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You Are Not Alone - PLEASE READ

ErebosErebos
edited November 2014 in The Real World
Hey, there, Lusternians!

Well, this is a dreary subject, but I'll ask you to suffer to the end of this post, and not take it as a chance to be a troll.

Look, in the late months there has been a huge rash of depression, and suicides, attempted as well as successful. This is not strictly in Lusternia, but broadly across most all the IRE games.  This is saddening, coming from a person who genuinely feels towards the suffering of humanity, as a whole.  

It is, having said this, my sole intent to help others.  I'll make this brief, and to the point...

You are not alone.  You are not hated, and even if you are, there are those that -do- care. You may not know me, but I am amongst those that do.  No one deserves to go through their lives miserable, and with the constant feeling of dejection and being alone.  I understand every person has a different story, and every story a different antagonist.  I offer this, in light of things, to you as a whole:

My name is Ryan, and my Skype is wild.card2684

You may message me, day or night, at any time.  I will listen to you.  I will not judge you on high like the Mighty Q.  I will not troll you, or put your story or situation out in the open.  This is completely in confidence. You can cry at me, or scream at me, and it'll be just fine.  It's what I do.

Whether you know it or not, I do care.  

Everyone deserves someone to talk to.  Don't let yourself be enveloped in fear, anxiety, or depression.  The world only becomes darker when you are gone, and it is never a better place for it.

                Sincerely,

                  Ryan
             Player of Erebos
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Comments

  • ZeleniZeleni
    edited December 2015
    I reread To Write Love On Her Arms (twloha.com) the other day (it's a short story, and you need to read it). I'm a bit of a writer, which I guess most of us here are, and so the words I read inspired me to write something of my own. I mentioned this the other day.

    I've been debating what I should do with this - I feel like it's important, but I haven't been able to pin down its use, so I'm starting here.

    The story is only about three pages long, but it bares a good part of me open that I've never really talked about before. I decided to share it here because I've seen posts here that maybe my story will affect people. I don't know. What I do know is that when you're thinking about suicide, when you don't understand why you can't be happy, when just breathing takes everything you have in you to continue, when you're in this place in your life, know that you're not alone. I've been there. Others have been there. And I'm here, for those who want to talk.

    Admin Edit: The following story contains mention of self-harm and suicide. Please read carefully if you are triggered by these subjects.

    -----------------------------------

    I have scars up and down my arms and legs.  My mother always asks me why I won’t wear shorts in the summertime, that I look so hot in my denim jeans.  I tell her it's because I’m fat and disgusting - which is true, but I know I won’t always be fat and disgusting.  One day I’ll be skinny and content in my body, but I’ll still wear jeans.  I will wear them to hide the truth, the truth people don’t want to see, don’t want to know.  That these scars, they’re from me.  They’re thin lines across my skin as I desperately grabbed at feeling something, anything.  The pain is hardly noticed compared to the pain I lived with and hid from every day.  As I slashed my hatred into my skin for a brief moment I felt something real, something that deserved to hurt.  For a brief moment, I could breathe.  I’d watch the blood for a few moment before the pain eased off and I began to lose myself again.  So then again, I would cut.  Five, six, seven lines; eventually I became too exhausted to continue, and I finally felt that I’d expressed something, gotten something out of me and now I could rest.  I’d lay in my bed, hearing only myself breathe and staring at a blank wall as my thoughts began to make less and less sense.  Eventually, I sleep.

    Later, I would try to tell people I was hurting, try to tell them and maybe someone would rescue me.  But I tell the wrong people and nothing gets done about it.  Occasionally my mother catches a glance of a line here or there and I improvise some excuse as to why it’s there, which she accepts easily; I am, legitimately, a klutz.  Pain is not something she understands – something bad happens, you mourn, and then you move on.  That’s her world, and it’s a beautiful world to live in.  I just can’t speak up and ruin that for her.  So I don’t.

