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85 lines
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<title>I have an addiction. - Archive - MayVaneDay Studios</title>
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<b>MayVaneDay Studios (Gopher Edition)</b>
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<p><b>I have an addiction.</b></p>
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<p><b>published: 6-14-2018</b></p>
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<p> </p>
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<p>I have an addiction. Not to drugs or to sex or to anything that might wind me up in jail or missing half of my limbs in the back of an alley or in a morgue.</p>
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<p>I have an addiction to video games. More specificially, one specific one. And I want it to stop.</p>
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<p>I have autism. Did you know that? Probably, if you've been paying attention to me for any long period of time. <i>Especially</i> if you know me in real life. Part of it is that I can't talk about anything I have even a <i>slight</i> interest in. I- I physically <i>can't</i>. You go up to me in the middle of the street or at the end of a class or wherever and you mention anything along the lines of, say, Zelda or writing or memery, and I'll lock up and stop talking and look for the nearest exit out. My mind only lets me mention things I like when I'm in the relative privacy of an online conversation, and even then only through a long-winded series of nicknames and inside jokes in place of the actual name of the thing.</p>
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<p>I have an addiction to something. I can't tell you upfront what it is for the aforementioned reason. But my mind <i>will</i> let me refer to it by nicknames: CTR-P-AKDE, or Angel Land Story 2: The One Where Pit Fucking Dies, or "no, Vane, I don't want to play Uprising with you; now load up that hecking Smash cartridge so we can Final Destination, no items, Fox only".</p>
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<p>Early last year, I moved to a town far away from where I grew up, far away from my friends and family. I was essentially transplanted in a dying town full of shitty people who only cared about me and related to me in terms of my father. I was never really able to make any lasting friends there, only fair-weather people I could trust to help me in group projects or to catch me up in whatever the hell was going on whenever I missed a day at school.</p>
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<p>Needless to say, I was pretty emotionally brittle at the time. So I clung to the first thing that hadn't already been tainted by the normies at my old school or my grubby-handed brothers. I hung onto it like it was the last lifeboat leaving the Titanic.</p>
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<p>It worked for a while. Slogging through a painful transition at school, roughing it through the hour-long car ride back home, and then another chapter through the game. It kept me happy for a while, even long after I'd defeated the game. High replay value, if you will, blissfully unaware as it slowly crept outside of the boundaries of "just a game" and started infecting my writing, my relationship with the person who would eventually become my girlfriend, my very <i>thought process</i> in all hours of the day.</p>
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<p>I used to be a Christian. Again, something you've probably picked up on if you've spent enough time in the poetry archives here. I used to have a god that I'd pray to every night, at least until I eventually stumbled across a theological question I couldn't just brush off and my faith began to unravel like a badly stitched square of knitting.</p>
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<p>We'll get back to that in a little while.</p>
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<p>A few months ago, I stumbled across <a href="https://8ch.net">8chan</a>. It was the beginning of the start of my agoraphobia, the moment when the seeds were starting to sprout- and seeing people who shared my fellow hatred of "normalf*gs" (censored for certain people's feefees) was like dumping a pound of fertilizer all over the whole mess. I soaked in the admissions of wanting to retreat from the world and live far away from the cancer of society like a jumbo-sized sponge.</p>
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<p>Baby's first nihilism came to whisper sweet nothings in my ear in the dead of night before I could finally make myself go to sleep.</p>
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<p>My mental health deteriorated. My attention span dramatically decreased. I went from being the bright soul who'd worked day and night for six months on <i>The Duality of Mankind</i> to a snivelling mess looking back on the outside world with nothing but condescension.</p>
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<p>I wanted to turn my back on the whole damn world and leave it forever. I wanted to seal myself into a tomb of my own making and wait for the heat-death of the universe. I wanted to build a monastery and dedicate myself to a goddess of my own creation and live out the rest of my days writing in a void, ableit a peaceful void.</p>
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<p>I wanted to die, plain and simple.</p>
