Thread: Non-PG13 (Strong Language): Internet Addiction (sorry, long post)
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armitage Offline
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Join Date: March 4th 2017

Unhappy Internet Addiction (sorry, long post) - March 4th 2017, 12:24 PM

This all started about 2.5 years ago. I got a laptop for school so for the first time, I had full on access to the Internet. No parental restrictions, no nothing. Just me and the World Wide Web. So naturally, I had to start peeking around. It was mostly harmless stuff, going on Amazon and searching up Doctor Who merch/desktop wallpapers, but then I started getting into shows that I liked, such as Merlin and Supernatural. My attachment to the characters and story led to me wanting more of certain canon couples (or not canon) and I stumbled upon fanfic. I had a feeling that it wasn't something my mom would like me doing and only read fanfic when she wasn't around. Which is where my secretiveness and dishonesty issue stems from, but that's a whole nother thread

Anyway, after a while it turned into staying up for all hours of the night hiding away in the bathroom reading fanfiction and discovering new things. It was the only thing on my mind and my constant desire to involve myself in fandom things trumped my desire to get good grades, so I started missing assignments and such, but I didn't care enough to push fanfiction to the side. Once my mom found out, she put blocks on Tumblr, AO3, etc so I couldn't access it, but eventually she took them off when my grades got back up and she felt like she could trust me. The bad thing is, I always felt like I brought my grades back up so I could use those sites again...

From then to now, it was the same pattern, progressively getting worse. When my grades would slip, they slipped bad. I'd hide the bad grades and procrastinate doing many late assignments before my parents found out because I wanted to get that fanfic I was writing done, or make that post on Tumblr or Reddit. I'd never study, never participate in class. Every day I'd tell myself, "I'll stop. Today's the day I leave this behind for good and get my shit together." But it never came. Then there was Google+ for the past year and 8 months, but again, that's another story which led to probably the worst day of my shitty life :^)

Now today, I think I'm ready. I realized how much I've fucked up but I can't change. I don't know how to change. I'm about to be a senior in high school so I can't let my grades suffer anymore. I want to go to college but I can't bring myself to care about what I wanna do when I graduate more than I care about Patrick Stump's side projects or the latest trend in the Kylux fandom! I'm bordering on not being eligible for scholarships because of this and it's caused me to become a secretive person but I just can't s t o p. Please, please help me...


TL;DR Fandom has caused me to become addicted to the Internet and as a result my grades are slipping and I need to know how to stop.