My relationship with the online world didn’t begin with grand ambitions. It began, quite simply, with fun. Facebook since 2007, insta, Snapchat since 2012.
In 2015, i had about 10k followers on insta and I found myself on Musical.ly — that strange, playful little app where people lip-synced, danced, and made short sketches without worrying about who was watching. It was light, it was silly, and it made me happy.
Around 2018 came TikTok, and suddenly those little videos of mine grew into something bigger. I found a rhythm, a voice, a community — and before I knew it, there were tens of thousands of people following along.
Somewhere in that same period, someone I loved introduced me to League of Legends. The graphics were fantastic, the characters intoxicating, and the gameplay chaotic in the best way. But the chat? The chat was a battlefield of its own. Vitriol, insults, casual abuse… the kind of ugliness that makes you switch to “versus AI” permanently. I loved the game; I just couldn’t stand the people in it.
By 2020, League itself faded out of my life — and TikTok was banned in India. Almost overnight, I lost a space where I’d been creative, confident, and oddly free. The pandemic arrived like a dark tide. Grief hit. Heartbreak hit. And lockdown pushed all of us into our screens, whether we were ready or not.
Instagram, which I’d casually used since 2012, suddenly became my living room. Reels launched around June 2020, and with TikTok gone, I poured myself into Instagram. I spoke about my identity, my sexuality, my mental health, my history — the things that had shaped me. I went live for hours; sometimes ten, sometimes twelve. I made friends across continents. I healed in front of strangers who somehow didn’t feel like strangers at all.
But then the trolls arrived.
They always do. First they ruined Twitter, then they seeped into Instagram, and now they’re infesting Threads as well. What I endured in school — the taunts, the mockery, the homophobia — began repeating itself in digital form. The cruelty of social media became impossible to ignore.
And the videos… that was the final blow.
Animals suffering. Forests burning. Humans being monstrous to the planet and to each other.
It crushes something inside me every time I see it. I can last about half an hour on Instagram now before my heart feels scraped raw.
So I began to step away. Slowly. Quietly.
And then came the turning point: late 2023. I bought myself a PS5. A gift, a distraction, a lifeline — I’m still not sure. All I knew was that my mind needed a quieter place to exist.
I entered the world of Hogwarts Legacy first — a universe I had known since my twenties and thirties. The nostalgia soothed me, even though I’ve had to firmly separate the art from the artist. Then Assassin’s Creed Odyssey opened up an entirely different dimension. I roamed through ancient Greece with Kassandra — the Pantheon, the Colosseum, the cradle of the Olympics. Places I had only seen in books were suddenly alive around me. It was a form of time travel I had not known was possible.
And then Ghost of Tsushima arrived — and that, truly, changed everything.
To gallop across fields of purple flowers. To stand beneath ginkgo trees shedding gold. To write haiku beside quiet waters. To sink into a digital hot spring and breathe, slowly, deeply, finally.
These moments — pixelated though they may be — brought me peace that the real world has not offered for a long time.
Gaming, for me, is not escapism.
It is refuge.
A sanctuary from noise, cruelty, and the relentless sadness of what we humans are doing to the planet I love so fiercely.
I don’t know why holding a controller quietens my overthinking mind. But it does. And so I return to these worlds often. Worlds filled with beauty, meaning, and silence.
And perhaps that is enough.
Perhaps that is everything.
Hearts Still Care 