    Time goes on and I eventually stop cutting.  I don’t remember how or why.  There’s a lot of things I don’t remember.  My first year at college flew by so fast and hard and alive.  I still hurt, but I finally found people who wouldn’t hurt me.  This time, though, I’ve learned.  Don’t tell anyone.  It doesn’t help.  So I smile and laugh.

    Then, suddenly, I feel good.  The pain seems gone.  I’d already failed out of college, so I decide to do something I’ve always wanted to: I enlisted into the Navy.  Nothing was wrong.  There were challenges and failures, but I kept moving.  I was happy, for the first time in years, truly happy, and I needed to embrace it as much as possible.  The depression was there, watching, waiting.  I worked hard in A school, I drank a lot on the weekends, I went out with my friends, I just kept going.  I got married very swiftly to someone I barely knew.  I had friends who took care of me when I was drunk, I had a steady paycheck, I had a place to sleep, and food to eat.  And man, I looked amazing.

    And then I started slowing down.  It was getting harder and harder to get up.  I was sleeping more and more.  I got transferred and we moved in together.  Within a month or two, I finally shattered, broke like glass.  My husband of three months held me down for four hours to keep me from running into traffic; I bit, I clawed, I purposefully twisted his broken wrist, I did everything I could to get away from him.  But he never let me go.  Eventually I ran out of energy, so put me in the car and took me to the ER.

    I don’t remember a lot of my time in the hospital.  I remember my husband holding me while I bawled my eyes out, telling him that he didn’t love me, that he didn’t want me so he sent me away every time he came during visiting hours.  And he came during visiting hours every time.

    Being suicidal in the military doesn’t quite work out, so the doctor I spoke to for about twenty minutes diagnosed me with borderline personality disorder and discarded me from the Navy.  That was diagnosis number one.

    I can’t remember the line of places he and I lived in.  At one point we had moved in with my parents.  Moved in with his sister for awhile.  Managed to get an apartment on our own with only him working.  Transferred to another state when they closed the office he worked in.  During this time my husband dragged me to various different doctors, trying to find one I would trust and talk to, but it barely worked.  He had to go to appointments with me or I simply wouldn’t go.  Not just to the doctors’ appointments either; I wouldn’t leave the house unless he was right there beside me.  I couldn’t work, just the thought of it made me break down.  He would work long hours then come home and have to make dinner and clean up after and get me in bed and then hold me through what we started calling my episodes.  Later, they’d be defined as panic attacks, but for me they were more like attacks of hysteria.  Nothing could calm me down, I’d just have to cry and scream and shake until my body ran out of energy and I’d fall asleep, late into the night.  Then, having next to no sleep, he would go off to work again.  This was my life.

    Finally we ended up living with my parents again.  By now, my mother knew something was seriously wrong with me, but it was so far out of her world that she just didn’t understand it, no matter how hard she tried.  And I didn’t want her to understand it; her world was so beautiful that I didn’t want her to see my failure and worthlessness.  This time, my diagnosis was depression.  More doctors.  More pills.  More hysteria.  Eventually I couldn’t even hide it from her.  It was in my every movement, my every breath.

    Then it came, one night.  I saw it ahead, saw the glass breaking, and I begged for help.  I didn’t want to shatter again, I couldn’t do this to my family again.  So in the middle of the night I told them to do it, and they packed me up in the car and took me to the hospital.  I went willingly and gave away all of the threats – my shoelaces, my belt, anything I could make into a weapon of my death they took from me.  I hugged and kissed them goodbye, and went to hide from the world.

    I went through electroconvulsive therapy next.  They hooked me up to machines, put me under anesthesia, and shocked my brain into having a seizure.  I went three times a week initially.  Then two.  Then once.  I ended up able to go a maximum of nine days before the depression came back in full force and I had to go back in for a treatment.  After thirteen sessions, they finally said it wasn’t healthy for me to do any more, and it wasn’t helping me enough anyways.

