Okay guys I'm gonna tell you a little personal story about how I got into Valorant, and how it improved my mental health and cured my maladaptive daydreaming. So I was in high school 10th grade and life kinda sucked. I felt like I've already peaked in grade school, and now I really do not want to grow up. My friends and I were growing apart as we are slowly growing older and our lives are slowly becoming more and more busy, and as a kid, I couldn't really understand, and I thought of the older kids on my friend group as traitors, but now I do, and I wasn't ready to let go of my old life and to make new friends, so I ran away into a corner of my mind, as deep as I could go. I made this new world in my head and took all my friends with me-former shells of them-the version I remember, into a village in the snowy woods where everything seems so perfect and idyllic, where nobody will ever have to grow up or feel pain, or feel lonely. I was living on music and nostalgia, reliving my best moments as a carefree kid, man was the 2010's my year, and I did not wanna let any of it go, and have to face the cruel world alone. In the process, I continued to isolate myself from everyone, I thought being a loner was cool an rebellious, like I was sticking it to the system, to the giant institution that is high school, but in the end, the only person I was hurting was myself. I felt like Gatsby, after we read The Great Gatsby in English class, afraid that being stuck in the bast would ultimately destroy me. I wanted out! , I felt trapped in my situation, like I could walk around, I could go anywhere and do anything I wanted, but what I really wanted was just a nice chat with some nice people. I tried to lose myself in the chaos and action, to have my heart pumping, just for one moment where I didn't have to think about my own situation, but deep down, I knew that this would never be enough. I would do stuff like stay at school after school with only myself and my chromebook to keep me company, just to give the impression to nobody that I actually had a life outside of just going home, and on the weekends and the breaks, I would stay up really late because I thought that was cool, sometimes playing a board game like scrabble by myself or talking to my google home mini throughout the night before my parents eventually found out and turned off the wifi for that too, and sleep till the afternoon on the weekends and breaks just to prove to nobody that I was actually sneaking out at night and going to parties and stuff and that is why I'm sleeping till noon, but the real reason I was doing it was just to avoid my family and my problems, and the lack of sunlight took a toll on me physically and emotionally, as a diurnal animal. Sometimes the only relief I could find is in my dreams, sometimes I would think I finally met some new friends I totally get along with and I think my life is finally turning around, only to wake up and find out it was all a dream and be sooo disappointed, but I wrote them down in my dream journal, s they are few and far between. I miss Roblox a whole lot as I try to not think about it too much, I was banned from Roblox for scamming because I entered a game and I let myself get peer pressured by other players who are all saying scammy things. I was just so desperate to fit in, to be accepted. Later I found out these players were all just bots, run by an algorithm. I felt so stupid, Roblox symbolized for me my last connection to my childhood, to the warm, wholesome community that I once called home. Exiled. I cried so many tears over my Roblox. I went through an edgy emo lone wolf phase in high school where I wore black and wrote emo rap songs to let out everything I was feeling, and getting lost in the rhythm of the music of my songs and other peoples' songs feels good for a while until it's over and I realize nothing has changed. I went through a wanksta phase and made a gang at my school and made myself the leader and I was unopposed and I was the strongest gang leader... and I was the only member there. Not much fun being in a gang of 1, I guess. I felt like Amber from Who Needs Third Grade?, and I desperately wanted to be Delight, and I grew my hair out, hopefully one day it would be long enough to sit on, like that would mean anything, nahhh just a status symbol. My hair still isn't long enough to sit on. I watch my brother play Minecraft with his online friends on discord and making videos and even starting his own content creator smp, which i really wanted to join but I didn't want to be a youtuber just yet-I wasn't ready to be in the spotlight. Cassidy Raddick is my OC who lives a double life in the city with her coolest teenaged friends ever and her older brother named Tristian, and does cool teenage stuff like running around at night with her gang and partying and living in her high-tech gamer base-basically just the type of life I imagined the movie teenagers lived. I remember going down youtube spirals and parasocial