It's not the drugs, I swear.

So yesterday, whilst being trained for my new temp* job (that I'm not going to write about because I'm so completely over the moon about it that the post would go on endlessly. My fangirlish excitement would dominate the blog and the twitter account would be a spam feed of joy...) one of the guys -who will furthermore be referred to as Sensei Overlord the Great since he has literally been trying to teach me everything and in return just been lumbered with the most useless piece of meat ever- validated the fact he was a proper gamer by indicating his bloodshot eyeballs and eye bags. He said he doesn't partake in the usage of illicit drugs and that it was purely the gaming.

I mean really, is that not a confession?

I would have been suspicious, had I actually found any of the ridiculous aesthetic complaints he spoke of. We gotta work on boosting that dude's self-image feels, y'know?

Anyway. It got me thinking about gaming as an addiction, about how toxic it had been to me as a youngster and how wildly that has changed in recent years. Seriously. It's gone from having the most negative impact to making some vital changes in how I think. I'm not going to say #GAMINGSAVEDMYLYF2K19, but it's definitely affected how I live.

I was a nervous little kiddie. I'm not going to go into details, ain't nobody got time for that! But I had some very good reasons for the anxiety. Playing through games where you have half a second to react before another fearsome multi-mouthed creature launches himself at you from the dark depths of all your nightmares has actually SERIOUSLY helped me. I'm getting used to being under pressure. I don't think I've properly panicked in at least a few weeks now -insert the happiest face you've ever seen, right here bbz-

*I say 'temp' with a lot of pain. But I have a plan to remedy that. I'm going to log over a thousand hours on Watch Dogs in a valiant attempt to learn some actual hacking skills. Once relevant skills are obtained, I'm going to hack myself into the servers at work and become a permanent fixture in their system. I will have to sacrifice my human form and become an entirely coded entity, never to be spoken to or see by any humanoid life form ever again- but it will be worth it.

What has gaming done for you?