Blarg.

I recently wrote a piece about me and decided to share it with everyone here because this is a place for me to do that kind of thing. (yes I know it's kind of long, you don't have to read it, no one's making you)

Hello, my name's DaFiren.

It's been awhile since the last time I had to write an "About me" paper, last time being either 5th or 6th grade, so don't expect this to be written well. It's also been a while since I've written much of anything so please point out any mistakes I make. I was never good at writing about myself and I've never wanted people to know who I was, not really, so if you're prepared for a life story then please, by all means, continue reading.

I'll start with the most important part of who I am. I'm a kind-hearted, fun loving, funny guy who seems to be a bit egotistical. I care about the people around me and I try to help when they're feeling down. All I want to do is make people smile, laugh and get through the bad days while making good days even better. At the base level, this is me, this is who I want to be remembered as and it's also someone who no one will ever see. I'll get to why further down.

I am a gamer. Not just a video gamer, a gamer. Most any game, I'll play, board games, card games, pen and paper, mind games and most genres of video games. I like to have fun, hang with friends and relax. I've always wanted to make games, almost went to school to learn how but ended up shifting to YouTube. I figured my love of games and creativity could leed to some epic games, ones that I would want to play, but the stress of school, expectations, responsibility and possible failure was too much. Decided it might be better to try to make my job one where I could play games rather than make them.

Right now I figure you think I'm just lazy for quitting school, hell, you might be right. It would be confusing for me to just say it so I'm going to explain, as best I can, how I got so sensitive to stress but first... My family is a bit odd so to summerize, my mom was deemed unfit to raise children and my brother, sister and I would have gone up for adoption had my grandpa and step-grandma not stepped in. My brother actually ended up staying with our biological grandma but this is about me, not him. My grandpa lived in Kansas, my step-grandma lived in Oregon, my sister and I ended up living in Oregon.

When I was 8, I developed a mild case of depression. My step-grandma had me move to spend time with my grandpa which resulted in me losing all my friends. While I was there I went to public school and I experienced the 'new kid' feeling which made it hard to make friends, too hard, I didn't make any. When I got back from my year with my grandpa all the friends that I had before I left had moved, transferred away or forgotten me. And without any friends to help to meet new people, the 'new kid' feeling held strong and it took a while to make another friend. Bullying had also become a problem while I was still in Kansas and that problem followed me back to Oregon.

Eventually I did end up making a friend, two friends actually. Both of them lived nearby so we got to hang out a lot and I made up for lost time by hanging out as much as possible. We ended up getting close fast and I trusted them both, we had each other's backs. One of them enjoyed video games and helped me to appreciate them more, the other was more athletic, we rode bikes and played wall-ball a lot. I don't know exactly what caused him to do it, if I did something wrong or if he was a just a horrible person and I failed to see him as such.

One day, we were riding the bus home from school, I was sitting next to my gamer friend, the other one sitting behind us, it was an ordinary day. I don't remember what I was doing, probably reading a book like I usually did on the bus, when I felt a pair of hands close around my throat. They gripped tight before I could react and no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't pry them loose. I could feel them tighten as I tried desperately to get air to my lungs, to no avail. I tried to call out but no sound would escape. I could feel my eyes bulge and it felt like my head was going to explode. The world started to blur as tears flooded my eyes. A few seconds later, things started to dim, my mind went blank as I started to pass out. It wasn't until this point that someone decided to do something.

My friend who had been sitting next to me the entire time, watching, finally leaped into action, prying the betrayers hands off my neck. Air filled my lungs, I started coughing, my vision came back still blurred by fresh tears. I dropped to the floor inbetween the seat in front of my own, turned around so I would know if the attack was over. After a while the bus stopped to let other students off. I got up, grabbed my bag and walked to the front, sat in the first seat and told the bus driver what had happened. He saw the marks on my neck and the streams on my face and told my attacker to get off right then and there. We were half a block away from his stop. Later I told my parents what had happened and the next day I told our teachers, neither of which did anything. I haven't been able to trust anyone since.

