One of my favorite video games to play is called Valorant. Valorant is a multiplayer first person shooter (FPS) released in June 2020. It’s already become very popular for all ages. Sometimes when I play a game some of my teammates are in middle school, while others are in college or older. While there is a large age range, Valorant definitely has more male players than female players. And while I enjoy the game a lot, as a woman, it can be very toxic. Many of the male players play very competitively and have this general idea that women who play video games are naturally bad. Because of this they make it their goal to make any girl playing feel like absolute shit. 

I started playing Valorant during quarantine after seeing some of my favorite streamers play. It seemed like a fun game to play with friends, and it was not like your typical FPS where you are shooting people down in a war torn city. There are different characters, called agents, you can play that have special abilities and generally the game is very aesthetically pleasing. Prior to Valorant the only games I would play were Animal Crossing, Pokemon, Mario, Stardew Valley etc. These games are all very peaceful and not competitive at all. So when I first started playing Valorant I was awful. I was not familiar with the maps, the different agents, their powers and I had never played a FPS before. I also had no idea how toxic the Valorant community can be. My first time experiencing a few toxic players was very early on. I was placed with four other random teammates and we were losing by a lot. I was already not good at the game and I was missing almost every shot and dying early on in each round. Then I made the mistake of making a callout of where an enemy was on voice chat. As soon as my other teammates heard I was a girl, the taunts and harassment began. The first guy said “You’re a girl? So that’s why we’re losing.” Another teammate turned on their voice chat and said “Shouldn’t you be in the kitchen right now?” Every time that I made a mistake or died, one of them would make a comment taunting me. When we lost the game, they cussed me out one last time. I remember after that game I turned off my PC, took off my headphones, and cried. It already sucks when you’re playing badly, but when there are other people constantly saying awful things it makes it so much worse and tears you down mentally. And incidents like these have happened multiple times to me. Now I never use voice chat unless I know I am doing really well and I am confident the people I am playing with are not assholes. It sucks because communicating with your teammates during the game is very important and helps a lot. Instead, I have to quickly type out different callouts in the text chat. I also had to change my username from my name to something more “gender neutral.” 

I have seen a lot of video clips of women having similar experiences and feeling the exact same way. Valorant has a report system, and almost every time I have reported a teammate for bullying they have been penalized… but the punishment is only temporary and it does not help the overall problem. Despite all of the toxicity I have had to deal with, I still enjoy playing Valorant a lot. Instead of playing with random people, I have a few friends who will get on a discord call with me and we play together. I have so much more fun playing this way, especially because all of my friends play the game to actually have fun. A lot of Valorant players take the game so seriously, and it just sucks the fun out of it. I have noticed a lot more girls playing Valorant which is really exciting. I hope one day this ridiculous idea that women are bad at video games goes away. So many times my girl friends and I will outperform the men that are playing. And honestly it feels so good humbling them, maybe the next time they play with a girl they’ll shut the fuck up. 🙂

I’ve always felt self conscious about how I look. 

It started from a young age, around when I was in elementary school, when I began to feel the people around judging me for my appearance. I was only 9 or 10 when classmates would tell me I needed to shave my moustache, or I was teased for having hairy arms. When I went to middle school, it was even worse. I had a unibrow so of course I was an easy target for bullies. There were so many times where my classmates would deliberately point out my unibrow in front of everyone. It used to upset me so much. I would go home and beg my mother to get rid of it. At such a young age, I was already so insecure about myself and I cared so much about what other people thought of me. I let western ideas of beauty define myself and my worth. It makes me so sad to think about how much I cared about my appearance at such a young age. I genuinely thought that I was ugly. I remember I used to look in the mirror and cover up my upper lip and unibrow to imagine what I looked like without them. 

I eventually got my upper lip waxed, I got my eyebrows threaded, and I shaved my arms. But none of that really helped me get over my insecurities, I still didn’t feel “pretty.” My self esteem was already ruined. 

Once I was in high school I thought it would get better, but then I started to gain weight and I would get really bad acne breakouts. It wasn’t until my senior year of high school that I finally started to fall in love with myself. I began to feel more confident in my own skin despite what I assumed others thought of me. It’s a journey I’m still working on.

Some days I look in the mirror and I still feel awful about my appearance. Other days I look in the mirror and I feel beautiful. But I can feel myself finally getting to a point where I am confident and happy with myself. 

