\n<\/p>\n
By now in his late teens, Nystrom discovered a party scene around the electronic music that he loved. <\/p>\n
Aided by drink and drugs, it came with the acceptance he craved.<\/p>\n
“I went from being not popular to ‘Oh, this guy is the life of the party’ and ‘This guy’s cool’,” he said. <\/p>\n
“People were messaging me. ‘Hey, man, we’re going to go drink, let’s go!’ or ‘We’re going to get ecstasy’ or whatever.”<\/p>\n
That awkward, angry young man, traumatised by the abuse he had suffered as a child, had found a way to fit in.<\/p>\n
But while most people indulged themselves now and again, Nystrom found that he didn’t want to put the brakes on.<\/p>\n
He found the first in a series of jobs working in call centres taking bets from the United States, where, in most states, it was still illegal to gamble. <\/p>\n
A reliable telecommunications network and a large bilingual workforce had made Costa Rica a go-to destination for the backroom operations of a booming online gaming industry that bypassed American laws.<\/p>\n
It was an environment as soaked in drugs and alcohol as the clubs he had begun going to.<\/p>\n
“At first, a gram of cocaine would last me a week, maybe two weeks,” says Nystrom. “Then only a week, then half a week, [and] then I was taking breaks at work to go do bumps of cocaine.”<\/p>\n
Nystrom remembers a colleague warning that cocaine was “white death”. But he wasn’t interested.<\/p>\n
“It was cool, it was dangerous, and I was like ‘I’m so sneaky, nobody can tell’,” he remembers. <\/p>\n
“It was something that I would think about, years later, when I was lying on the street. I was like ‘Man, that guy was right’.”<\/p>\n
At least partly aware of the road he was travelling, Nystrom describes how hard he tried to resist temptation, only inevitably to give in.<\/p>\n
“My brain [was] saying ‘I don’t want to do drugs today’ and my body on autopilot was walking from my apartment to the payphone to call my dealer,” he says. <\/p>\n
“And all the way thinking ‘No, don’t do it. Don’t do it. Don’t do it.’ But it was like I could not control myself. I had to get to the payphone.”<\/p>\n
He began to hallucinate: hearing voices, imagining he was being tracked on the street or being monitored by microphones and cameras secretly installed at his home.<\/p>\n
“It was horrible, horrible, horrible, horrible. I was losing touch with reality,” he says.<\/p>\n
No longer able or interested in going to work, he lost the last of his jobs, ran out of places to stay, and found himself on the street.<\/p>\n
He was there for more than a year – sleeping in alleyways, begging for money, scavenging for food.<\/p>\n
Staff at one of the local fast-food restaurants would sometimes leave a bag of tacos next to the bin at the end of the day.<\/p>\n
“And all the time, [I] was begging for money, to go do drugs. It was all about the drugs,” Nystrom says.<\/p>\n
Even in such extreme circumstances, bitter memories of his previous life broke through.<\/p>\n
Nystrom sometimes used discarded newspapers to try to keep warm.<\/p>\n
“I remember looking at a newspaper and seeing the sports section, and pictures of guys that I grew up playing soccer with, were now on the national team,” he says.<\/p>\n
After more than a year of living on the streets, with seemingly no way out from his addiction and wracked with guilt about abandoning a young son whose mother he had separated from before the birth, Nystrom came to the desperate decision to end his life.<\/p>\n
“I knew I couldn’t stop. It didn’t work. And so finally I decided, I can’t do this anymore,” he says.<\/p>\n
He had tried several times in the past, but this time, on this day – 27 September 2012 – he says, he meant it:<\/p>\n
“As soon as it was light, I went and started begging for money. I managed to get enough to buy what I thought would be enough drugs to die. I hadn’t put that much effort into anything in years. There was no way I was going to be alive the next day.<\/p>\n
“I went into a used clothing store and stole a pair of jeans, and then I stole a polo shirt, because I didn’t want them to find me in rags. I had just enough money left to check myself into a cheap motel, so I could take a shower, because when they found me, I wanted to be clean.<\/p>\n
“The last thing I remember was thinking that I needed to buy more beer. The next thing is opening my eyes and seeing two paramedics in front of me. <\/p>\n
“There was this incredible rush of emotions: anger was the first one. Then fear and sadness because this was supposed to be it, I wasn’t supposed to be alive anymore. <\/p>\n
“I remember trying to fight and the guy hugging me. It was the first time I’d been hugged in I don’t know how many years. He just held me while I was trying to fight him and said ‘It’s going to be OK. I don’t know how. But it’s going to be OK’.”<\/p>\n
Nystrom’s life had been saved by a concerned motel receptionist who came to check on him and called the emergency services.<\/p>\n
Before that last suicide attempt, he had sworn that this was the end and, if, somehow, he found himself still living, he would do what was needed to change.<\/p>\n
That decision was reinforced when he witnessed a grieving family in the hospital in which he was recovering.<\/p>\n
He can’t explain why they had such an impact on him. He had seen much violence and pain before, but this time, for some reason, it was different.<\/p>\n
“It was like this weight that I had been carrying for who knows how long had been lifted,” he says. “Like I finally knew what I needed to do, where I was going to go.”<\/p>\n
He headed to a rehab centre in San Jose, where the staff were clear. They would give him food, a bed, but no second chances. If he failed to follow their rules, if he slipped up, he was out and on his own.<\/p>\n
“I’m alive today because of those people,” Nystrom says. <\/p>\n
He describes the blissful feeling of simply falling asleep – as opposed to passing out through intoxication or exhaustion – but also the physical pain he felt as his body adjusted to a life without drugs.<\/p>\n
There was temptation. He considered sneaking out and joining a party which was going on just over the wall from the treatment centre. Part of his brain told him, now he’d made a start, he could manage his recovery on his own.<\/p>\n
But, somehow, the moment for him to quit the programme never came. He stayed the course and started the long climb to a different life.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n