Further into the school year, my gamer friend introduced me to another of his friends, Andrew, and he later became my best friend. The next year, a week before my birthday, my gamer friend moved away without telling me. I found out while trying to invite him to my party. I was trying to reach him but his phone had been disconnected and his house was empty. Haven't seen him since. Andrew and I had fun though, I think we went to an arcade and had pizza.

That was 6th grade, 7th brings a bit of deja vu. Bullying had increased and my step-grandma decided that private school might be better for me. Unfortunately my friend didn't come with and being in different schools caused a bit of a divide between us, didn't hang out as much. We weren't fighting or anything, just didn't see much of each other. As for life in a private christian school where there were only 15 students per class and one class per grade, it was boring. It was also a K-8 school so everyone knew everyone else there which made me feel as though I didn't belong. Needless to say I didn't make any friends during 7th grade.

8th grade was a little easier. Two new students who knew each other joined the school as 7th graders and one of them shared my name. Easiest friends ever. We didn't share classes together because I was a grade above them but we had the same lunch/recess periods and the one that shared my name, Robert, joined the basketball team, I joined with so we could hang out more.

I like sports, sort of. The game is fun, competition however, not so much. I like playing the game but when playing a game between schools, it kind of detracts from the fun of the game. I've played sports before, american soccer and baseball, so I knew that I wouldn't like playing in actual games. I had asked the coach before I joined if it would be OK if I sat out of games but joined in for practice, he said that was fine. I still showed up at the games to root for the team and Robert. Not to mention the fact that I suck at basketball and don't do well in the spotlight, I would have killed our team.

Despite being in a christian school, having permission from the coach and having a legitimate reason for not playing in games, I was still harassed for not participating. It might sound like I was picked on the whole time, only once. Only one time, one act to make up for lack of bullying since I got to the school. It did it's job. A 7th grader, possibly 6th, can't remember, stopped me in the locker after I had changed into my jersey. He was about a third my size, short for his age and skinny, he told me with as many swears as he could fit into a sentence that if I wasn't going to participate in the games that I shouldn't be there. For someone who'd be a pancake if I sat on them, to throw so much hate at me just for being there, and in a school that collectively goes to church on wednesdays...

I was crushed. My depression had gotten worse during 7th grade due to lack of friends. I was 12 years old and I wanted to die. I went back to the stall, took off the jersey, put my shirt back on, walked outside while trying (and failing) to hold back tears, handed my jersey to the coach and said I'm done. I was hoping to be able to just leave but he stopped me and asked what happened, I told him and for the first time, I wasn't the one who got in trouble for getting picked on by a bully. I still left. The foul mouthed kid may have gotten in trouble but he was still on the team and I didn't want to be around him.

The damage was already done. I couldn't help but hear his words and feel his hatred wherever I went. His one act of verbal abuse was enough to tear down any and all progress made to bring up my self esteem and destroyed the walls keeping my depression at bay. I was consumed by a dark presence that gnawed at my very being, casting away all my hopes and dreams, leaving nothing in it's wake. Sorry if that sounds overly dramatic, I'm not trying to play it up or anything. This is legitimately how I feel and I know no other way of expressing it.

I stopped doing homework, stopped paying attention in class. My grades dropped and I was 'sick' more often than not. If it weren't for the fact that the end of the year was near I would have had to have retaken 8th grade, not that it would have mattered. I convinced my grandparents to let me try online school, they agreed as long as I did it in Kansas. Guess my step-grandma didn't want to deal with a drop-out failure.

Once again I was forced to leave my friends behind. At least this time I was old enough to be allowed to call my friends. For my online classes, my grandpa bought a laptop, not for me, for me to use, it was his laptop. He also let me play a few games on it, Minecraft, SecondLife and Cossacks. Later I got Halo 2. It was OK at first but things always find a way to turn sour.

