ShutinThrowaway12345

My advice being this: There's absolutely no shame in being yourself. You do not have to accept the pressure that you feel from those people who were giving you the feeling that you have to become financially independent as soon as possible. There is no shame in being yourself. Other people do not know how you feel or how you think, they instead judge everybody based off of their own experiences, and since a lot of them have had it easier than you or don't have the same problems that you've had then they feel like they can talk about you behind your back or to your face and make you feel like dirt. You do not have to be ashamed of what you are or how you earn a living. While it would be nice to be financially independent, it's something that's not possible for everybody. Everybody has dreams of being a millionaire (or a billionaire in the case of the Japanese currency), but very very few people actually achieve that. The majority of people just do the best they can with what they can do. While you should always strive to make things better and easier for yourself, if you're not able to do that then you can't let it get to you. Society in general is an uncaring bitch. Society chews people up and spits them out and eagerly awaits more people to chew up, all without caring about who gets spit out. Take a look at the Manga industry and see how many Mangeka work themselves literally to death because they feel the pressure that their bosses/companies and society places on them.

Everything in life is a learning experience, no matter what you do. Even things that feel like a waste of time, are actually learning experiences that help you grow. Me wasting a decade on WoW helped lead me to being better at this other MMO (which I'm not naming since some people here on Reddit could probably track me down and I'd like to avoid that), which in turn led me to being able to have the knowhow to contribute to this fansite, which led to me getting this unique job in the Manga industry. Some day I hope to be able to make enough to be financially independent myself, but everything in life is a stepping stone to something else. Only time will tell where those stones lead. That sounds a bit corny, but as an old man approaching 40, I feel that it's true.

I really do hope your game is a success. It's got enough random hilarity in it (judging from the trailer) that it might catch a lot of people's eyes online, because we all know how much the internet loves things that are quirky. As long as it has elements that everybody can relate to (not something that only you find funny, for example...like a private joke between you and someone else) then it should be something that could reach a broad audience. Becoming a full-time writer/novelist is an incredibly difficult thing to do successfully... There are billions of books out there all competing for people's attention, so for somebody to become a breakout star and generate enough money for it to become their full-time job instead of a hobby is a monumental task. It will be challenging. But as long as you keep trying, then eventually you will succeed. There are far too many people in life who don't have the courage to try, and then lament later on in life "If only I'd had the courage to try and see what would've happened if I did this or that..." (I'm one of them. Nightly I have nightmares about stuff from my past, and I wish I'd done something different at some point or another just to be in a different place than where I am now).

Anyways, I do apologize for writing my own novel about my life. I'm not someone you'll ever know or meet in real life, and I'm not expecting you to actually read through my posts, or to even care about them afterwards, but I felt the need to chime in and tell you that you should never be ashamed from society's peer pressure. Everybody in life feels pressured by society, and some of them deal with it by turning around and putting pressure on other people for the wrong reason. Try to not let it all get to you :)

Here's an imgur album I threw up containing two old pictures of myself. https://imgur.com/a/MYScMQy One before I got hired on at that auto parts store (when I was still mostly happy with life, though dealing with that bitchy stepmother and suffering from the depression from ~5 years earlier due to my best friend/girlfriend). I hung out with friends and played the crap out of Dance Dance Revolution heavily at the time. I actually think that picture was taken at a diner after a DDR tournament, in fact... The other picture is me a few years after hurting my back. Not at the height of my homeless slob look (I couldn't bear to look at myself in the mirror, so as bad as I look in the second picture, reality was worse a few years later...), but still enough to show that I was telling the truth about getting some scraggly hair and beard. If you look closely, my hair's naturally curly and I naturally grew some of those stupid little curly hair bits that Jewish men grow (google says they're called "Payos"?) Not something I'd recommend doing, lol

I just wanted to chime in here with my life story... if you're not interested, then please feel free to skip this post and move on, but I wanted to tell you it just as a sort of cautionary tale. I apologize for my rambling in advance, I hope you're able to understand most of it even though I jump around a bit describing things that were going on over the years. At the end I'd like to offer a little bit of advice, but I'm writing my life story in an attempt to show that I'm not someone on a high horse who thinks they need to butt in and tell you something simple because I've never had it hard, I'm someone who's been through the shut-in lifestyle as well (but in a different country where there's not even a term for it outside of 'shut-in'.) This is going to be a multiple-part post and a mini-novel, and I hope it's not a waste of time for you to read it... if it is, then I sincerely apologize right now.