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<p>Was I so desperate for a master of higher powers that I made one appear out of thin air? That I stole someone else's and put it on a pedestal so high not even my ego could see the top?</p>
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<p><a href="https://hooktube.com/watch?v=NfjsLmya1PI">Present day, present time</a>. I'm having a mental breakdown on the first stop of the last great family vacation for a while. My chest is tight, my eyes are sore, and my head pounds with a pleading to stop writing for the night and to go to bed.</p>
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<p>And I have an addiction.</p>
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<p>Addictions aren't inherently bad. I also have an addiction to eating and breathing and getting at least <i>some</i> sleep every night, even if it's far less than I should be getting. Are these things bad simply because I'm addicted to them?</p>
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<p>Some addictions are inherently bad, and we as a society instantly recognize them as destructive. Alcohol, smoking, drugs, gambling. We put people in rehab and hire therapists and create entire industries around getting people off these addictions.</p>
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<p>I'm glad <a href="http://www.nydailynews.com/life-style/health/classify-gaming-addiction-mental-health-disorder-article-1.3721762">the WHO recognized gaming addiction</a>. I spent the last two weeks doing little else but playing old games and thinking about games and thinking about a certain little angel and the game he comes from. I spent the last two weeks fighting off anhedonia and struggling to write even the simplest of poems, let alone another entire book. It's a miracle I have something I can call my next future book, <i>A Hospital for Souls</i>. Even if it was born out of another mental breakdown in the middle of the night, an unedited mess that grows more tangled with each day, it's better than nothing.</p>
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<p>It's better than being dead.</p>
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<p>My ex had an addiction to a certain boyband that was wildly popular when we were in middle school. Her entire life revolved around it- she owned a boatload of merchandise; she wrote its name next to hers in all her school documents; <i>it was all she ever talked about</i>. Her entire life revolved around five people she would never meet, would never have a true emotional connection with.</p>
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<p>What separates the her of then from the me of now?</p>
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<p>There's nothing wrong with liking things. There's nothing wrong with having special interests. But when something external to you becomes your whole identity, your whole <i>being</i>, and then that thing sours... it's like a rug pulled out from under your feet. It's like a blindfold ripped away from your eyes and suddenly discovering that you were never able to see in the first place.</p>
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<p>If I stand for nothing, then I will fall for everything. But if I stand on a pillar of wet sand, eventually it will crack and dry and crumble into dust, and I will fall fast and I will fall hard.</p>
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<p>Hello from rock bottom, by the way.</p>
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<p>Forget the Lain Era, where I romanticized being immortal in the throes of the internet, enshrined in the thrashing waves of cyberspace, seen by every eye ever to peer at a computer screen and yet never truly seen at all.</p>
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<p>Forget the Medusa Era, where I romanticized death and the end of my life, comdemned to rot away in a seal of stone.</p>
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<p>Forget the Fi Era, where all I thought about was the divine reborn, reincarnated into a mortal body, sent on a lifelong mission with only half-recovered memories as verification of the purpose of said person's earthly life.</p>
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<p>Forget all the other eras named after fictional characters I had no hand in creating. Forget all the painful versions of myself, self-inflicting an unattainable standard in the name of a nonexistent deity.</p>
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<p>I'm not a faithful priestess. I'm not a guardian to something reborn, *anything* reborn, pissing my life away waiting for someone to come who will never come because they never *were*.</p>
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<p>I'm not dead, and I'm not an otherworldly being, and I'm not any combination of those two things.</p>
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<p>I'm not a mindless consumer, beholden to the whims of a game studio half the world away.</p>
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<p>Metaphorical God help me, from this day forth, I will fight until my very last breath to stay myself. I will not seal myself away from the world. I will face it head on, and I will overcome every challenge "normies" throw my way.</p>
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<p>Because I'm Vane Vander.</p>
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