Pokemon cards.

I was so into it, my brother and his best friend and I - we'd enter these tournaments at the mall and one of us would always win. Every week.

I forget the admission fee, like $5 or $10, but the winner got a box of whatever they wanted, something like a $60 value. We did that for over a year - beating everyone, including all sorts of strange folks who were like 30 and playing.

We did that for over a year, and by hen Pokemon was on the fade - the beginnings of shame were born. We had a winning system though, and this little card shop in the mall said we could pick any box of cards we wanted when we won - so we changed it up to Magic: The Gathering - for another year, until eventually they stopped having the Pokemon Tournament.

But they did have Magic the Gathering tournaments, so we started doing that with a much lower success rate. But we kept doing it for years until eventually our decks/majority of our cards fell out of "T2" - for the uninitiated its basically some of marketing scam where you have to stay in the last two "types" - the last two "expansions" of new cards. Where by then we were almost in high school and we just called it off.

To get the best decks possible, we pooled all our cards together. So when we stopped playing, we just let my brother keep them all - which he still has them all. We had holographic #1 editions of almost every kind. Knowing what we know now, should have sold them in the height of the Pokemon addiction where one such Charizard was worth $500, of which we have several.

Anyway. Now I can't talk about it at all to anyone I know, coworkers/friends - without them giving me that... poor sad nerd look. Hard to describe, but it's definitely shaming.