Make it stop, just please make it stop...

To start this off, I'd like to introduce myself.

Hi, I'm Steal Women. If you've played online games in the past 4-6 years, you've probably seen my name.

I'm 23 years old, the addiction started one early morning on the 25th of December in the year 1999. This was the day I got the first and only gift from my father, a GameBoy Color and Pokemon Gold. This is where everything started. I could barely even read, the game actually helped with that.

About 2 days after I was given this GameBoy my brother was gifted one as well. We would spend hours upon hours playing together, trading, battling, breeding, searching. There was no end to it.

While playing Pokemon, my grandmothers ex-husband noticed we were into gaming and would request us to come to his house and play N64 and a few PC games that he had. After some time of doing this, my grandfather found his game. Asheron's Call was released on November 2nd, 1999. Now I can't say he played since release, but I can tell you that Christmas was HUGE for us. We ended up spending almost 2 entire weeks confined to his house watching him play the game. When he would have to take care of basic things like food, hygene, etc, we would be able to play.

This is where it gets horrible, where everything is just out of control for YEARS to come.

We would spend hours there, not sleeping, not showering, nothing. At the age of 8 and 10. My grandfather was never a father so he didn't know exactly how to handle two children spazzing out over a game refusing to shower, eat, and sleep. I can remember going to his house for the weekends for the next few years always just playing the game and loving it. After a while of this, I found a game that I could play on my own computer, and almost any other computer that could load java, Runescape. Runescape was my game. This is where I would spend every waking moment of the day. I would come home sick from school, pretend to be sick so i didnt have to go to school, and anythiing else I could do to play this game. Fast forward to 15 and I get my first girlfriend, enter the Quest to Lose Virginity which helped me stop playing runescape for about 3 months. After I realized I had not played, I just quit doing everything for a while. Nothing would get me off the game except that girlfriend, who was completely toxic and would force me to not talk to my friends and family because they knew she was toxic. So I was basically on a computer, unable to have friends online or offline and only able to speak with the people liviing with me and the girlfriend that would come over. This made me CLING to the game, completely and totally.

After having lost that girlfriend and moving on to another, I switched my addiction to PS3 and COD:World at War. My girlfriend and I would just get high and play all day. This was not completely unhealthy, but obviously unhealthy. (No hard drugs, just some pot.)

Fastforward to leaving her and moving on to Runescape 20+hours a day. Nothing but pot, runescape, coffee, and sleep. Not the best real life situation at the time, so I'd just get lost in the grind. This was from 17-21 years old. I did not have my frist job until I found out a then friend was pregnant with my child. After that I would get a job and have to balance the grind between job, gf, and living situation.

Fast forward to today, I've sicne not played Runescape in 2 months, a horrible, long, sh**ty 2 months. I've since collected almost every pokemon game known to man, multiple DS systems, multiple GameBoys. Now I've also moved on to FFXIV and FFXI.

As you can tell, quitting has not been good to me. As I type this I'm truant from my job, spent the entire day yesterday on FFXIV and getting FFXI to stop being buggy for me, and I just want to play Runescape.

Nobody in my real life takes this as a serious problem. Nobody. I just need some help. I can't get off the games. This is a moment where I can actually feel that pull on me, where I can resist it. But for how long....

As soon as I post this, I'm going to load up FFXIV more than likely, make an excuse to my girlfriend as to why im not at work, and spend the entire day hating myself.