    The vast majority of this part of my life is gone – the therapy messes with your short term memory, so I only have glimpses here and there.  Somewhere along the line, I got diagnosis number three: bipolar depression.  I found a doctor that finally asked about my life as a whole instead of focusing on just my immediate problems and was able to better understand why I wasn’t responding to any of the treatments.  A new drug, but this time, it was different.  It was a mood stabilizer.  That whole year I spent in the Navy without any symptoms of depression?  Yeah, that was the manic side of my disease.

    But even with the drugs slowly going the right way, I was still shattered and broken.  I wouldn’t leave the house unless my husband or mother took me out, and even then I was having problems.  I lost my friends just because I was too afraid of them.  I gained a lot of weight.  I forgot what it was like to be a person.  Just the thought of going outside terrified me into having full-blown panic attacks on the spot.

    Then, I learned that there were dogs that could help people with PTSD.  My husband helped me make an appointment, and then dragged me out to tour the facility and talk about the dogs.  I had to fill out some paperwork and get a doctor’s signature and then I could start the process.  I had never had a dog before, so this whole thing was completely new to me.  I had to go to the facility for group training every Saturday and my husband wouldn’t take me.  He said this was my thing I needed to do alone.  I trained with a couple of different dogs before they paired me with the right one.  After a single hour with him trying to learn how to make him heel, they sent me home with him because he was meant to be with me.

    I didn’t have any dog supplies, though.  I was afraid they would never give me a one, so I simply didn’t invest in it.  So on the way home from training, I stopped.  I got the dog out of the back, grasped his leash tightly, and the two of us went into the pet shop.  That was the very first place I went to willingly on my own.  This was what it was like to be human.  It took some time before I was confident in controlling him, and even more time before I gained any real independence, but slowly, I did.

    So now, where am I?  Seven years married to the man who wouldn’t let me get into traffic.  Going two months between doctor visits instead of two weeks because my medicine seems to be working correctly.  Going out on errands by myself.  Starting to build up friendships again.  Going out regularly by myself.  Smiling.  Laughing.  I’m now “the girl with the dog”, and I’m okay with this.  If you have to define me by something, then I’m fine with people associating me with the animal that gave me freedom again.

    I still can’t work because I get burnt out so easily.  I still have panic attacks once in awhile.  I’m not perfect or cured.  I still have work to do to move forward, but for the first time in years, there IS a forward.  I’m okay.

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  • MayleaMaylea
    Zeleni: <3. You are so brave to share this, and it is beautifully written.

    Not a day goes by that I am not proud of the strength of our community in supporting one another and giving people a platform to speak the things they find it difficult to. It is a testament to the importance of online communities that such a safe space is created. It might not be the most obvious place to share such things, but I am so glad that you felt able to use it.

    To make sure this is also a safe space for others, I've added a small trigger warning at the beginning of your post. I hope you don't mind.

    With this discussion opened again it's important also to remind people of the limitations of our community. @Lisaera put it beautifully here. This post also contains a list of resources if you are concerned about your own or others' wellbeing, and you can find even more resources in the General Dissatisfaction thread in some posts I and others have made.
  • XeriaXeria
    edited December 2015
    sometime back i wrote an incredibly long and rambling post about a trick i use to deal with anxiety and depression. i've realized that it can be summarized into a few paragraphs instead of a textwall.

    1) mental healthcare is utterly inadequate where i'm at. It gets treated like a behavioral problem instead of a mental or emotional one. it's either shape up or fail out of life. (and good luck to you! if we don't kick you on the way down, count yourself lucky)

    2) when people write their 'it get better one day stories' they often leave out the steps of how they got there. mine hasn't had a happy ending yet. i hope one day it  will.

    your job is to find a function compromise with yourself and the world at large.

    3)as a person you don't have the luxury of worrying because all that extra processing capacity people normally use for such things, has been chewed up by your depression and/or anxiety. it'll affect your decision making skills in the long . whatever and where ever you're at  your situation may get better, and it can take a turn for the worse. your goal is to prevent this and make your mental and physical resources stretch as far as you can. You need every last ounce. anxiety and depression eats away at your processing capabilities. There's a mind body connection, taking good care of your body through regular sleep, exercise and good nutrition helps keep your mind healthy, making it easier to cope with anxiety and depression. Cut out everything in your life that's hurting you even if you love it. don't worry about things you can't control. if you're doing something about it and it gets you to where you want to go, then you're doing fine. don't worry about it.

