Takeaway:
What you devote yourself to is what defines you. Your identity is not fixed or permanent. You can recreate yourself by starting to focus your time, resources, and attention, towards things that align with the identity you desire.
I used to be famous.
Even feared.
I had amassed more than 10,000 hours in my craft.
What was difficult for others came naturally to me.
That was because I had reached a place of constant flow and unconscious competence in my profession..
..As a level 70 Night Elf Shadow Priest, in the popular Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game, World of Warcraft.
Offline, I wasn’t that skilled.
And I wasn’t popular in the real world.
But on Mannaroth, the online server where I played, I was unstoppable.
Being the best came at a cost.
The truth is, anyone could do it. It simply required an exorbitant investment of time and interest—both of which I had in abundance as an impressionable and fantasy-oriented kid.
I was devoted to the game.
Even before its release I would spend hours forums and fan sites devouring developer updates. I was even an early beta tester.
By the time the game released I was an ardent believer in all things Warcraft.
My obsession found a place in a guild composed of other fans. We began to forge our online personas as priest, warlock, warrior, paladin, mage, hunter, rogue, and so forth.
We knew little to nothing about each other’s personal lives.
But we knew our keyboard strokes and shortcuts, macros, which spell to cast, when to ‘flash heal’ an injured opponent, and all the strategies required to take out bosses and get some serious loot.
At the heart of what outwardly appeared as an incredible waste of time, was a boyhood love for a world where magic and dragons existed.
One where my childhood found purpose and belonging confronting other-wordly fiends and saving the realm from unspeakable evil.
But that love had an obsessive quality. It became akin to a fanaticism. Dictionary defines a fanatic as a person filled with excessive and single-minded zeal towards a belief or activity.
That was me.
My entire life was organized around a parallel identity, in video game.
And I became, and continued to become..
Fast forward to today.
As a psychotherapist, I continue to witness a remarkable truth about being and becoming:
What you devote yourself to eventually defines you and transforms every area of your life.
I’ve seen it with those who began therapy feeling overpowered by a habit and addiction they couldn’t quit. They describe how some guilty pleasure—often an innocuous indulgence in some activity, transmuted
And those who’ve built incredible careers, skills, and a lifestyle families,
Everything else becomes organized around an obsession.
I recently met with a client who described feeling helpless to an all consuming rumination.
In tears, they described how they hadn’t slept much, had skipped several meals, and couldn’t even find the motivation to drink water.
Their brain was fixated on a thought pattern they couldn’t escape. And it had began to jeopardize other aspects of their life.
