We've come a long way baby: Your GRcade journey.

Seriously though, im glad things are getting better for you. I should probably post my story soon too.

In 2007 I lost one of my closest family members, my paternal grandfather and my mum spent months in hospital coming close to death a few times. It affected me badly at the time but it wasn't until 2008 when everything went bad. My anxiety hit it's peak and it got to the point where even the thought of trying to go to college made me writh up in pain with my stomach. My Mum was still in the hospital and I didn't have a clue of how to actually handle life. The only one person who kept me from falling into a deep state of despair was my paternal grandmother (My Nan). While I was living at home on my own which I'd never done before she kept calling me to check I was ok and kept inviting me around to have dinner and what not to make sure I was eating properly.

I was struggling but with my Dad now living in Israel for work I didn't really know what else to do. I was suffering really badly. I wasn't going to college at all and I missed like 2-3 months of it and got put on a final warning. I went from getting all distinctions in year 1 (before my Grandad passed) to not even submitting things. They gave me one last chance to finish my coursework before I finished and thankfully I managed it but only with a MPP grade which is gooseberry fool. After college I kinda just forgot about it as it reminds me of a horrible period of my life which is those two years. My entire world turned entirely upside down, but I think in the end it shaped me into who I am now.

My mum had long since been back at home and I'd finished college. The idea of going to University was something I hadn't even considered but it was the height of the recession and there was no jobs in my area anywhere. I gave up looking and that was when the Job Center gave me an out I hadn't thought of. Living at home on my own with my mum meant I was technically her carer as I was doing everything for her, but I never even knew carers allowance was a thing. They helped me sign up and I got it, I lived off of like 250GBP a month which was fine but I helped my mum pay for food and what not and anything else I used to stop myself from going insane. I decided that I would do something I'd wanted to do since the age of 9 and that was to learn an Asian language. I'd decided pretty quickly to do Japanese so I started learning. I thought I was going to fail, I really did but because I had very little else to do responsibility wise and it was something I really enjoyed doing I kept it up.

It was about 2 months in and I decided to watch Shakugan no Shana and that was when my entire life changed. I fell in love with that show and I found out that I was starting to understand small bits of it because of my learning and after that I quickly found a recommendation online and started watching Haruhi, Lucky Star and then K-On. That was it, I'd become fully engrossed in Japanese otaku culture and there was no way back for me. I found it was helping me cement my understanding of Japanese atleast when it came to listening and I shortly fell in love with Japanese music as well.

One other side thing that happened with this was after meeting Dala the year before playing WoW, he'd been telling me about this RTS game I'd enjoy called StarCraft. I'd never thought of playing it before but I'd heard of it. I downloaded a demo and enjoyed it, but didn't buy it with my limited funds. That was when I found teamliquid and that is when I found out there was a big eSports scene in Korea dedicated to the game. I happened to check a few days before the finals of one of the bigger tournaments, starting with this game right here:



This started my other passion. I fell in love with watching that Terran player (FanTaSy play) and I decided that I wanted to become good at BW. I had a lot of spare time so between that and my Japanese I had my hands full trying to learn a craft. A few years passed and in that I started collecting anime figurines which I still collect now, I started posting on BW forums a lot and strengthened my friendship with Dala online and we met up in person.story

Another small set of milestones between that and 2014 were that I started an open university course to try and give myself a chance once I stopped being a carer. The major issue this caused was it let my anxiety breed and fester since I very rarely left the house and very rarely met anyone else. The me who'd been bullied constantly in school who was already bad in confidence lost even more and I was more like a hermit. The other thing was I found out my Dad had found a new woman who he'd fallen in love with and he'd started a family with her (while keeping this all from me and my mum, which pissed me off majorly). I've explained this story before but it got to the point that I didn't ever want to talk to my Dad again. This is the sad part but I saw Clannad which was emotional already, but the main character has a big argument with his Dad in a similar way I did, but the Dad apologises for everything and it triggered something inside me to not want to lose contact with my Dad forever. I opened up to him and he opened up to me and I eventually in 2013 met his new family, my step brother and my half sister who was about 2 at the time.

Come 2014 he wanted to move back to the UK to be closer to his Mum and myself, so he forced us to move out of our family home and move to Hertfordshire which is where I now live. I had 2 rocky years of living with my Step Mum who I've never got on with and never will before in June 2016 I decided I want out. I had some sad news that my Nan (the one who saved me in 2007) had developed some kind of cancer, but the doctors thought she would be fine with treatment so I'd kinda got the idea that she'd be leaving us out of my head and in June 2016 I started planning to move out. I'd been in my job for a year and I worked out my budget that I could just afford leaving, but I was getting depressed at home so i knew I had to leave my Dads. I loved living with the rest of my family, but she ruined it entirely for me.

Along comes August 28th 2018, the day of my move out and one of the worst days of my life. The day before I was speaking to my Nan on the phone and she was saying how much she was worried about me moving and how annoyed she was at my Step Mum for forcing it to this, but kept saying over and over again how much she loved me and wanted it to go well and said she'd come over soon to see my flat soon. That night, in the early hours of the 28th she suddenly became very ill and by the time the ambulancemen got her to the ambulance she'd passed away. I woke up so excited to move and my Dad came into my then packed up room and gave me the news. I was devestated. The person who saved me in 2007 from severe depression and who had been a rock my entire life to me had gone and I had no idea what to do. Thinking about it now is making me upset again, but it felt like for the first time in my life things were going well. My mum was happy where she was living and everything I'd been working on had been going well. It was a total shock. My Dad insisted I stay with him for another week so I pushed my move back and I'm glad I did.

I went straight back to work but after the funeral my bosses thankfully gave me like 2 weeks of compassionate leave. My cat at this point (Lotty) was living with my Nan at the time as I couldn't bring her with me so when I moved in I was completely alone. I thought my whole world had collapsed in on itself. There was a huge amount of family drama on my dads side and I nearly didn't get my cat back with me because my banana split of a cousin. The veil of how happy I was at work dissappeared and I started hating my job, but I started thinking of doing something outside of work to improve that.

That brings me to the final points of my life so far. I made a close friend at work and we've been to Amsterdam together. I write this as I'm chatting to him online and this new group of friends has helped me become a lot more confident. I'm still useless with women and have self confidence issues but atleast I'm trying in that regard now. My Mum is ill again and she's been in and out of hospital (she's even in there now for observation) since she started dialysis. My step brother is just a real brother to me, blood or not I'm super close to him and I'm glad he's in my life and my little sister loves me to bits.