Casper Notto · @NVD_Hunterace
12th Dec 2018 from TwitLonger
This is my untold story
Hey everyone, my name is Casper, I’m 18 years old and I’m a professional esports (Hearthstone) competitor.
4 weeks ago I tweeted that I’m the #1 points earner in the world in 2018. This tweet, however, is the most important (and terryfing) tweet I will ever make. It’s by far the hardest text I’ve ever written, but I feel like it’s necessary and that the timing is right. Now that I’ve become kind of an example, I feel it’s right to not hide anymore and be 100% honest about who I am and my story. This is not the entire story, since I feel like there’s unbelievable depth to what’s been happening, but it’s impossible to write everything here. I hope that this at least paints a picture.
In 8th grade I started getting a lot of stress and anxiety around school and performing. It was something I carried through all of secondary school which eventually led to a mental breakdown in 10th grade. I was staying at home for several months, trying to get back to where I was before and getting rid of the “demons”, without any luck. I ended up being totally isolated from the rest of the world for the rest of 10th grade. Going into high school I started working with a mental coach (Alex) that I have worked with ever since. He managed to help me get back to school in the start of the school year.
When I started high school I still felt broken inside and at the same time I didn’t manage to be honest to the world around me which led to the anxiety and depression slowly, but surely, building up to explode. From that point on we decided to take school from home.
That year I was balancing between working on my mental health, trying to do school from home and at the same time I started to get passionate about competitive Hearthstone. It was a very depressing year and the only thing that provided me happiness and motivation was Hearthstone.
In the end of 2017, I had some deep conversations with Alex and my mom, and we decided that I should put school on hold for now and go all in on Hearthstone in 2018 and see how far I could go with that. We all realized that it was not only something I was deeply passionated about, but that it also would provide a good community and experiences that would challenge me in a positive way to help me grow as a person.
At this time I had briefly started to get into the top competitive Hearthstone community, but I felt that it was difficult to be honest with everyone about myself, and to this day it has been difficult for me do to certain things due to a lot of insecurity, so it felt like I finally had to tell people about my story.
This year I succeeded massively and I got to do things which brought me a lot of joy and confidence. Even though it may not have been clear, the Hearthstone community has been everything that I have had. I can’t express in words how much it has meant to me to have all of you helping me to become who I am today – both as a player and as a person. Recently I’ve also started to contact my best friends from earlier that I had isolated myself from for several years.
I don’t know if all the choices I have made – and are making - are the right things to do, and it might not seem like the right choices to a lot of people. But these choices have been giving me purpose and inspires me to wake up every day to be the best myself that I can be. I’ve met so many great people on my Hearthstone journey so far that all has seemed to respect me for who I am, and I’m endlessly thankful for that. Hopefully they will keep respecting me after this.