The Downward Spiral

Senior year of highschool, depression had hit me so hard that I wasn’t eating and I was skipping school. Any allowance I received went to cigarettes and weed. After I graduated highschool (somehow), I lost connection with everyone. I got a full time job at a now defunct retailer, working overnights for $7.25 an hour. At the age of 18, my schedule was 11pm to 7am five days a week. I used my dads old Mazda 626 to get around. I took smoke breaks with the staff out in front of the store at 3am. I didn’t see daytime for a year. When I couldn’t afford cigarettes, my mom would buy them for me. She smoked too. When I ran out of cigarettes, I picked them up off the street to try and get a fix. Eventually, I took a promotion and got daytime hours on a register. I worked in the “digital” section. I took inventory on dvds, specialized in selling modern consoles and video games. During season, I worked 10 hour days. I worked the day of the Nintendo Wii release. I saw fake checks. I saw fake cash. I saw lines out the door. I saw violence in the parking lot. Sometimes, there were events – I traded mystery event Mews to kids on their game boy advance with the link cable. People actually paid like, $700 for the ps4. I was in on it. I bought a DS, and a DS lite. My wages went to gas, video games, cigarettes, and drugs where I could find them. I was breaking into the liquor cabinet every night (my parents attempted a lock, but it was very easy to pick). I drank as much as I could every night. Eventually, I got the opportunity to work a better job at a hotel. The hours were rotating, 7am to 3pm, and 4pm to 11pm. My drinking was severe. I was showing up to work extremely hung over. The repeat guests treated the staff like trash. The hotel rooms were dated, some facing outside the parking lot. The winter got so gold that year, people were frozen in their rooms. I still smoked cigarettes, I went outside bare hands in single degree weather and smoked, walked people to rooms, and tried to open doors. I had to wear a business suit. One night, I was so out of it I left my personal cash bag out on the front desk, and forgot to lock it up. A coworker stole $100, and it was taken out of my check. I saw bar fights late at night. I saw regulars with estranged women. I saw weddings of all kinds, worked with event management, and mastered the phone system and room system. The hotel was constant disarray unfortunately. The housekeeping head manager vanished, landed in jail one day. The ladies were understaffed, the laundry room had a literal mountain of sheets piled up. Rooms were never ready on time.

At this point, I was still visiting my local GameStop for DS games and such often. I asked if they were hiring, filled out the paper application, and put on the line: “I really like video games, please hire me :)”. Well, so I was hired. I walked out of the hotel job. The managers there didn’t take it well, I didn’t really care. I furthered my video game expertise, and had a long career of 6 years at GameStop. Chronically depressed, a drunk, and a skinny girl wearing black clothes and dark eyemake up, I was blissfully ignorant. I was doing the work fine, but my boss said I had to ask people if they wanted to pre order games. He gave me “coaching”. When I walked out of the meeting in the back room, I asked the next person if they wanted to pre order any games. I mentioned one I liked. They did. This made my boss very happy, and he laughed a bit. I didn’t realize at the time, but it was because I was making eye contact, because I was a woman, because I was speaking with great knowledge on the game (publisher, director, studios, gameplay). My paycheck went to gas, cigarettes, and video games. I didn’t get very much extra. I was always invited to GameStop worker get-togethers. I was too nice. A guy or two asked me out. That’s what I get for sitting down next to someone, and introducing myself right? The other guys, I smoked weed with a lot. I got drunk everynight and played games with another manager on Steam. I went to The Legend of Zelda 25th Anniversary orchestra with some people.

The co-worker that invited me died later that year. He was sick, I never really understood. He was vague about receiving some kind of UV treatment. We did shots at the funeral for him. I was numb. He had to have only been 25.

Eventually being promoted to a manager, I moved locations often. I had worked at or helped build more than half of the Chicagoland GameStop locations. It was fun, but people started leaving. I watched the GameCube games get scheduled for liquidation. I watched the GBA games get clearanced. I watched the largest library of PS2 games vanish from every store. Of course, I collected some rare titles.

The unfortunate reality now, was that I was being staffed alone. I worked opening release for a game alone. This was a mall store, and the amount of people in the store with me alone was insane. The following morning, before the store opened, I lady called and complained about setting up her rewards card. She yelled at me, and I just gave up. I called my manager, said I quit, and left. The following week, the store was held up at gunpoint at robbed.

Further down the spiral

The drinking never stopped. I got a job at a local fitness center and non profit. There were only two or three people on staff at the time. My co-workers abandoned me alone at the desk before. One of my supervisors locked herself in the office and never helped with the endless line of registrations, memberships, photos. I was asked to help at the front desk for a raise. It was.. extended living, like rented rooms / apartments. The environment was decrepit. The residents were essentially on par with being homeless, with small rooms, no stoves, just a microwave. One of the residents choked on food and died in his room. Another kept smoking in his room and said he couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t do anything but a wellness check. The ambulance came and had to give him oxygen. One of the hallways always grew a mushroom from the carpet. There were cockroaches. There were bugs everywhere. I was expected to clean up food and trash after people. A woman passed out in the locker room, and I had to all an ambulance then too, luckily I was trained on CPR and had a coworker assist.

