That Obligatory Awkward First Post

[Marlowe]

Being new here, I feel I should do one of those starting-off posts where you write useless things about yourself to break the internet ice. At least this site is a little different, so I have an obvious starting point/focus. Here goes nothing.

I'm a student. I like cats, the colour purple and peanut butter. I also adore anything that involves a fictional universe, including movies, TV series, books, roleplays, but especially books. My ultimate goal is to walk into someone's house and see a book I've written on their shelf - I could die happy then. But this site is about Maladaptive Daydreaming, and so far I've not connected myself to that properly. In all honesty, I'm not sure I can fully claim to be a 'sufferer'; for one thing, I don't feel like I suffer whilst daydreaming and for another thing, the daydreaming rarely causes any direct problem to my life. I do my work and I have a few friends whom I can talk to well - I've only once walked out into the road without looking because I was distracted, and I didn't even break anything then. The only two things that actually bother me are that I always feel really guilty because I should be spending the hours employed daydreaming doing something productive and that I'm starting to feel fulfilled with just the company of an 'imaginary friend' (for lack of a more sophisticated term), which is obviously not in line with my goal of not dying alone.

As for the daydreaming itself, well, I love it. As a kid, I used to read a book (or later, watch a movie/TV show) and suddenly I couldn't wait to go to bed because it was in the hours between being tucked in and actually falling asleep that I'd just go ahead and stick myself right in that world. I used to fight sleep for ages. Still, I've never been able to get to sleep in under an hour. As I've grown up, not much has changed. I do it more, if anything - on the train, the bus, walking down the road, in class, in my room - even sometimes during a conversation. The characters I play have (thankfully) become less annoyingly perfect and preppy, but the worlds and others are just as vibrant. I move around, use props and really get into it - sometimes I even cry, which is pretty pathetic when you think about it.

Anyway, I don't really want to stop, but I'd like for this not to get any worse. This post went way longer than I'd planned (much like many of my daydreams) so I'm just going stop abruptly now. :3

[Cordellia Amethyste Rose]

Thank you for posting. Despite its title, Maladaptive Daydreaming isn't all negative. In fact it comes with many gifts. I hope one day we'll be able to harness them and learn to live the best of both worlds. Once we do that, I think we'll be grateful for it. We'll be better off than those who never had it. It's only a problem when we let it affect our outer lives negatively............and like you said, it doesn't have to. :)