    4) You have to develop a roadmap that allows you to get to where you need/want to go  it has to be realistic, and tailored to your specific skillset, situation and internal wiring. collect data from various sources. talk to people, everyone you can think of, start with your family and work outwards to books and forums. Then use this data to work out what's possible for you and your situation. put a time limit on the date collection stage and then act on it. do remember, it's a roadmap and it's not set in stone. stay flexible. as long as it achieves results with the minimum of fuss, then it's alright. alot of advice out there can be counter productive, you'll need to figure out what works for you by testing it out in various situations.  

    5)keep it together and hang in there!
    is dead like the dodo
  • HavastusHavastus
    One of my favorite ways to cope with stress or anxiety is to write down whatever it is that is causing me grief, then to burn it. Writing down your thoughts in-and-of-itself is therapeutic, allowing you to organize in your head what exactly is getting you down and any negative thoughts that you may have. The burning it is simply a symbolic gesture.

  • AeralAeral
    My story also doesn't have a happy ending yet, but it's gotten a whole lot brighter. I'm currently waiting for one of the best programs offered for treating my condition. (BPD, as Zeleni had mentioned above.) 
    Avatar by the amazing @Feyrll! 
  • ZeleniZeleni
    Maylea said:
    @Lisaera put it beautifully here. 
    That is incredibly well written and very excellent explanation and resources to use.

    image
  • SiamSiam Whispered Voice

    There is also this beautiful poem by Maggie Royer that I'd like to share with everyone:

    The morning after I killed myself, I woke up.

    I made myself breakfast in bed. I added salt and pepper to my eggs and used my toast for a cheese and bacon sandwich. I squeezed a grapefruit into a juice glass. I scraped the ashes from the frying pan and rinsed the butter off the counter. I washed the dishes and folded the towels.                                    

    The morning after I killed myself, I fell in love. Not with the boy down the street or the middle school principal. Not with the everyday jogger or the grocer who always left the avocados out of the bag. I fell in love with my mother and the way she sat on the floor of my room holding each rock from my collection in her palms until they grew dark with sweat. I fell in love with my father down at the river as he placed my note into a bottle and sent it into the current. With my brother who once believed in unicorns but who now sat in his desk at school trying desperately to believe I still existed.

    The morning after I killed myself, I walked the dog. I watched the way her tail twitched when a bird flew by or how her pace quickened at the sight of a cat. I saw the empty space in her eyes when she reached a stick and turned around to greet me so we could play catch but saw nothing but sky in my place. I stood by as strangers stroked her muzzle and she wilted beneath their touch like she did once for mine.

    The morning after I killed myself, I went back to the neighbors’ yard where I left my footprints in concrete as a two year old and examined how they were already fading. I picked a few daylilies and pulled a few weeds and watched the elderly woman through her window as she read the paper with the news of my death. I saw her husband spit tobacco into the kitchen sink and bring her her daily medication.

    The morning after I killed myself, I watched the sun come up. Each orange tree opened like a hand and the kid down the street pointed out a single red cloud to his mother.

    The morning after I killed myself, I went back to that body in the morgue and tried to talk some sense into her. I told her about the avocados and the stepping stones, the river and her parents. I told her about the sunsets and the dog and the beach.

    The morning after I killed myself, I tried to unkill myself, but couldn’t finish what I started.

    Viravain, Lady of the Thorns shouts, "And You would seize Me? Fool! I am the Glomdoring! I am the Wyrd, and beneath the cloak of Night, the shadows of the Silent stir!"

    #bringShikariback 

  • KurutKurut
    This forum post is too important to be buried during this time of year.

