2014 — More Than Just Games

A couple years later, I had somehow become the "computer kid."

I was only in third or fourth grade, but I already knew my way around Windows better than most kids my age. And without even trying, I'd picked up a bit of English along the way — just from playing games, clicking random stuff, and reading whatever showed up on screen. Looking back, video games were probably my first English teacher.

But then something happened that I didn't see coming.

My parents decided to give my computer to one of our relatives so they could use it for school. I remember being so bummed about it. To everyone else, it was just a computer. To me, it was where I spent basically all my free time — exploring, gaming, figuring stuff out.

Thankfully, that wasn't the end.

Not long after, my parents got me a laptop. And honestly? It felt... off. I genuinely preferred my old desktop. The bigger screen just hit different, especially for gaming. The laptop felt smaller and kind of underwhelming in comparison.

But after a while, I stopped caring about that.

Because it wasn't really about the device anymore. It was about what I could do with it.

I kept going down rabbit holes — clicking through every menu, randomly changing settings, installing new software, breaking things, fixing things. Every day I'd stumble onto something I didn't know before.

Then something kind of funny started happening at school.

My classmates started coming to me for help.

Microsoft Word. Microsoft Paint. Which button does what. I wasn't some expert or anything — I just happened to know more than they did because I'd spent so much time messing around on my own.

That was probably the first time it clicked for me that technology wasn't just something I enjoyed as a hobby.

It was something I genuinely loved figuring out.

And without realizing it, I'd already been teaching myself long before I ever wrote a single line of code.