How Mortal Kombat Turned My Life Around: A Thank You to the Community.

I didn’t get off to a great start in life. Despite coming from an upper middle class family it was a family with some very deep problems and I started a downward spiral around middle school. Something happened in my brain and I found myself unable to focus myself or socially interact like most people. I remember hating almost everyone, losing my ability to focus, and losing all sense of confidence in myself. When it started though there was no real “Oh shit, I need to snap out of this” moment in my brain and I never viewed this change as bad. I just thought “Well this is me”.​

Later in highschool I quit going, surrounded myself with people on the same track, and picked up a few habits. I spent the remainder of my teenage years sent away at “Fix my kid” programs and when I turned 18 eventually started bouncing from basement, to couch, to basement, to floor, to car, to whoever would offer up a place to stay. That’s how the nickname “Vagrant” started.​

When Mortal Kombat 9 came out I played it all the time and eventually stumbled onto TYM. About a year later I started getting into the competitive scene and met some of the smartest and entertaining people I’ve ever known. While leveling up with these guys at Galloping Ghost Arcade, attending tournaments, competing against other people, and arguing redundant matchups and strategies on the forums, something started to happen in my brain without me even realizing it. This changed everything.​

I started to care about accumulating knowledge. Studying, adjusting, practicing and outthinking opponents were all positives that I kept re enforcing into my brain because they gave me success in the game, and I watched these habits give other players success. For the first time in my life I had a goal and an idea of the person I wanted to be. I wanted to be the guy that knew everything about the game and could think and adjust his way out of any situation in fighting games. I also surrounded myself with people who shared a similar goal, generated excitement and motivation for it, and worked with one another to achieve it. Most importantly I learned how important it is to stay humble if you want to learn effectively.

As the years passed I kept improving my fighting game skill with minimal success in tournament but with more use of my brain than I had used in the past decade. Around mid IGAU era I started to care less about how I did in tournaments and more on just my love of focusing on the game and improving myself. Somewhere around this time I had the idea to start applying this line of thinking into my life in more than just a subconscious way. My social skills, my relationships, my self-confidence, and most importantly my ability to deal with disappointment and failure were all improved DRASTICALLY. Realizing that something was definitely different in my brain, I tried to give school a shot again last summer. For the first time in my life I was able to get excited about it, I worked at it, I adjusted when something didn’t work, I had the confidence to not give up, and I finished what started. I finished both summer classes with B’s and continued into the fall finishing the fall semester with a 4.0 GPA. I’m now into my winter semester with more educational momentum than I’ve ever had. This isn’t me just popping off about grades, it serves to my larger point:​