I'm 36 years old, born in 1984, and I've been severely depressed ever since I was about 15 or 16 when my first girlfriend cheated on me with my (at the time) best friend. That was around the time of Episode 1 and 2 of the Star Wars movies being released (for an idea of a timeline.) Those two decided to make my life a living hell for the next year, until my father got a job in another state and remarried (he'd been divorced since I was about 10). I followed him a little while after, and dropped out of high school shortly after that. I lurked around the house for a few years, before I got a job at an auto parts store (for just above minimum wage, but it was enough to let me move out of the house and in with a roommate). I wound up really fucking my back up when shoveling some heavy snow a few years after that (I had a bad back and didn't even realize it, so I wound up rupturing two discs in my back which immobilized me for the better part of 3 months before my dad finally dragged me to the hospital to get checked out, and it was determined that I needed back surgery to fix it.)

After the surgery, which I got when I was... about 23 or 24, I fell into a super deep depression. Just before I got crippled with the back pain, I wanted to switch jobs to another/different auto parts store (long irrelevant story there), but I hurt my back the day before my final day at the first one, and 2 days before I was set to start work at the other store. I wound up getting laid off from that other job due to not being able to work (I was literally confined to bed due to the pain) so that was a huge blow to my self-esteem. Couple that with the shitty best friend I had as a teenager, my new stepmother being an evil bitch who wanted nothing to do with my dad's kids and did everything she could to drive them out of the house (which was why I moved out as soon as I got that job), and then being injured seriously for the first time in my life, contemplating suicide from the large amount of pain I was in because of that injury, losing my job due to the pain (a job that a great friend pulled some strings to get, so me being laid off I saw as me being a huge letdown to my friend. He put himself on the line for me and I failed)... all that led to the really bad depression. I've technically been depressed ever since the girlfriend thing when I was ~16, but it kicked into high gear with the back injury and being laid off. So for the better part of 2 decades I've been fighting it.

After my surgery, I moved in with my dad (because I didn't have a job, I couldn't pay rent, so I went to mooch off of him) and I basically became a Hikikomori/shut-in. Never left the house, stopped caring about myself, let my hair grow to an absurd length and rarely shaving my beard (I got quite the hermit beard going for a while there)... I lived with him for a couple years, before I moved to the far east side of the US (I was born and raised in the western part of the US, so 3000 miles away was a huge move for me) to live with my sister, who needed some help around her house taking care of stuff, so it was decided that I would be the one to go out there (since I wasn't doing anything in life). Lived out there for about 5 years, and just recently came back to where I was born (where I'm currently living). That whole time, I was mooching off of family and steadily gaining weight due to just not caring and finding some comfort in unhealthy (but delicious) food. I don't know if I'll ever get married to anyone, because that first girlfriend utterly shattered me and made me completely unable to trust any girls outside my family ever again. My sex life is non-existent, due to not being able to feel anything in an extremely important body part. All my life I've heard jokes and stories about "two-pump chumps" or guys who instantly nut due to being too sensitive to the feeling (like that scene in American Pie with Shannon Elizabeth), but my own 3 (yes, 3...) experiences with sex all led me to not being able to feel anything at all. Just a very vague 'pressure' on my junk. After about 10 minutes of intercourse with the women, I came up with an excuse like "ohhhh we'd better stop soon" because I didn't want it to be obvious that I wasn't even remotely close to being able to 'complete'. So to this day, at 36 years old, I still really don't know what sex should feel like, so my sex drive is nonexistent. I've not been able to bring up the courage to mention that to my doctor (being overweight, the odds of me being able to actually get someone to have sex with me if my junk was working would be slim to none, so I don't see the point in wasting time on that when there's other shit I need to fix first), so for now I just deal with porn and a few devices that actually can make me feel a little something. But being in my mid 30's, the sex drive is starting to die down anyways... so I'm double fucked there.