My grandpa was a college professor at the time, taught business and finance. My uncle was a student at the same college. The two of them lived in the same 2 bedroom apartment that I had then joined. My uncle is evil. My uncle is a bully. He's a special kind of bully, anything he does could be classified as teasing, rightfully so, but he does so many different kinds of 'teasing' with a high enough frequency that by the end of the year, I wasn't just having occasional thoughts of suicide, it had become constant. It's been constant for the last 8 years and will probably continue for quite some time.

As for the online schooling, I gave up pretty quick. Mostly played video games and read books at the library to get away from my uncle. My memory isn't too clear but I think when summer rolled around and grandpa and I went home for summer break, I was enrolled in a math class and bowling class online so that I wouldn't have to play catch-up in high school. All the classes from the year before tanked, I believe. I managed to pass the math and bowling classes and started freshman year of high school.

My friends, Andrew, Robert and the other unnamed kid from private school, were all going to the same high school that I was. Unfortunately because of my online school fiasco, I wasn't the same grade as Andrew anymore, so he didn't want me hanging out with him because I was a freshman and he was a sophomore and all his friends were sophomores. Since it was a public high school, there were a lot of students so, as my luck would have it, I didn't have any classes with my other two friends either.

I did have lunch with them though. The two of them seemed to have split or maybe they just didn't know where the other hung out during lunch because I could never get them together. I tried hanging out with Robert, which failed because he had become a 'ladies man' and was always with a girlfriend (new one every week...). Eventually he decided he was bi-sexual and started to hang with boyfriends, I don't have a problem with guys being with guys but hanging out with him was every bit as awkward as with the girls. So I tried to hang out with my unnamed friend instead.

The reason that I haven't named him is because we aren't friends anymore. The reason Andrew's name is here is because I'm still friends with him. The reason Robert's name is here is because we share the name and that was an important part in how we became friends (not a friend anymore). Mr. U. N. Owen (Unknown) was an OK friend for a while, we had more fights than most. We probably would have fought back in private school as well but Robert was there to keep us from it. What ended our friendship was me telling him about my depression. Short story shorter, he got mad and stopped talking to me.

I dropped out of high school later and didn't really do much of anything for a while. I had been grounded from all video games, friend visits and outdoor activities because I dropped out. Eventually my step-grandma was tired of me doing nothing and I was forced back to Kansas where my grandpa and evil uncle awaited. I had decided that I wanted to go to Full Sail University to learn to make games, my grandpa said that I'd have to get a job. I tried for a while to get a job, got an interview at a Golden Coral (I'd taken a culinary class in high school and later got my food handler's card), didn't get the job. Gave up after that, my ban on video games had ended when I was sent to Kansas so I went back to just playing games.

Eventually I ended up back in Oregon. My grandpa talked to me about an option I had open, the General Education Degree or GED. Despite the fact that I specifically dropped out of high school to get my GED so I could skip the high school drama and abuse and go straight to college, I acted like I wasn't super pissed that they had sent me back to an evil uncle and wasted a year and they helped me schedule the tests at a local community college. I actually ended up taking a GED prep course that I didn't need because the prep course gave a free college credit to those who pass the GED tests. I slept through most of prep, passed the GED tests (with pretty good scores too) and started taking classes at the community college.

Things went downhill fast. Despite being interested in the classes I was taking, I couldn't focus. It's hard to pay attention to things when you're constantly thinking about ending your life (if you don't know what I'm talking about here, you missed a part above). I tried my best to focus, I tried my best to do the work but I couldn't. I managed to get through a couple classes but I failed the rest. I stopped going, two semesters later I'd try again only to fail even more. I quit college all together because I didn't want to waste any more of my grandpa's money failing classes over and over. I decided that I would try learning from books instead.

