen to start therapy, take Adderall, and force myself to face difficult situations in order to overcome my anxiety, but it wasn't an easy choice. It took several years, a shitty roommate, and a course in basic psychology for me to look into the possibility of having an anxiety disorder, and it's taken a lot of therapy and self-exploration to get to the point where I can feel comfortable with who I am and not feel like I'm at fault for not being able to handle a situation the way most people would without so much as a second thought. I choose to work towards happiness, but no matter how much work I put into it, I can't always stop those feelings of intense fear and self-hate from overwhelming me at the most inopportune moments.

"A person will be just about as happy as they make up their minds to be," but the fact is, sometimes our minds don't do what we want them to, and to say we're not trying hard enough to be happy is to say we've failed as human beings, whether that's your intention or not. And let me tell you, after a certain point, when you're constantly being told that your misery and pain is something you're doing to yourself, even though you're trying your best to make yourself happy, you can't hear the words 'happiness is a choice' without wanting to punch whoever says them in the face. Happiness is a choice, but for people like me, it's one of the most difficult choices in the world.

(Edit: I think this comic sums it up perfectly: http://xkcd.com/828/ )

Daily Story 21 - Retarded Misconception

(This one's... a lot more of a rant than usual, but there have been a few times I've wanted to say this to someone (more than one person, actually) and I figured I should just get it out of my system before I snap and go bat-shit crazy on someone for a harmless comment. That, and after I wrote this I didn't really have the energy or the inspiration to write something else for today's story. And no, there wasn't anything that happened today that triggered this, just thinking about earlier in the semester when I tried to explain that being 'retarded' (nowadays the correct term is 'having a cognitive delay') was a very specific type of mental disability and didn't necessarily apply to someone who was showing signs of having some kind of mental disability. The first paragraph is what I just now realized I could have said, and the second paragraph is how I would have reacted if someone had asked me 'what's the big deal,' but only if I were the kind of person who actually went off on angry tirades (the ones in my head don't count because I'm the only one who can hear them).)

Just because someone can't display their intelligence in a way that everyone else expects them to doesn't mean they're incapable of intelligent thought, and just because they have trouble doing things that the rest of us can do doesn't mean they don't have anything else to give to the world. Even people who do have a cognitive delay, all they need is more help and more time than the rest of us. Stop looking at what they can't do, and start looking at what they can do. People can't just up and change the way they think, so give them a break. God knows they need it.

Yes, it might just seem like a simple mix-up of definitions, it does bother me, because I've spent my entire life being lectured and mocked because I'm afraid, because I can't concentrate, because I can't do things the way everyone else does, and I hated it, I hated people lecturing me, I hated being constantly reminded that I wasn't good enough, and I believed it. I knew there was something wrong with me, I got reminded every day, I thought it was my fault, I wanted to change, I was sick of feeling that way, but I couldn't change it because I didn't even know what the goddamn problem was, so how the hell was I supposed to fix it, but they kept criticizing me, getting pissed off at me for something beyond my control even though it was obvious, it was fucking obvious that I couldn't do what they wanted me to, how did they not see that I needed help? But they were right, I needed to change, and that hurt. It hurt so fucking bad, I hated myself, I couldn't see anything but failure, and it never stopped. And now, now I know, and now I'm sick and tired of hearing people telling me that I should stop being so anxious and that this it's not a big deal, because it is. I just want to scream at them, stop telling me what to do, I can't start thinking that way, I can't change that easily, I can't do these things that everyone else can, I need help, stop judging me for what I can't control, stop telling me to change, I'm trying, it's hard, stop forcing me to be like you, stop it, just stop, just stop, just- just shut up, just leave me alone, just let me live my life, just shut up, shut up, just shut up, just stop, stop, shut up, shut up, shut up, SHUT UP!

Because, honestly, I don't want to deal with this anymore.

Daily Story 19 - Paper Towel Drama

(Note: this isn't completely 100% accurate, but the ideas behind the thoughts are the same as what went through my head just before I wrote this.)

I go to the bathroom, I wash my hands, I pull the paper towel and it tears, not at the perforated edges, but right in the middle of the sheet.

Oh, I should probably pull the rest.

Nah, this way it'll save paper.

But now it's all funky with half a sheet.

I toss the half-sheet I used into the trash can.

So? It's saving paper.

But now that half-sheet's going to feel sad. It really ought to be reunited with its other half.

Oh, for- really? Are you really going to go down this road again?

It's so lonely!

I exit the bathroom.

Forget about it! Those two halves didn't get along anyway.

Yeah, okay, I guess you're right- but wait, how do you know that? You're just making things up!

I walk down the hallway.

Oh, God, not this stupid argument again.

Oh yeah, you're right. IT'S JUST A DAMN PIECE OF PAPER TOWEL! IT DOESN'T HAVE FEELINGS!

That's just mean!

IT'S NOT A REAL PERSON! IT'S AN INANIMATE OBJECT!

Okay, yeah, you're right... but still, it just doesn't feel right to have a torn half-sheet hanging there...

It. Saves. Paper.

Actually, whoever uses the bathroom next will probably just take that and the next full sheet, so it's not really saving anything.

Oh, for- IT DOESN'T MATTER! IT'S ONE IN THE MORNING! STOP DOING THIS TO YOURSELF AND GO TO BED!

I'm trying! It's hard not to think about it, though!

Hey, I should write this down, it's kind of funny.

I get back to my room.

Yeah, actually I forgot to write today's daily story. Guess I should've waited to turn the computer off.

I think about it, and I admit, I really don't know what's wrong with me. Oh wait, yes I do. Never mind.

Good night, everyone.

Ha ha, my thoughts are talking to you. I am communicating with you telepathically. Be afraid. Be very afraid.

I finish this story, upload it, and go to bed.