Press Start to Begin Again: Mental Illness, Adulthood, and Recovery of an MMO Junkie

Content warning: Discussions of suicidality, suicidal ideation, and trauma.

Spoilers for Recover of an MMO Junkie

This is, in the simplest way, a piece about an adult falling apart and nearly succeeding in the most horrific way. In truth, I didn’t expect to be here to write this piece. I expected there to be a eulogy for me that I’d never read, an obituary of kind thoughts for those who would survive me. I expected to be “the late” right now. I expected to be in memoriam.

Instead, I’m writing this perspective piece from my apartment, from a desk that no longer resides in my bedroom, from a room with a view of the sea and a chain of islands. I’m writing this because I’m alive. Also, because as of November 18th, 2024, I am no longer employed.

My time as a socially productive adult is done, at least right now. My bank account dwindles under the oppressive weight of adulthood. I spend my days mostly inside, tackling weekly job hunts while trying to return order to an apartment that is a living record of my major depression. I look out my window, watch the barely wavering sea, wait for the specific hiss of the electric buses whizzing by. Occasionally, I pick up a mask, put on my coat, and leave to fantastical places like Trader Joe’s, Daiso, Walgreens, or the local indie bookstore. These mundane acts are how I measure my days.

But there’s something new now to fill my mind. Now, I’m measuring my life in thoughts about Recovery of an MMO Junkie. After all, since I’m here, I might as well tell this story in Anime Feminist tradition: through the lens of feminism and Japanese pop culture.

Recover of an MMO Junkie comes from a season that’s almost a decade old: Fall 2017. It’s a simple story, following Morioka Moriko, a thirty something who quits her exhausting corporate job and becomes a NEET–that is, “Not in Education, Employment, or Training” or simply, unemployed–in order to find something that actually fills her cup. It’s a testament to the phrase that not all money is good money: she leaves not because she’s unskilled, but because her job is burning her out.

During her time as socially outside of adulthood, she decides to return to a comfort place: MMORPGs, namely Fruits de Mer. She creates a male character named Hayashi and almost immediately finds friendship with another character named Lily, who helps the IRL Moriko learn the ropes. Instantly, life goes from grayscale to soft pastels: Moriko feels alive again and starts her recovery into adulthood and toward a future where she might actually be happy.

Caitlin Moore’s recommendation of this show came to me at what can only be called the right time: it came amidst my late recovery when I started to think, “Yeah, I’ve got to leave my job even if I’m scared.” It was a cathartic recommendation that came with the addendum of checking out and letting myself sink into a series instead of my thoughts.

While the world outside the series is complicated because of holocaust denying, and anti-semetic, director Yaginuma Kazuyoshi, inside is a comforting narrative centered on an adult leaving society that comes from a similarly endearing source. Sadly, that source has an additionally tragic nature due to mangaka Kokuyo Rin ending the series prematurely due to her declining health. This really strikes at the heart of MMo Junkie in a cruel way, especially as a story centered around burnout and workplace recovery. 

When we work, when we adhere to society’s rules and performed able-bodied behavior, we are considered respectable and acceptable members of the world, functioning adults in a global economy driven by dollar signs and zeros. Even if you hate your job, there’s a duty to the bottom line and production and wanting more: more success, more money, more social status. But I don’t want more: I just want enough to live comfortably but not greedily. I have no desire to step on others for my own benefit. 

Instead, I want enough to be kind to myself and others.

Therein lies the appeal of a female lead like Moriko: she quits her job in tech because she wants more. Moriko wants to be happy, a rarity in a developed and industrialized nation these days. More importantly, she makes the decision to go, even in the midst of her rock-bottom confidence and mental spiral. But that decision doesn’t come easily: there’s a path toward her recovery that has to be made solely by herself. I suppose that’s what inspired me as well.

My disability has often left me feeling like my development is not as linear as that of an able bodied, neurotypical person—while science suggests that our brains stop maturing around our early twenties, I feel out of sync with this idea. I almost always feel like a work in progress. Plus, I don’t fit into a neat, tidy box in the way society desires: I likely never will.

As an autistic adult with ADHD, my brain is anticipated to boil and toil in the sea of my developing thoughts until age thirty-five which for me, lies on the horizon of three years from now, though honestly, I’ll always be growing. In many ways, I feel like I’m something of a teenager who can rent a car, pay taxes, and indulge in heaping bowls of artisanal ramen when my energy is low. I decide when I nap, which is often; I decide when I get out to run errands, which is more frequently these days. I have full control of my life, but in many ways, I am in what I’ve started to personally call my second adolescence, redefining my vision of adulthood in steps and stumbles. 