Around the end of 2013 I started getting real heavy into this one major Japanese MMO, to the point where I started spending most of my time contributing to a fan site for it. Thousands of hours I've spent cataloguing stuff for that site because it was basically my life. Every time a major patch comes out, I have to be awake during the night to help datamine it and get the info up as soon as possible because that was what I latched onto to keep myself from focusing on life. Most games weren't fun for me anymore (a sure sign of depression...) I wasted over a decade (a little bit before I hurt my back up until I moved back here) being hardcore addicted to WoW, and after I quit that game I realized how much time in life I had lost due to all this shit, particularly WoW. Nobody outside of that game was going to give a fuck about any Server First achievements or rare mounts I had. Nobody gave a fuck about the hundreds of hours spend wiping on hard raid bosses only to finally triumph over them and get gear which would be replaced in a few months with the next set of bosses... Since then, this fan site has slowly started to pay off (literally.) They started paying me for the sheer amount of work I've done for the site, and I managed to get super lucky with a connection someone at the site had and was able to get a job as a manga editor (basically quality control checking Japanese->English translations), and I've been able to get health insurance to finally go to the doctor and get myself checked out, and have been slowly losing weight and working on improving myself.

I say all that to give you an idea of how shitty I was feeling about myself, and the things that led to me being a shut-in. I dealt with problems by ignoring them and not thinking about them. It was far easier to just brush them aside and focus on something else (mainly video games) instead of dealing with the stress that was building up over being a leech on my family and not able to make and money. Health problems and personal appearance also got ignored in favor of games, because their in-game world was so much better than my reality. As bad as I thought I had it, I've been slowly digging myself out of the miles-deep hole I dug for myself because of my lack of confidence and self-esteem.

So, with all that being said, I'd like to offer you some advice. It's advice that is going to sound terrible at first, but you'll find later on that it really is as simple as this. It's a bit like telling someone who has a weight problem that they "simply need to eat less"... while technically the truth, it's almost impossible for them to eat less because the food tastes oh so good.

(continued in next post in 5 minutes, because this is a brand new throwaway account I made so my main account wouldn't have this story on it, as I routinely get people checking my post history and I don't want most people to know my life story, so it's limited because it's new.)

Thanks :) I definitely hope so as well. It's been a long time since I've sat and reflected on shit like that. I don't even feel like I'm 36 because of the depression, I still feel like I should be in my early 20's because time has flown by quicker than normal due to not focusing on anything other than just trying to escape reality... Most guys have a mid-life crisis at like 40 or something and realize they've like wasted their life not having fun so they go out and buy a sports car or something and try to feel like they're still young. My problem is the opposite of that!

Thanks :D It's definitely a unique job... and it's really, really weird seeing my name in print. Every day I learn something new about manga that I didn't know before, even though I've been reading them off and on for over a decade now and I thought I had a firm grasp on everything. I briefly worked on one series which is absolutely blowing up in popularity right now, but another (well known) company came in and took it over from me and the company I work for....fucking <name redacted> D:

It's been a long ass time since I've sat and thought about my life like that, usually I just deal with every day as it comes, and before that for a long time I just tried to make each day get over with as quickly as possible, to the point where it feels like I literally lost a decade. I totally don't feel like I'm 36...I've heard from older people that it's a common thing (like, "there's no way I'm not 60, I still feel like I'm 25!") but it really does seem like only a few months ago that the PS3 came out... a lost decade sucks. D: I can only imagine that this is sortof how a coma patient would feel if they were unconscious for so long.