    If you are feeling alone, helpless, or any other feeling where suicide seems anything less than a terrible idea, please call the number below.

    1 (800) 273-8255

    This is the National Suicide Prevention hotline, and the wonderful people there are more than willing to talk about anything that could be troubling you.

    If you feel you don't want to talk, or can't talk, you can text 'Go' to 741-741 to chat with someone.

    Don't leave us, things can always get better.
    I occasionally like to pretend that I'm replanting all of these herbs to attract bees, and might one day form an alliance with the bees and take over the Basin. Then we could have a wonderful tea party with plenty of honey and the best tea blends.
  • NienlaNienla
    edited January 2016
    I've known at least ten players across IRE, many of which I knew on a personal level, that have committed suicide. As someone who has/still does suffer from depression, it's really crappy and you can feel like garbage, but there are people who care about you. If you ever need someone to talk to, my AIM is feignedbydesign and my Skype is the same. Feel free to rant, be angry, or what have you. I'll listen.
  • NienlaNienla
    edited January 2016
    Sadhyra said:
    I'm banned from Aetolia, but maybe this will get back to there.

    I've struggled with depression for a long time. 

    A few months ago, on Valentine's day, I decided to end it. As the pills took hold, one of my pals from Aetolia sent me a message to say "What's up?" It wasn't anything special. It wasn't anything unique. It was just a pal saying hi. But, to me, it was a light. People may laugh or shit on friends from games, but they ARE FRIENDS. That night, the fact that someone wanted to chat with me and see how I was doing  was the point where I realized "No, death is kinda a shitty idea." I told them what I had done, and they got an ambulance to my house. My friends from games saved my life. Literally. :)

    Thanks and love to Piper and Mariena <3
    Piper and Mariena are absolutely lovely people. I've met Piper and she is a quirky, yet incredibly kind-hearted person.

    As for the Aetolia ban, it's probably the for the best these days anyway. I feel like your character has done a lot and made a lot of big impressions. I feel the same with mine, which is what makes it hard for me to commit to Seir. He's done everything he set out to do and his story is over.

    Edit: Though, again, I'm here if anyone ever needs to talk. Seriously. You've got friends.
  • LuceLuce Fox Populi
    Undertail spoiler, kind of, but a good message: http://dreemurr-reborn.tumblr.com/post/133495375626/wildcard-va-original-picture-and-message-by-the
  • XeriaXeria
    https://www.edx.org/course/becoming-resilient-person-science-stress-uwashingtonx-ecfs311x-0#!

    Becoming a Resilient Person - The Science of Stress Management

    This course gives you the permission to take care of yourself by learning the skills to manage stress and optimize wellbeing.




    is dead like the dodo
  • EllowynEllowyn
    It's so true though, if someone can understand even a part of what you're going through it really makes all the difference.  <3 you Lavy!
  • TarkentonTarkenton Traitor Bear
    So I never figured I'd be posting in this thread anything but words of encouragement or commiseration with folks that have gone through rough times.

    Warning: heavy shit follows. Including plan of how to end my life. Read on if you've got the constitution.

    For the two weeks prior to Easter, I planned to kill myself. I was going to get up to 90mph, unbuckle, and let Sir Isaac Newton take over as I hit a telephone pole or street light.  The silliest thing stopped me. My car is the newer one in our household, and paid off. I couldn't bear to leave my wife with her clunker, and I could never come up with a good reason for me to take her car.

    This was my thought process, every day, to and from work.

    Why?

    I was extremely depressed.  My whole life, I've tended to be a fairly calm, relaxed, happy guy.  Bounce back from just about anything and everything without too much of an issue.  Two years ago or so, I had to quit school with the news that my youngest was conceived and on the way. With a second kid coming, being able to afford the time to go to school, along with the money, just wasn't doable. And I was okay with it, right? Because hey, I'm having a kid, and it's a sacrifice that I can make for the sake of my family.  So what if it means that my dreams, my plan, are derailed?  That's okay, I have a steady job so long as Apple decides to keep us around.  

