The Journey So Far

Book 3 : My Long and Winding Road

The Playstation 2

And so the next age, the PS2. I put off buying a PS2 for ages, well after everyone I knew had bought one. It was expensive and I didn't have the cash and furthermore, I didn't see the reason to buy a console with so few games at launch. But as time passed and its games library grew I finally bit the bullet and got one.

The Playstation 2...what can I say about it? It had a DVD drive which I never used (we had PCs for that) The goddamn piece of junk broke down five times - oh wait I already told you about that. It's game library was definitely smaller than the SNES and PS1, though there were some quality titles (like SRW!)

I would curse and swear at Sony a LOT over their piece of junk hardware. Due to lens problems I ended up buying a grand total of 5 PS2s (quite a strain on my limited budget!) I bought one to play SRW, and I only continued buying them to play SRW. Or so I told myself. Truth be told there were many good games on the PS2 (some life-changing ones as well) and I was very happy to play them.

The PS2 era was directly after my suicidal period, after my some of my friends had left for university. I would have been...twenty-plus by then I think.

What else happened? Life continued in a form of limbo. I still couldn't go to school, work was sporadic and hard to come by. By now I had sort of realized that my life was very, very different from others, and that only intensified my feelings of loneliness and alienation.

Home life continued to be terrible. The fear of a relapse was always looming, and my sister and mother were running scared all the time. I was technically not "ill" (ah, the dreaded illness!) but nothing had truly been resolved. OCD was just pushed way down into my subconscious. If I had thought my mother was attached to the PhD before, now it was a full-blown obsession. She ate it, drank it, slept it. She talked of nothing else (when she wasn't scolding us and telling us we were parasites who ought to die, that is) Even her screen-saver (it was "Get That PhD!") I think in the depths of her obsession she probably thought that if she got it, it would Solve Everything, just like how I was going to Get Well and Go To School like Normal People.

I totally and completely became a parent and ran the house at this point. Cooking, cleaning, doing household repairs – the million and one tasks that one has to do it keep things running smoothly. When I look back and think about it now it's staggering how many things I had to do on my own.

I remember making a business call for the first time and not knowing what to do, so I read up on it. I researched and wrote all my resumes all by myself. I read magazines on child-rearing, post-divorce family situations, first aid books, everything. This was before the Internet really took off, so there was not a lot of information on some topics, but I read and read anyway. It's not like anyone was going to do it for me!

Meimei seemed to be always worried...worried about everything. Completely understandable. She had grown up in a family in which her parents had suddenly disappeared at six and the only replacement was a scarred youth bleeding internally from unhealed mental wounds. If I woke up she was scared that I hadn't had enough sleep, which meant that I might have a relapse, which meant that she had to talk to me to keep me company and make sure I didn't have a relapse which would mean that the world would have ended.

She suffered terribly (as I did) and I tried my best to shield her from everything around me (and myself) but there is only so much a twenty-something year old with severe mental illness can do. Again it's a relief to admit that, because for the longest time I felt to do so would have been an admission of weakness. For a long time we were each other's parent and that was something that was not only unpleasant but unavoidable.