Discord and its Endless Loops

My monitor starts jingling. “Jay is calling,” the popup says. It ends abruptly because I didn’t answer, I’m just staring blankly at the screen. A new message comes in.

Jay: “U hopping on tn?”

F*ck. I’m sluggish in my chair from staying up all night on Discord with Jay, and I’ve only been up for 3 hours. I glance over at the clock. It’s 6PM. 

“Bruh I’m f*ckin’ tired from last night do I have to get on?” I type out.

Jay: “We can’t lose our streak bro u better be on in a few hrs”

I exit out of the tab and just plop onto my bed. I have a splitting headache from staring at the screen all day and all night. It’s winter break, and my room is so stuffy I can practically slice it with a serrated knife. I open my phone to 20 unopened messages. All of them are friends from school inviting me to hang out, but I willingly ignore everything. I don’t even know why I do this to myself. My stomach growls so I break open a bag of hot cheetos and stood up just to sit back down in my chair. 

I open up discord and join the voice channel. It feels like a rabbit hole. It feels like vertigo. It’s destroying me to continue doing this but I can’t even fix this. Might as well play.

“Ayyy Annie what’s good” Jay says excitedly

I don’t even know how to speak anymore, I feel like I’m endlessly deteriorating. I just pull down my mic and put on a smile as I turn on my webcam. “Haha yeah I’m here. We doin’ duos?”

8:30PM turns into 11PM, 11PM turns into 3AM, 3AM turns into 5AM.

I’m endlessly playing this stupid game and I’m so addicted to it that the second I press join I’m stuck in it until I physically cannot use my hands anymore. It’s that rush of adrenaline everytime I get a kill. It’s that feeling of pride when people spam me in servers on discord while I stream. They adore me. I’m loved. I’m addicted to that feeling of being wanted and that feeling of knowing that I’m top on the leaderboard. It’s a stupid thing to be addicted about, but addictions are always blown out of proportion.

“Jay, do you wanna get off in a few minutes” I say. “Uhh, maybe in like an hour or two?” She responds back unattentively, clearly too absorbed in the game. “Dude the sun is coming up..,” I press. I only press because I don’t want to wake up at 4PM anymore. I don’t want to wake up to my parents screaming at me for being so unbelievably useless and unproductive. 

“Yeah once this game is over lets get off then”

I know once this game is over she’ll convince me to play another round. Then another mode. Then serverhop. Then move into a new discord call. My eyes water because I’m unable to blink anymore.

“Okay.” I smile weakly.

It’s like the most draining cycle and a negative loop. It feels like I’m running downhill, but it’s completely perpendicular to flat ground, and I’m just running straight to rock bottom. To the mantle of the earth. All the way down into pitch black and nothingness. I can’t breathe anymore, it feels like the pressure of the air is compressing me, but it isn’t even noticeable at this point. 

I wake up and my head is pounding. The sunlight is seeping through my curtains, trying to leak through to warn me to wake up. My headset is still squeezing my head, and I realize I fell asleep in my chair. Jay did me a favor and kicked me out of the call realizing that I was asleep. My computer is practically screaming at me because of how loud the fan is from it being on all night. 

I hear clicking. It’s from outside of my room, I can hear the slight click in every other step in my mom’s achilles. It’s a rapid-fire walk, I can tell there’s a panic in her footsteps. She opens the door to my room without even warning, and it makes my hair move from how the door swung open. 

“Your dad heard you playing all night and he’s been waiting for you to wake up all morning.” She’s speaking in this accelerated tone, and my brain is so fried from doing literally nothing for the past week that I take a good 5 seconds to translate her Korean before I can respond. “Sorry. I don’t even know what happened I just fell asleep and I can make it up. I did the dishes and folded everyone’s laundry last night, is he mad?” I rub my eyes as I speak. I can taste my own breath and I smack my lips as I get up slowly to stretch. As i take my hands away from my face, I realize my mom’s already gone. She probably didn’t even hear me speak about the dishes and the laundry. I sigh as I start trying to close the door so I can just rot in my bed, but then my dad stops the door from closing. I see him glaring at me, and I can see my mom in horror barely peeking out from behind him. I know they think I’m a failure, but I still do my basic chores…why are they even confronting me?

I’m just thinking as my dad just smacks me across the face. It stings. He walks over to my bookshelf and starts tearing my books apart. I’m so utterly confused that all I do is just start screaming at him to stop. He’s mumbling words in anger all under his breath and I can barely hear my mom telling him that it’s enough. He throws the ripped pages in the air and then throws the spine at me. It strikes me straight in the cheek, and I just sit on the ground in emptiness.

“You’re throwing your life away and wasting money on these meaningless things and I can’t watch you do all this in front of me. I don’t even know if you’re my daughter.”

I just start blocking everything out again. I see this black, endless void, and I envision myself falling into it and never finding the end. Just being swallowed by darkness.

People can argue that game addiction is not that deep, but I personally feel like compared to other addictive things I’ve tried, it was the most draining one I’ve had to experience. I think that it is kind of a gray area of what specifically I was addicted to, because it was a mix of many things. The game, the people, the validation, and the feeling of reward when I played. I think that it swallowed me whole and all I could do was just wait for it to die out or for me to just slowly fade away from it.