    Except, underneath that, the thought was "This is as high as I can aspire to for the rest of my life.  An associate degree and a job that I'm slowly starting to hate because it's all consuming".  

    Then, during the last month of her pregnancy, my wife had to be admitted to the hospital due to complications.  The "my wife could die and there's nothing I can do about it" type of complications.  Intellectually, I got the fact that she was in the best place she could be.  Emotionally?  I was a wreck.  I fix things for a living, and in my personal life.  I couldn't fix that, and it dragged me down.  I put on thirty pounds eating just the most unhealthy drek out there.  Family size frozen meals, constant fast food (usually along the lines of $15-$20 meals), things like that.  So, along with the hospital stay, I feel fat and ugly on top of all of that.  Did I ask for help?  Did I tell someone I was hurting?  Of course not.  I'm Tark, I deal with stuff, I bounce back.  It was at this point I parted ways with my faith as well.  I still believed in God, I just figured that He didn't give two cents about me, so why should I care two figs about Him?

    Baby was born, ended up healthy.  Wife was healthy.  But during all of that, somewhere inside, I broke.  Things started sliding, that I didn't remember letting slide.  Bills didn't get paid on time, then just didn't get paid at all.  Power got shut off a few times because I could have sworn I'd paid the bill, when I hadn't.  I had the money.  The money was never an issue.  When the power shut off, I paid the bill online, and it was back within an hour.  "Oh, whoops, wow, I just must have spaced it, sorry honey!"

    Things really started to go wrong around July, last year.  I stopped making the house payment.  Could swear I'd done it, to this day, I thought I'd been making them.  On New Year's Day, my car was repossessed with two payments to go.  I had been getting the mail, and then stashing all the bills, all the letters that weren't junk or inconsequential, in a large box in my garage.  "I'm okay, I'm okay, I'm okay" is what went through my head.  I don't remember doing that with the mail, with the papers.  The car loan was settled, crisis averted, "Just been under a lot of stress from work, and it slipped my mind" is what I told myself, and my wife.

    Fast forward to two weeks prior to Easter. Foreclosure notice on the house, for not paying.  I didn't tell my wife about it, I mean, how the heck did that happen?  And that's when I started thinking that maybe she, and the world at large, would be better off without fat, ugly, horrible husband, failure father, and no good me.  My mood became erratic.  Unreasonably angry, at nothing, then down in the dumps.  It all came to a head during my wife's spring break, when the mail man dropped off another certified letter about us being in foreclosure, and this all just erupted from me.  I told her about it, my plans to kill myself.  It was a relief, to not have that burden anymore.  But the mood swings stayed.  In fact, they got worse.  My wife was afraid that I'd just get into the car one night, and there was nothing she'd be able to do to stop me.

    I saw a counselor through my church, last Wednesday.  A delightful man named Calvin.  Calvin listened, poked, prodded, and after half an hour, he told me that he wasn't going to be able to let me leave his office, that I was a threat to myself.  I broke down, and bawled my eyes out.  I knew it was true.  I knew if I'd had the chance, I wouldn't go past a week before trying to kill myself.

    Wednesday evening, I was admitted to a mental hospital.  Me.  The guy with the wife, the kids, the one good car and the one meh car, the house, the whole American dream.  And there I was, in with the addicts, the severely mentally ill, the depressed housewives.  It was a humbling experience.  Six days.  Going to group, meeting with a psychiatrist for the first time in my life.  Being put on an antidepressant.

    I returned home yesterday, humbled, changed.  I've lost whatever pride I had at being the guy that always has it together.  I never told anyone, not even my wife, what was really going on inside of me.  And that was a terrible mistake.  It's easy to deceive yourself, and others.  One of my best friends is finishing his dissertation to snag his doctoral and become a psychiatrist, and he was completely blindsided by this.