A new girl got hired. She was, I would say, inner city. She was pretty, not the smartest with tech but personable and that was more than enough. Two weeks later, she was shot and killed in her home, a victim of gang related violence. I was numb. She was 18. I was almost, well laughing. We took trauma counseling. I attended the funeral. It was incredibly packed. The culture and community was loud and outspoken about the violence. The street was shut down. How many funerals had I attended in my life by now, anyway? My grandmother died of lung cancer when I was in highschool (here I am, smoking a pack a day). My fathers oldest brother died of a heart attack, an alcoholic. My grandmothers sister had dementia. A great-great grandmother of my cousin, who taught me how to make some greek dishes and was an influence on me with her culture, passed at 90. How much death had I seen by the age of what, 25? I’ve driven by busy streets and seen a corpse covered in a sheet, dead from a car accident. I broke into cabinets and drank anything I could. I stayed up until 1am watching Toonami alone, laying on the floor. I walked outside in the summers to the parks. I would lay in the grass and feel the world spinning, completely deliriously drunk. The feeling of being on a rollercoaster. The up and down, my stomach falling into a pit. I played private World of Warcraft servers for what felt like a decade with people all over the world. I was chain smoking in the house. I was drinking nothing but soda and rum and whiskey. I broke a glass one night at 2am, and cut my hand open deeply on my right hand, just under the pointer finger. It felt sharp, but I couldn’t feel much. there was a lot of blood at first. The glass had shattered into 3 clean pieces, I hit the counter at a bad angle. I wrapped it in a towel and slept for three hours. I woke up and my mother was outside at 6am and my mother was outside smoking cigarettes. I asked her if it needed stitches. She took me to the ER. I was still drunk. I got six stitches. Any deeper, i would have hit a nerve.

I kept drinking. I couldn’t wake up some days. My night terrors returned. I had a re occurring dream. A tornado was always chasing me. It was so close, coming at me in my bed, hanging just above me. A violent torrent, always headed directly for me, my home. I had sleep paralysis often. I passed out on the basement floor a few nights. I drank until I had to vomit. I would vomit and keep drinking. My parents would drink every night, too, and stay up late. This was normal, and I never saw a problem. My body withered. My mom passed out on the couch and spilled her drink a lot. My dad fell down the stairs, more than once. There were… one or two cases of domestic violence, maybe, that weren’t so bad. My father had untreated sleep apnea, my mother got violent with him for snoring, my father punched her and she had a bloody nose. My father was so drunk one night he fell into the bathtub. My mom tried to slap him conscious, he retaliated by doing the same and beat her around her head with the palms of his hands. This was normal. My sisters were gone at this point, I was alone living in my parents basement, surviving off of scraps. Literal scraps of food.

The Fragile

I had eventually given in to the torment of night terrors, and was issued a prescription for Seroquel. The dreams worsened. Before I realized it, I wasn’t sleeping. For three days, I slurred my speech, trying to communicate to my parents I needed help. I couldn’t sleep. It got to the point where I had no impulse control. My mind was controlling my body, I was talking nonsense online. I came up stairs, and the last words I remember were “I need to go to the brain doctor”. My parents looked at each other, and said I don’t have health insurance. I was already paying out of pocket for meds. The next day, I was driven to a families clinic for help, off the books. They prescribed me xanax, thought it was a panic attack. I don’t remember how much I took. I couldn’t sleep, and I started taking sleeping pills. I was in and out of consciousness. My paranoia had shot up to horrifying levels. I had auditory hallucinations. I was seeing things. I hadn’t slept. I don’t remember who I called. I tried to set my house on fire. I was convinced I was being watched, I stared at the lights on the router. I went to my next door neighbor and asked to used their internet, that mine wasn’t working. I don’t remember was I was doing. I left and went back home. They were watching me there, too. My memory continued to black out at these points. I took a make up pencil and wrote on the walls. I had no shirt on, I was half naked. I looked in the mirror, and wrote all over my body. I knocked on my neighbors door. The younger brother of my sisters friend was stunned. He called for his older sister. She said my name, which brought me back to consciousness for a brief moment. She asked me to sit down and talk to her. She was on the phone. I heard one blip of a siren. I said “they came for me”. Men covered me in a white cloth and put me in the back of an ambulance. It was a long ride. I don’t remember what happened. I lost consciousness. I was gone. “Me” vanished. When I got out a month later, my neighbor refused to tell me what was written on my body. I will never know.