Diary Of A Videogame Addict

Somehow, there’s a big difference between the way people perceive me, and the way I really feel. I suppose everyone feels this way, but for me it’s different. It has gotten to the point where I seem so happy, that what many people remember about me most is my smile. If you were to ask people who know me, they’d have nothing but positive things to say. They’d talk about how I’m a “Go-getter”, that I’m “always running around“, “constantly moving“, “always doing something“ but they can’t see what’s really happening. And how could they? After all, they‘re always on the other side of the glass, looking in. Distanced from what’s going on. I can’t say I blame them. Most of us rarely take the time to get to know one another. Mostly, we just want to be entertained. Well, in reading this, maybe you’ll spare a thought for the entertainer.

They say that everyone has a past. That we’ve all done things we’re not proud of that we wish we could take back and I guess that’s true. But my past has the power to haunt me. And I’ve been running away from it for years, practically for as long as I can remember. That’s what I do; I run. I run so hard that I don’t have time to think about it. I run so hard that even stopping to eat a simple meal seems like a bonus.

A friend once told me that it seemed like I was always chasing tomorrow, chasing a new day. But every day seems the same to me. The same fears, the same headlong rush. The same walls hemming me in.

More and more, I find myself taking pills to chase away the pain. If you’ve never been an addict, you can’t know. But it monopolises your life; you’re always thinking about it and you always know if you’ve got any left. You know where they are and how long it’s been since you took them. You constantly argue with yourself about how long you should wait before taking them again. Balancing some crazy risk and reward equation just to see if you can hold off taking them just a little longer. Because the real fear, the real nightmare, is that you might run out, and be left alone with your demons.

But when you take them? The rush! All your problems seem solved. You feel invincible.

When people ask me how I’m doing, I don’t know how to explain to them that I feel haunted by the ghosts of my past. That I feel that, should my past ever catch up to me, I might just melt away, disappear into the background as if I’d never been. That no matter what I do, it seems that whenever I turn around, or try to turn a corner, those ghosts are always there.

I can’t tell them that. So instead when I’m asked, I just paint a big smile on my face, open my mouth real wide and say what I always say,

“Wacca-Wacca-Wacca-Wacca-Wacca-Wacca-Wacca”.