Anonim (19, Belgium)
I received my first Rubik’s Cube when I was 6 years old. I loved all sorts of puzzles at that time and I couldn’t keep my hands from it. However, I struggled a long time to solve it.
A half year after I received the cube, I looked up online how to solve it, but since I was 6.5 years old, my Googling skills weren’t what they are now, 13 years later. I found this tutorial in English (which is not my native language and which I couldn’t speak/write/read at that time) and I tried figuring out the steps by looking at the pictures. I managed to solve the whole cube except for the permutation of the last corners. It told me to do R D R’ D’ to permute them, but the mess it created got me panicking and I messed up under pure stress while thinking I was destroying all the work I had done.
Afraid as I was, I didn’t touch my Rubik’s Cube for many years. I believe I was around the age of 15 when I tried again and I was able to solve the first two layers by intuition and the last layer by algorithms I found online. Since then, I was hooked up and solved it again and again and I couldn’t thank my parents more that they gave me this wonderful toy 13 years ago.
From there, I wanted to solve it faster and I was able to solve the Original Rubik’s Cube under a minute when I found out the concept of “speedcubing”. I bought my first speedcube, the Moyu Huanlong, around 2 years ago and reached sub-20 on it.
I got more and more into the community of speedsolving and found out more about other twisty puzzles, WCA and non-WCA. I kept laying my interest on speedsolving, but in the meanwhile buying more and more non-WCA puzzles. When my PB was just a bit over 15 seconds, I unconsciously abandoned speedcubing and started solving non-WCA stuff.
Today, it’s been months since I touched a 3×3. I started focusing on hard and challenging puzzles instead of getting faster on a 3×3. I always bought puzzles which I thought of as unsolvable with my current experience, just to keep thinking. I think “the thinking” became more appealing than the speed. Because after all, that was exactly the reason why my parents bought me a Rubik’s Cube 13 years ago.