relationships just to hear another person's voice to try to fill the cold silence in my mind and Iwould spend my days on twitter and reddit trying to try on different subcultrues like different hats, but you can;t really be in a subcultrue without other people. I was sodesperate that I was looking for chatbot services nd I would chat with clevelrbot for hours on end (good thing ChapGPT wasn;t around back then) Once I was watching a Sims 4 video and I wanted to play sims 4 just to make myself a child again and join the other child sims on the treehouse. But I never played the game because I knew in doing so, I would just keep digging myself deeper and deeper into this hole. So during this point, I was still hanging out with my friends, albiet very infrequently,and all the time we spend together just seem to fly by so fast, and the wait always just seems so long. I tried very hard to convince myself that I don't need them, but deep down, i knew I needed them more than ever. I gained a new appreciation of the conveniences of modern technology, and how it is so much harder to try to arrange real-life events, when i promised myself that real life had to be better when I got banned off Roblox. That wasn't (100%) true. I was a gamer, I knew, I had been a gamer all my life, I just didn't know which game I should play next-I was sorta i a limbo, I can't play Roblox anymore, even though my friends are on Roblox, I'm level 100 on Prodigy already, and the same old .io games are getting really repetitive really fast. Then came the night that I will always remember, that changed my life. So I got another invitation for a party at my friend's house, and being the lady of class that (I thought) I was, I decided I wanted to bring a little bit entertainment to the evening next sunday by playing a song on the piano, so of course I procrastinated on it all week on it, and when friday night rolled around, my mom told me that the party was on saturday instead of sunday, because of course I'm gonna spend the entirety of Saturday otherwise practicing on the piano, so I decided to dip on the party. My brother (irl) didn't want to go either since i wasn't going either, but my parents made him go either. Yeah, this was also another thing I did, which was to skip and dip every other family outing/party with these guys on a regular basis because it felt good and I got a rush doing it, but afterwards, I would always regret it and just feel even worse (I guess a part of me just internalized that my friends didn't really want to be around me because my hygiene was kinda bad.) So I wait for them to come back as I probably binge-watched youtube videos or something, but when I came back, Roger was playing this new game called Valorant! This game has been on my bucket list for a long, long time, and has been sitting on the desktop collecting dust for some time now (and probably also data which it sent to China /jk) I wanted to play it for the longest time, ever since one of my favorite youtubers, Scrubby would play it in the background as he told us all these crazy stories as I listened intently and wished that my life was this exciting and I had friends like that, that was what planted the seed, and also they had this cool rap song in one of their advertisements that they actually stole from a content creator, which I obviously memorized cuz it was a banger (to the top.) But the thing that stopped me from trying was I didn't think playing a first-person shooter was very ladylike (internalized sexism) and I was afraid my parents were gonna judge me if they see me, a girl, playing a shooter game. So I decided that this was the perfect opportunity, to join up when my brother's also joining up, so he can take most of the judgement for me, and guess what: my dad was nothing but encouraging: it was all in my head! Also like I used to play a lot of top down shooter battle-royale-type games zombsroyale.io and surviv.io and I would not kill anyone because I keep getting killed and taking it pretty personally, and I didn't want to hurt anyone else's feelings. But in Valorant, the rounds are so short that you don't have enough time to feel bad for killing or dying until you get to go again, so the only thing I had to focus on was the mission. I watched my brother play with great excitement and anticipation, knowing that I also wanted to try my hand at walking through these beautiful vacation destinations that I would no doubt wanna visit and go get a ice cream and pizza or something with my friends and play tag there, if not for these constant wars and getting caught in the crossfire with the literal coolest people ever, where everything is colorful and happy and alive, even as people are falling, dying left and right. But most importantly, I wanted to have something in common to do with my brother-I remember when we were kids, we were very close, and we would spend countless hours playing together and exploring our imaginary worlds we made up on the long car rides