But I’m no MMO Junkie: the closest I get to an online game is Genshin Impact, which is far more an RPG with co-op in an open world than, say, Final Fantasy XIV or EVE Online. No, I’m not an MMO Junkie: it doesn’t run rampant in my gamer blood.

I’m just a recovering adult.

Being a recovering adult is, in my mind, the thesis of Recover of an MMO Junkie. Sure, a job is necessary because we’ve decided that slips of paper with decorative designs are what allow us to have the “luxury” of shelter, food, and occasionally, water and electricity depending on where you are situated in the world. But a job can also be the thing that hurts us: a bad job can separate you from yourself, can pickle your personality and make you feel small. While it’s never detailed explicitly from her perspective, the message is clear: even though Moriko is skilled, her job didn’t value that and devalued it enough over time that leaving was the only thing she could do, even at risk of her basic needs.

Thankfully, this is fiction and Moriko is never at risk of being unhoused or missing payments, but the spectre of her dwindling funds never leaves the periphery. There’s something grounded here, a specificity to its examination of turning your back and walking away from a stable job in order to heal. What makes this seemingly mundane experience revolutionary is that viewers get to witness Moriko’s whole journey. She starts as a near complete shut-in, drawing a clear delineation between what is Outside and what belongs in the territory of herself. She leaves for food, and it’s a sneak in, sneak out kind of relationship: go in, get what you need, get out without interacting. When she eventually changes and takes a chance on societal reintegration it comes with price tags: not working, not going out means that she has expired makeup and nothing fashionable to wear and this time, she can’t just sneak in and out. 

But that’s not where Moriko’s story starts. It starts with a fragile grip on the few things she’s in control of in her immediate orbit. While there’s a future where she’s thriving, when you start the series, Moriko is in the now: she’s unemployed, she’s deeply depressed, her morale is low, and all she has to anchor her is Fruits de Mer amidst the shambles of the adulthood she was supposed to want and have.

It is, put succinctly, the actions of a depressed adult living in their worst year.

I don’t like to rank years for a lot of reasons. I largely find that it oversimplifies things and hides the fact that years have multiple facets that are both simple and complex at the same time. But I’m human, and I scaffold memories by rank: the bad obscures the good, and the worst outranks the bad.

Yet in my mind, 2023 and 2024 rival one another as two of the worst years in my life. In 2023, I became permanently disabled in a way that directly affects my day to day life: I became a Type 2 diabetic, which meant immediate life changes and a fear of food that I had to overcome. But in 2024, my mind broke, shattering into a million distinct pieces that scored my heart like a hot knife through butter, rendering me into a shadow of who I believe, and now know, I am.

Things were okay at the beginning of the year: I had complications from COVID-19, ended up with POTS (Postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome), which occurs in a third of long-COVID patients, and a slightly higher A1C. But that could be treated, and was and is: a few pills a day, swallowed with as much cool, not cold, water as I can guzzle. That was okay. Hell, it was even was doable. Sure, the bills piled up and I hit my out of pocket in April, but…I could rationalize that. I could ask for mutual aid: I did ask for mutual aid. I made a dollar out of fifteen cents day after day in order to get by.

But then food stopped tasting like anything. My bedroom in my apartment became a cluttered, often inaccessible, mountain range of failed projects, paperwork, dirty clothes, and half the dishware. I had to carve a path from bed to desk to door. I stopped brushing my teeth and ceased bathing, resorting to baby wipes to shore up my flagging hygiene. The familiar shadow of mental illness began to haunt the doorway to my innermost thoughts, sounding a familiar klaxon.

In that time, life evolved: I had a public breakdown at work, endured a visit from a crisis team. I found out I had to move, I closed myself off to survive, and I started to crumble. Amidst it all, I packed and I found a new place to call home, going from two roommates to none, thrust into solitary living for the first time since 2020.  

Like Moriko, I was sick at heart and down on my luck. Unlike her, I was sick enough that my doctor wanted me to be hospitalized and on suicide watch but my cruel understanding of working education while mentally ill meant that I refused: the IOP and emergency medical leave, paid by the state, was our middleground. And even with ten hours of therapy a week, I couldn’t turn kindness inward: I hated myself with every breath. Things got bad and then they got worse: I had meltdowns almost every day. I couldn’t use my gas stove for fear of what I would do. I refused to leave my apartment for well over a month.