Do I actually want children or do I only want children because society, culture, and family has enforced the idea I do? When I was younger this was an easy question to answer. I would have said something along the lines of: “Of course I want children. Who wouldn’t? I want 4 kids!” I thought that was what you were supposed to do when you “grow up.” You get married and then have children… easy. As I got older I realized very quickly that it was not that simple. 

First off, pregnancy and giving birth affects your body in so many ways. Pregnancies are not as simple as cravings and a round tummy. Your body has to completely transform and adjust for the baby growing in your stomach. Some of these changes are permanent. And then there are so many stigmas around women having sagging breasts, stretch marks, and their vagina stretching. As if any of that even matters. I don’t know if I am ready for my body to completely change. Also, the thought of my vagina ripping gives me chills. I will never be mentally prepared for that.  

Another aspect of having children that scares the shit out of me is somehow fucking them up. That might be a harsh way to put it, but that’s exactly how I feel. What if I don’t give it enough love and attention… or I give it too much? What if I’m too strict or I’m too lenient? How do you even raise kids? I know my parents did the best they could to raise me but I really wish they could have done a lot of things differently. I wish they could have waited to have me and my brother when they were more financially stable and their marriage wasn’t on the verge of falling apart. 

Once you have children you suddenly have to live your life for someone else. Your decisions in life now directly affect another human being. I can’t choose to suddenly move to a different country and live out a dream there because I have to consider my child that relies on me. I am so scared I am going to lose my identity. I always think about how much happier my mother would be if she didn’t spend the majority of her life raising us. She could have done so many more things. Maybe she wouldn’t have felt like she needed to be stuck in a bad marriage, and she could remarry and find actual love. 

But at the same time, I love kids. Any time I see my younger cousins I love playing with them. I love holding and cuddling babies. It’s exciting to think about taking care of a baby and having a family with the person I love. Whenever anyone asks if I want kids my answer is usually yes, but I always explain my hesitations. I know that if I ever do decide to have my own children I have to be 100% okay with everything that could possibly go wrong. 

I spent almost every single day of the first six months of 2020 crying myself to sleep. At first I didn’t realize it, but I was dealing with the repercussions of traumatizing events. Before quarantine I thought I was just very very upset over a break up. And rather than sit and face my problems head on, I forced myself to be surrounded by people every second of the day. I also refused to let anyone know I needed help. I knew I needed it and I knew there was something wrong, but I struggled to reach out and tell someone. Instead I was spending every night crying myself to sleep, and then waking up the next morning with a forced smile on my face. I still remember one night after classes I began my walk up to my apartment on the hill next to walker garage, and out of nowhere I realized I had to go spend the next couple of hours by myself, alone, in my room. The realization was an obvious one but for some reason I did not process it until I was halfway to my apartment. Suddenly I couldn’t breathe, and I began to sob as I got to my apartment. I walked straight to my room and cried until I was numb and fell asleep. This was only a few days before campus shut down because of Covid-19. 

When the pandemic hit and I had to go back home, all of the things that I had been ignoring began to surface. I was back in the environment I had been wanting to avoid, and I was alone. Every night for the next few months was very similar to the one night I had walking up to my apartment on campus. There was so much more than just the pain from the break up that I had been simply refusing to accept. But this time I knew I could not let myself continue to hurt, as I did not have people to use as an excuse to ignore my problems. I began to notice how my emotional pain was beginning to affect myself physically. I was not eating all day and I was spending the entire day in my room by myself. I was losing weight, losing hair, and it felt like I was losing myself. 

It was a very long and difficult process to finally get to a point where I felt okay. Weirdly enough one of the main things that helped in my healing process was buying my first plants. When I got my plants I quite literally went into plant mom mode. I found a few from Home Depot and they were all wilted with leaves falling off. Now I had something that I was forced to take care of. I’d wake up at 7 am everyday, open my blinds to make sure they had plenty of light, water them (when needed), repot them into new pots, and sometimes I would even just sit and talk to them. As I took care of my plants, I was also taking care of myself. I knew just like my plants, I also needed care too. I also need light, love, water, food, and just someone to sit and talk to. Some days are better than others, and I still struggle with my depression. But now when I look at my plants, which are all a beautiful shade of green, standing up straight, looking healthy, I know that I will be okay.