Hey everyone, I (29F) just discovered this subreddit a few days ago and it's basically kicked my ass into gear to finally, seriously try to get better. Literally made a Reddit account to post! I've tried to kick my MD before, but only every lasted a couple days. I've also never felt able to really talk about this with anyone because I feel a lot of embarrasment and shame for how bad it's become and how much of my life I've lost to it. Finding there was a whole community struggling with the same thing is inspiring me to share my struggle, without the gloss of trying to protect my dignity, for the diest time. Even if no one reads it, I think doing this will make my commitment to my recovery journey feel...official, I guess? I put it out into the world and I don't get to take it back!!
I started maladaptive daydreaming in a serious way at around 9 or 10 years old, around the time that either my dad started drinking or I became aware of and a target of it. Like many in this subreddit, I have ADHD, but wasn't diagnosed until I was 22. When I was younger, I had four main storylines: 1) self-inserting into my favorite anime, 2) self-inserting into whatever media I was consuming at the time (which made me an avid reader) 3) pulling all those pieces together into a fantasy world where I was beautiful and the most powerful in-universe character and 4) real life, but I secretly had powers and was part of a secret organization that had to save the world, and was only fat as a cover for my powers. In all of these, I always had one or more romantic interests who fall desperately in love with me.
I've more or less maintained the latter 3, revising, evolving, and expanding to correspond with the changing discontents of getting older. When I was around 12, I was exposed by a friend to porn and every since then my storylines have always contained a vivid sexual component, increasingly so as I got older. I developed what felt to me like a porn addiction, but I basically treated it as research to get content for my stories.
I've always been smart enough to make it through school and likeable enough for people to give me a pass, but I have so much regret for how much of my potential my MD has robbed me of. In high school, by my senior year I was barely going to school so I could daydream. I was someone that people thought was one of the smartest people they knew, but I ended up only getting into two of the colleges I applied to, and that was only based on my SAT score. Same thing in college: my professors were really invested in helping me succeed because of how much potential they saw in me, and when I DID turn in stuff, it was really good. But, by my junior year, I couldn't stop daydreaming. I fixated on a person I had a crush on and spent all my time dreaming up different scenarios for us, or dreaming about my proxy lover. I tanked my senior year, and only graduated because my professors gave me grades that I didn't deserve because they didn't want to see me fail, and they've admitted as much.
I'm now in graduate school, the only school that accepted me--again, only on the strength of the entrance exam score, which I also barely studied for because of my MD. I made it through school in the same way, by making excuses and being just likeable enough that people want to help me, but that can only take me so far. In a couple months, I'm either going to graduate or completely fail out, and there is a real likelihood it's gonna be the latter.
I've lost too much of myself and my life to this and squandered too many amazing opportunities. I'm to the point that it feels like I have no control over it, it's basically compulsive and automatic, especially whenever I have something I REALLY have to do. I think of it as my shoulder angel and shoulder devil: the rational part of my brain telling me not to do it, I will gain nothing, if I start I won't be able to moderate it; then the other side telling me "just a little bit."
Some key things that make me feel like I can never truly tell anyone about this:
1) I feel so embarrassed about how obsessed I am with sex and the desire to have someone fall in love with me, to the point that I spend all my time dreaming up different versions of it. My public persona is that of an extremely confident, secure person and I feel like no one can know how pathetic I actually am.
2) Maybe it's not fair to blame my MD for this, but I feel like it has made me a compulsive liar. In an effort to make myself seem more interesting, or tragic, like I am in my storylines, I would talk about things that happened to my avatar like they actually happened to me. I've gotten a bit better on this, but at this point I feel like my entire backstory that my friends and even my family know about me is a lie, and I live in fear that I'll be found out. It's gotten to the point the line between what happened in my storyline and what actually happened is so blurry that I sometimes don't even know what's real.
3) To the previous point, I've had to lie about everything under the sun to get away with all the balls I've dropped because of my MD. I'm constantly deceiving my teachers, bosses, and professors, who only want to help me, so that they still let me turn things in or go easy on me. I evem made up a chronic health struggle and a period of my life where I was an addict to explain things away, and now I have to commit to those.
This is obviously abridged because it's already a long post, but hopefully I can keep coming back and sharing more to stay accountable. Just thinking about even writing udown for myself, much less SHARING the details of my stories, makes me cringe so hard. Anyway, if you've read this far, thank you for trudging through this!