    So where's all this going?  During the stretch of time when I stopped making mortgage payments, you'd think that I'd notice "Oh, hey, Tark, there's an extra $1050 in your bank account. What's up with that?" Well, I dumped a lot of it on random expenses (family trip, Christmas, car repairs, new TV). I also poured a stupid amount of money into IRE games.  Hundred here, few hundred there.  Got the credits, got the toys.  I have a character on Imperian with a retire value likely over 6k.  Tarkenton's retirement value is in the neighborhood of 18.5k.  So, to piggyback off of my Absences post, I'm staying away from Lusternia for a while.  It's not that I fear I'll spend money, I'm just ashamed at what I did without really thinking about it, and I need to distance myself from the game for a while since it became my obsession while I was depressed.  My usual cycle is to bounce between games every two to three months.  I was stuck on Lusternia for about a year and a half straight.

    So, yeah.  That's my story.  A mostly positive ending.  Got some things to work out, working on not losing my house.  Letting people in, speaking about how I really feel instead of the "I'm good, I'm okay, I'm fine" crap I used to regurgitate.

    The tragedy of all this, though?  The part that had me crying while I was writing it?  Calvin died the same night that he saved my life.  He was killed by a nineteen year old drunk driver.  This awesome man, who through luck, fate, random chance, or the hand of God, was put in my path and saw my anguish was taken from the world.  My faith had been shaken, in the past two years.  It was pretty much gone.  Mock me, shake your head at me, but God put him in my path knowing that he would stop me from making a terrible, horrible mistake.

    I kind of rambled at the end there, I think.  This has been a lot of feelings, a lot of processing, and a lot of backspace and retyping.

    If anyone feels the urge, Calvin's wife and family have a gofundme set up to help provide for the lot of them.  He had six children, four of whom are still just kids, one to eleven years old.  It feels like soliciting and the like, but honestly, I don't care.  The administrators can edit out this part of my post if they feel like it.  https://www.gofundme.com/8hwwudqs is the link if you're feeling generous.  My wife and I, and her family, have both given to it.  And I think that there's worse things that a few bucks here and there could go towards.
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  • YmuliYmuli
    Monday I had to take myself to hospital because things got so out of hand and my head was in a bad place. It's still not really out of it. But I asked for help and that's a start, right? There are a few of you who have been wonderful lately. To those people, and you know who you are. I love you. Sorry I haven't been able to make all my commitments. Please be gentle with me, I'm trying. 
    Wildeflower Aramel Strongleaf says to Xiran, "My cousin's attitude to life is rather like her attitude towards cake - to have everything, and at once, and lots of it."
  • AlaksanteriAlaksanteri
    edited February 2019

  • AshiyaAshiya
    I know that I have some pretty severe anxiety and depression and it has driven me from MUDs in the past, including a different character on this one. I'm not quite sure what the catalyst is - it may not really be anything specific. Maybe just a series of things, or just one progenitor incident that sours me on a character or the MUD and makes it difficult to get in to the character's mindset again. I start avoiding people, doing stuff by myself, limiting interaction as much as possible.

    I'm terrified of crowds, and tend to shut down if there are two or more other people in a room, or if I'm around someone I think is great at RP or combat or has more influence, or is just an intimidating person to be around. I go quiet, thinking my attempts at RP are laughable and I'm wasting people's time, or doing something wrong.

    Just wanted to say it on here in case I ever go quiet in a room with any of you, or I'm hiding off by myself, or going out of my way not to talk to someone because they have somehow brought my depression or anxiety to the forefront.

    I want so badly to get in to good RP, I try super hard, but sometimes I just completely lose my ability to interact. Sending people tells is a strong act of willpower. Getting tells from someone sends a spike of panic up my spine. Talking to "authority figures" has a similar effect, and compounds if I have to combine the two. And sometimes I can be mid-RP, sending out detailed emotes and says, and then suddenly get a flare of anxiety and I'm reduced to only a few word responses.

    But I keep trying because I enjoy RPing and writing. It's my hobby. I get a lot of satisfaction interacting with all of you when things aren't going bad OOC.

    Not really sure if I had a point to get to when I started writing this.
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