2018 — Learning Beyond School

By 2018, I was in my second year of junior high school.

And honestly? School computer classes had stopped being interesting a long time ago. Every lesson was Microsoft Word, typing documents, basic stuff — things I'd already been doing at home for years.

I don't blame my teachers for that.

I'd just reached a point where school couldn't keep up with what I wanted to learn. The real classroom, at least for me, was the internet.

Around this time, I got completely hooked on Dota 2.

It wasn't my first MOBA — I'd played the original Warcraft III DotA years before, so seeing it evolve into a full modern game felt kind of surreal. What started as "just another game" quickly became something I took way more seriously than I expected.

I was grinding hero mechanics, studying strategies, reviewing my own matches, trying to improve every single game.

Eventually I hit Ancient II while still in junior high. Looking back, that was actually a pretty solid achievement for a kid my age.

But Dota gave me something I didn't expect.

Since most matches were with players from across Southeast Asia, I ended up communicating in English almost every single day. Teammates from Singapore, the Philippines, Malaysia, all over the region.

My English at the start? Not great.

Half the time I could barely understand what people were saying.

But after thousands of games — reading chat, listening to voice comms, typing fast mid-match — English slowly became something I was actually comfortable with. One of the most useful skills I'd later need in cybersecurity, and I was building it through a video game without even realizing it.

Around the same time, I got into making content.

Whenever I pulled off a good play in Dota, I'd clip it, edit it, and upload it to my YouTube channel — KikyyTsunayashiro. I shared videos in Facebook communities, met new people online, and slowly watched my subscriber count climb.

Eventually I hit 1,000 subscribers. That felt incredible.

Getting to 4,000 watch hours though? Completely different story. Way harder than I thought it would be.

Outside the screen, junior high gave me some of my favorite memories — not because of grades or exams, but because of the people. Incredible friends, my first love, the kind of ordinary days that somehow feel significant when you look back at them.

It wasn't a perfect time. But it was one of the happiest chapters of my life.

None of us knew it then, but those days were about to come to an unexpected end.

In early 2020, the world stopped.

And so did everything else.