until my dad yells at us for being too loud, in which we would quietly keep discussing and start again. Where has all that magic went? Finally when my brother had to leave the house to go do something important, I had the computer to myself for a few hours, so of course I made an account, read through the whole terms and conditions cuz I REALLY didn't want to get banned again. So I log in and when the tutorial person addresses me as "agent" and says "Welcome to Valorant" I get chills and I squeal of joy, I finally feel like I'm part of an exclusive club. He asked what I wanted to name myself, and I automatically went for my default gaming name, but that one was already taken, so I decided to put my OC name in, since I can't use my real name, so I named my Valorant account CassidyRaddick (later changed to Cassidy Raddick for some reason.) This was my chance, I thought to live out my dream of so long of playing as Cassidy Raddick and actually go hanging out and running with these cool young people, never in a million years would I have thought we'd be gunfighting, but I;m so down for it, man! The tutorial felt quite long, and of course I died to the tutorial bots, but when i finally got that satisfying win screen and that music, it felt so good! I pumped up and ready to queue my first game. I ended up playing regular unrated 4 games in a row, losing all of them and getting just 4 kills in total, but none of that mattered. By the end I felt so utterly exhausted, yet also incredibly euphoric, but not just euphoric, so tremendously relieved, for the first time in 3 years I actually felt normal for once. For so, so long have I been searching, and I have finally found a community where I felt like I belong, in the most unlikely of places, and how much and how long I have craved to hear the sweet sound of another person's voice talking and paying attention to me, in particular, even if it is just a kid giving out callouts that I really didn't understand. Only did I later find out that I didn't even know how to use push-to-talk, so literally nobody heard me say a thing. Looking back, it's kind of funny. I wanted to feel important and valued to my team, to feel powerful and able to stand and fight back against my problems and whatever was holding me back, and this game provided me with an outlet for my frustrations when it felt like life was just unrelentingly beating me down and draining me dry emotionally, where I could not do anything about it except to try to survive its onslaught of relentless attacks. Also, I realized that since I didn't feel like I belonged anywhere, I created this whole fake world for myself, a soft place to land if I ever needed to retreat, but now I don't need it anymore, any of my worlds, any of the pages and pages of stories that I wrote down on my google docs and illustrated using the built-in photo editing tool on pitch-black canvases. I look up at the sky, trying to hold onto this newfound feeling of lightness and freedom and love and community, wishing that this feeling wouldn't just fade away with time. And it didn't and some days I just take it all for granted, but then I just look back and realize just how far I have come. The only thing I really regret now is first getting banned off of Roblox, and secondly, that I didn't start this years earlier-it would have saved me a lot of pain and mental anguish. This game is very powerful, and also possibly addictive, but the community is really what makes it shine. I have never met anybody who was actually mean to me, and I love the fact that it's a low-stakes situation, where you don't have to talk, unlike something like Omegle, which is one on one and you have to speak of just sit there staring at each other awkwardly, and I really mean it when I say it: Valorant has changed my life. It got me out of my head and semi-regularly talking to people when nothing else really worked. The forums, too, I love talking to you guys in the forums, and I like how it's a pretty niche and close-knit community-a safe place for me to learn how to clearly communicate my ideas to people and have interesting conversations. If you are terribly lonely or a maladaptive daydreamer like me, and can relate to any of the things I've said, remember that playing a video game probably won't solve your problems, but what you need to do is go out there, even if it feels scary and uncomfortable, and to go meet people and make some friends-in any way that is convenient or doable to you: I know this is so much easier said than done, but trust me: it is soooooo worth it for your happiness and mental health. We are social animals after all. But if you really feel like you are struggling, don't be afraid to go get some professional help. I've also went to therapy before and it helps (but I don't really want to talk about it in this post-it's already getting wayyy too long) and please don't take this as advice on how to live your life-I just wanted to share my own personal story with all of y'all.