For a season, I spent most of my time haunting my four walls, flickering through from room to room, the banshee cry of my agony filling each corner with the haunting wail of adult suicidality. Few people reached out to me: my former roommates, my therapist, my newly gained psychiatrist. Only one person from my workplace, which heralded me finding out that one of my closest coworkers scorned my decision, choosing to become angry at my decision to privately save my life and publicly recover instead of just asking the why of things. Students asked my former roommate when I’d return, a bittersweet question that marked how safe they felt with me but how unsafe I was to be around them.

My struggles with agoraphobia, made worse by a world filled with pandemic and hate crimes and the klaxon on a million warming waters whispering a fate that stinks of shimmering oil and plastic, turned inward, questioning why I should ever exist in other spaces again. Collectively, these thoughts became one of the many things needling at piercing my heart, pinning me in place like a painfully wrought tapestry of stitched together, hazy thoughts.

That pain, that ache, grew, and so did my destructive ambition. I became very good at attempts: I became nearly successful, only to be foiled each time. Three is my favorite number and three attempts on my life I made. But I’m here, and I’m on another uncountable chance. I’d like to stop tallying up attempts: I’d like to start the count from one with this single life I have to live.

Seems like a good bet to go all in on.

Like life, Recovery of an MMO Junkie ends not with a solid ending, but the close of a chapter. Moriko, having met friends in, having found community, having even found the start of a romantic relationship, is able to go outside. The almost inch thick barrier between her apartment and the world still exists, but that door becomes a portal to a fuller existence. We don’t get to know her fate because life is just like that, but we get to see the start, and more importantly, we get to see that part of her life resolve in order to open up to new potential. If anything I think that’s better than a concrete ending: leaving things open lets viewers imagine more for Moriko and the friends–and romantic relationship–she establishes along the way. And isn’t that the real goal?

So often, we expect a concrete narrative with a satisfying ending, but life isn’t like that. Video games, books, manga, media: they are structured to visually and mentally satiate us, though the success rate can always be argued depending on what you want from the media you consume. Still, I find it satisfying that an anime, and a story overall, went this more human route. It makes the journey of self-discovery feel more authentic. 

For Moriko, this is the right time to step back outside and reintegrate and let her life change. It’s less of a natural stopping point and more of a natural transition, an encouraging look at what it means to step into recovery and remake our lives on our own terms. It’s what we all anticipate from life, at the end of the day: autonomy and the ability to seek our own future. And isn’t that a beautiful thing?

When I first decided to write this piece, I was incredibly anxious. It is one of my most vulnerable articles, detailing (within limits) my plunge into suicidality and severe depression. It underscores a massive amount of public masking on social media, review articles, and podcasts where I presented as being okay. I was, in many of the things I wrote and recorded this year, not okay.

The road to recovery is rarely simple once you’ve let the depths of depression swallow you like a kelpie pulling you beneath the brackish tides of a pervasive sense of worthlessness. I sat down and marathoned, across two days, the entirety of Recover of an MMO Junkie. I sat in pajamas, probably with an assortment of cheese, and I watched and my brain focused. For the first time since my piece on Nagata Kabi, which was ironically written at the start of my breakdown, I knew, without a doubt, that I wanted to write about the rest of my year.

In truth, I was afraid to publicize that for the most part because of how I think I’m perceived as public: an optimist, a kind person, someone who truly cares about everyone. The darkness of my mental health spiral felt antithetical to all of that. But in the end, it really isn’t. It’s just a part of me. So consider this article me being brave. I think that’s the best way to put it. I’m being brave as I look towards the future. 

This article is a milestone marker, a reminder of where I was, but not where I am. I can’t say where I won’t be again: life is really fucking hard and so incredibly unpredictable. But I’m a recovering adult, and more importantly, kind of resilient: I don’t think it’ll get this bad again because I let the world in.

As always, I have a non-exhaustive list of people to thank, but this time I’d like to specifically thank the entirety of the Anime Feminist team, who has seen me through my mind playing tricks on me and trying to convince me that my mere existence was a reason to snuff out the light of my life. Special thanks goes to all of them for texting me and seeing me through some of the most frightening moments of my life: even more special thanks to Lizzie, who called me multiple times and helped me remember that I do know how to laugh. The life debt I cosmically owe everyone here on staff will be paid back by living and continuing to be present here on the website.

Finally, I want to thank myself. I always believe I stand with others and never on their shoulders: I am the product of helping hands, not stomped upon hearts. I hope that when I write my next perspective piece, you’ll see the recovery of a recovered adult. Until then, wish me the best: I’m going to be here for a very long time to come.