I have always had a strong passion for Xbox, not just because of the excellent games and the awesome apps such as Channel 9, but because of the amazing, strong community. While there are always trolls and rude people on any social media platform, I feel that there are more good, kind, helpful people on Xbox. It can be as simple as saying “Good game!” to everyone in the lobby or someone reaching out to me when I am feeling depressed and just being there for me. For a while, I told very few people about this because it was a dark time in my life, and now I am going to share it with you all.
In 2010, I had just gotten settled in this new home and everything was perfect. My birthday was coming up, school was a breeze, and Xbox was pretty much my life. I had and am still suffering from rheumatoid arthritis and cerebral palsy and was still mentally recovering from a gas fire that destroyed my home on my first day of kindergarten. I had lost everything and we had to start from scratch, but I was not going to let these things bring me down. Life was good.
In October of 2010, I was sitting in the living room with my family and we were watching television and my older brother and I start having a verbal argument. Everything began to escalate and I said something that angered him so much that he picked me up and threw me across the room. I landed on my neck and my family, knowing of my conditions, panicked. I could have easily died or been critically injured if I had landed another way. My mom rushed over to me to see if I was all right. My dad was so furious with my brother that he punched him in the face. I was horrified that this was happening.
My mom took my bleeding brother and I to the hospital, thinking my neck may be broken. I sat in the emergency room for a while and then doctors came in, examined my neck, and put a brace around it. Then a detective came in and asked about what happened. We all told our story. I spent a week or two in the hospital with my mom and brother. My dad was told he needed to leave the house because he was a danger to us and we could not go home until he left. I sat in the hospital just seeing the images of all of this flashing before my eyes. I was terrified for my family, uncertain about our future. After a while, they determined my neck was not broken and they sent us home once my dad left the premises.
It was late at night and I did not want to sleep so the first thing I did when I got home was get on Xbox and jump into an Xbox Live party with some of my good friends. I told them what happened and they were all very supportive and asked me if I needed anything. We played some rounds of Halo: Reach to get my mind off it all. It surprisingly worked. I was back to myself for that brief period of time…happy as could be building structures in Forge mode with my friends and laughing. In one of my darkest times, I had light.
A week or so later, I went back to school with a lot of anxiety and nobody had seen me for a month so everyone welcomed me back and was kind even though they had no idea what happened. My teacher told me I had to make up a lot of work, and this made my anxiety a hundred times worse. Some of you may think “Grade school is not hard, so why should catching up with work be hard?” And you are sort of right. However, when you miss all of the lessons and have to not only catch up, but also try and do your current assignments, it can get quite difficult.
My anxiety would get worse, I would have panic attacks, and refuse to go to school. It got to the point where the school sent my family to truancy court. Now I was afraid my mom would go to jail, I was buried in schoolwork, and I was depressed. This is something no child should have to worry about. It is not normal. This continued for three years and my life was a mess. I constantly felt sick, and we were moving from apartment to apartment scraping what we could for food because my mom was unemployed due to some medical conditions she has. It was a constant struggle. I stayed home a lot and just played Xbox because that is where I felt safe, that is where my friends were, that was what made me happy. Games like Call of Duty, Halo, Skyrim, Grand Theft Auto, Red Dead Redemption, Gears of War, and Battlefield were my escape. I felt like another person, I was happy to be able to mess around with my friends, have a laugh, and enjoy amazing games.
Not only did I find joy in the online Xbox community, it was the moments even where I was alone playing a single-player game that helped me cope. One of my all time favorite games by one of my favorite developers, L.A. Noire, came out around the time this was happening. I will never forget putting my disc into my Xbox 360 and immersing myself in the 1940s as a detective. The game had brilliant storytelling, awesome gameplay, and featured a lengthy campaign with numerous side mission as well. It was the perfect distraction from reality. I would wake up in the morning and knew if I had to go to school, I would be able to come home later and go right back into beautiful 1940s Los Angeles. It was a game like L.A. Noire that kept me from going too far over the edge and just giving up. It prevented me from thinking I will never be able to get out of this and be happy.
The Xbox community and the amazing games saved me from what maybe could have ended in self-harm or suicide out of depression. The people in that Xbox Live party that night I came home from the hospital are still my best friends and we still hop on Xbox together and play some games even though they are on the other side of the world. Without them I would not be where I am in life. They supported me and my writing and gave me constructive criticism. Without these people I may not have even discovered I was capable of writing about video games. I have never felt happier or more secure then when I am on Xbox. If that does not show how powerful video games are, then I do not know what does.
I would like to say that I am not painting my father or brother out to be bad people, if that is what it seems like. They both did it out of anger and my father did what he did because he loved me, cared about me, and wanted to protect me. I am not defending his actions, because it was wrong and he knows that, but I understand why he did it. Today my family is living together again, and while we are still struggling financially, we still make the best of what we have.
Bruce was a community contributor to ICXM, writing 1 article in 2015 covering Xbox news. ICXM operated as an independent Xbox and Windows gaming outlet through the Xbox One’s first full year of post-launch coverage, including the early days of Backwards Compatibility and Windows 10 gaming, drawing from a rotating bench of editorial volunteers.