I'd started life in a manner most people don't ever have to: on the wrong foot straight out of the womb. I'd started development with multiple impediments and defects: severe myopia, lazy eye, Asperger's syndrome, and gender dysphoria. Some of it was treated, other aspects were hidden from society in fear of retribution and death. Take a guess which one. I'd developed anger issues, trust issues, and made very few lasting friendships during that time. I'd developed a "dark knight" complex that lasts to this day: a habit of pretending to be the bad guy in order to protect not only myself but the social structure in which I live. I became a natural Bad Cop. It was this that drove me to the edge for the first time: It wasn't the end of the world, but you could see it from there. I was ready to snap. But then came the first "that". I got into video games. I could get lost in the worlds of Mario, Zelda, Star Wars, Banjo Kazooie, Pokemon, Metal Gear, Grand Theft Auto, and so on for hours on end, and it gave me something I hadn't had before: a punching bag. There's a recent article here about "the goon", essentially the masochist of gaming. Those poor bastards helped me retain what little I had of my sanity at that point, and armed me with something more: a social leg-up. You see, there's a thing about us high-functioning autistics: our brains work rather differently from normal folk. I became a walking encyclopedia of strategies, codes, and other little secrets. There was not a game that could beat me. Add this to a year of summer camp, and now I have long-lasting friendships that come from the first revival. For a few years, I was able to keep myself composed. I was able to keep together, and preserve the part of myself that I'd valued above all else. Gaming save my life. I call that the first reboot.
For a few years things were going well. Or as well as they could go for an introverted autistic transgender individual who had to expend twice as much energy to do anything than they should have because they had to keep up a shield to protect their most vulnerable points. But at that time the shield was stronger than it had ever been. I became an expert at sending false positives by mixing them with the true positives, wrapping lies in enough truth to make the actual truth seem much more preposterous. And the whole charade was going well. Come 2006 though, the first serious crack at my psyche in 7 years had been dealt by a cruel twist of fate: I'd lost my dog, who'd finally bit life's bullet via lethal injection because he went batshit bonkers insane. He'd been around for a decade and had gone senile, biting both me and my mom in places where arterial blood was all too common. That didn't stop me from mourning his loss. Soon after I followed suit, lashing out at friends and family as well as my digital goons. My bodycount was through the roof at that point, so much so that I'd stood atop a tower of the poor saps. I'd tried drowning the pain through drugs and alcohol too, the things the schools hilariously spent billions of dollars on warnings against. The next year didn't help things any: my grandma, my final grandparent, kicked the bucket at age 84. Maybe it was her time yeah, but that didn't soften the blow. At that point my parents and I gravitated away from each other. I dropped the sauce and pills, instead talking to people who'd become close to help me through my issues. I still had to maintain the shield: it was twice as hard at this point. It hadn't been chipped away: it was split. It only became harder when my mom became a raging alcoholic. The otherwise intelligent and articulate mother became a raving idiot and a monster all in one, and didn't give a shit. School was barely safe, and home had just become much more hostile. That was the first crash. No safety nets this time.
At that point I'd needed to find a way to express the despair. Keeping everything bottled up was killing me, and more and more it felt like talking was helping less and less. My voice sounded increasingly alien to my my ears: it felt like a monster had taken my words and tried to express them in a sort of twisted fashion with its own vocal mangler. With that gap ever widening, I took up writing. Finally, I found a place where my voice, or what little was left of it, had been untainted. I wrote many things, from stories to detailed analyses on fiction and fact. I'd become an amateur writer. It helped me recover somewhat from the damage that had been done by two losses in the space of a year. I'd done well in school, repaired some relationships, founded new ones, shedded ones gone sour. I was on the road to recovery. I'd enrolled into college, and even scored a job after graduating high school, and in a bum economy like this that was quite the achievement in its own right. My shield was strong again. And then, like a jerk that likes to crash parties, life threw me another curveball: on my way to drug testing for the new job, I got hit in a car accident. Barely avoided a rollover that would've totaled me as well as the car. Luckily only the car was screwed. I had to blow my entire savings account on something to replace it, and what I got was, as I like to put it, a drivable iron maiden. From poor traction to a tendency to mechanically fail ten times in a single year and a seat that you have to be careful in how you sit as to avoid being literally backstabbed, this thing was a bigger mess than I was. Getting hospitalized three times in the following year didn't help either: mono-hepatitis, Bells-paulsey syndrome, and another attack from my longtime menace the kidney stone were not kind to my wallet or life. The dysphoria was also more intense than ever: twice I'd lost hope. I'd had it: I put the gun up to my head and pulled the trigger. Except all I got was a goddamned click. I'd tried my good old pal the pills: I'd taken enough Oxycontin and Ibuprofen in tandem to down an army of elephants. I'd done it, and more. 20 years of psychological pain and repression had led me to not only hit rock bottom, but tunnel under it. And down there, the sleep was deep. My only problem with that was that I'd woken up.
Crazy things happen when you're in drug-induced sleep: you enjoy not existing. No worries, no pain, no people depending on you. No responsibilities. No need to hurry, no need to wait. Just nothingness. But then something happened: I started waking. Some part of me still had hope for a future in the world. But that part had to fight free, and think fast. When I'd woken two days later I picked up a game I hadn't touched in months at that point: Mass Effect. I wound up telling myself "if you bring it to life in there, it may become true out here", so I'd imbued a new commander Shepard with as close of an approximation of my traits, both desired and already in place, as I could. She'd become what I want to be and more. Strong, capable, and compassionate. A chaotically good angel of sorts. Id revived myself once again, and now I had more than just an outlet for my anger in games: I could be myself for once. It had also prompted me to make a pact with myself: if self-termination was ever brought up again, it was time to spill the beans. I'd finally done that not too long ago. I'm in the process of getting help now, and if this happens the way I hope it does, I'll finally have the truly definitive "that" moment. I'm on the verge of either a recovery from a problem that's been slowly killing me my entire life, or the final straw. I'm tossing away the shield. Let's hope I don't need it anymore.