That failed. With my depression being as big a distraction as it was, I don't know what I was thinking when I tried to learn from books. By the time I had started college I was already having trouble reading books that were meant to be fun rather than teach. I have a book sitting next to me right now that I've opened at least twenty times in the last month, trying to read it. I'm on page 3. It's a good book too, got through half of it when I was younger, was hoping to finish it because I have the second as well but I can't even get through a sliver of what I had finished before.

All the while, my depression was getting worse. I had stopped caring about personal hygiene or health. My room would become the worst pigsty, my step-grandma would make me clean it up and within a few weeks it would travel back in time to before I cleaned it. I lacked any drive to do anything, except for gaming. I relied on YouTubers like Markiplier, JackSepticEye, PewDiePie, TobyGames and more to get me through the day. All I did anymore was watch videos and play games because they were the best way to distract me from the voices in my head telling me all kinds of horrible things.

Somewhere along the way I realized that I could be a YouTube gamer. It could have been my unwavering love for games, the fact that I could almost always put a smile on someone's face or it could have been the people playing with me telling me that I should do YouTube. I decided that I would try. I recorded some videos... and they sucked. I decided to upload them anyways. This was while I was still going to community college, it was my first attempt.

My computer... my grandparents' computer wasn't good, my mic wasn't good and being an OCD/perfectionist wasn't helping. I posted them and basically gave up. Until earlier this year (2016 as of writing in case you're a time traveller). My friend Andrew and I for the last few years have hardly done anything together, not for lack of trying. Andrew is a very busy person. Anyways... He surprised me around my birthday (21st if you must know) by asking what's in my (grandparents') rig in the hopes of upgrading it with his old graphics cards.

We managed to set up a date for him to come look at the inside of our pre-built system (I tried to get them to let me build one, it would have been better but they wouldn't let me) and he found that his GTX 580 would just be able to fit, any bigger and it would have required dangerously risky modifications. Only issue was the power supply wasn't enough. He was able to find one that would work on Newegg and I convinced my step-grandma to buy it for my birthday. It got here in 3 days despite using the cheapest shipping method and after some minor heart attacks while upgrading, my system was running faster than ever.

One month. For one month I was able to record videos, edit and upload them to my YouTube channel. Things were going great, except that nearly every time I tried to record a video something would go wrong with the computer. Sound drivers kept crashing, videos would lag for no reason, audio was ♥♥♥♥ but that was to be expected with my microphone. I probably could have kept going if it weren't for the last thing, the one scare that ended my YouTube career short. The hard drive crashed.

I managed to get it back up and running by disconnecting and reconnecting the hard drive with the rest of the computer so I could continue to play games... It wasn't worth the risk. Making videos was the first thing that has ever helped my depression. I enjoyed seeing other people try to promote their own channels via comments on my own because it gave me a sense that I had purpose, that I wasn't just yelling at a computer screen. I enjoyed knowing that despite the horrible quality, both sound and visuals, people were watching and some of them even liked it. But if I lost my games...

I would have nothing. No way to escape the endless torment of my own head, no way to interact with the only people I can honestly say I care about anymore. I can't trust that my family would get a new computer. Even if they did, would they even let me on it? YouTube was my last hope, my last dream. I chased it and but in the end I was the one running away.

I can't change the way I feel, believe me, I've tried. I can't just smile and force myself to be happy, it doesn't work that way. I can't keep my depression from ruining my life. What I can do is not let it destroy me. No matter how hard it gets, no matter how much I suffer, I promise, I won't give up on life. I just wish I had the strength to follow the dreams I once had and to handle the stress of life that everyone has to deal with if only to be less of a burden to those around me.

That's it, that's why you can't truly see me. It's buried too deep. I can't even see it anymore. I don't think it could ever happen, but I'd be lying if I said I thought it impossible for me to come back from this hole I've found myself in. One thing that's never changed for me is one belief, anything, no matter how unlikely, is possible.

I guess that's it for now, not much more that's really important. Anyways...

I've been DaFiren, and you... have probably been you... and that's perfect. I'll see you in the next one! Bye-bye!