Trigger warning: discussion of depression and suicidal thoughts
When I was 18, I did what a lot of people do and moved away to go to college. I had grown up in one town my whole life, but I wasn’t nervous about moving 400 miles away. I wanted to study what I love, I was self-sufficient enough for dorm living, and I was looking forward to making a new group of friends.
That last part didn’t work out as planned. I lost track of everyone I met at freshman camp. I didn’t click with anyone in my close-knit department. To this day, the last time I spoke to my freshman roommate was October of freshman year, and we lived together until May. I didn’t even have much in the way of old friends, since there was only one guy I barely knew who came from my high school. The only friend I made was the girl who randomly sat next to me in the cafeteria, and she had a different major and dorm. Freshman year was pretty lonely.
Luckily, I had my internet friends. I had joined my first online roleplay group at the beginning of 2010 at the insistent nudging of one my real life best friends. This wasn’t an MMORPG; it was essentially collaborative fanfiction written by fans playing different characters. We used LiveJournal as our platform of choice, constructing threads of the story in comment threads. At the same time, we also had a chat running in AIM every night where we switched between speaking as ourselves and speaking as our characters, a fanfiction of our fanfiction. We all got along well, and it was a great way to spend an evening.
My first group was based on the recent Star Trek reboots, setting the characters in modern day San Francisco. Since my best friend was playing Scotty, she helped me set up the character of Scotty’s younger sister (using Karen Gillan's face since the character didn't exist) so she could help guide me through the process instead of just throwing me in the deep end. This game didn’t last, with updates stopping in early February as many of us migrated to a new, Supernatural-based story. I had only barely started watching the show at this point, but I didn’t want to leave my new friends. Since it was the season of the apocalypse on the show, they let me be the Horseman known as Famine (though mine was played by David Tennant instead of James Otis). This group didn’t last long either, but since I had One Act Play competition and high school graduation to worry about, I wasn’t too bothered.
The third community I was in was actually started by my best friend. I had gone home for a visit in October of 2010, picking her up from her school along the drive. We invaded our high school’s theatre room to surprise our favorite high schoolers (we were both theatre nerds). It was as we were camped on the couch left on the room’s stage that she told me about it.
“I’m playing an FBI agent played by Jared Padalecki,” she explained, “and Heidi is going to be the leader of a crime family played by Jensen Ackles.”
“And they fall in love?” I guessed.
“Of course,” she said. “Who do you want to be?”
“Has anyone taken Matt Cohen yet?”
(No one had. I fashioned him as an amnesiac soldier turned mother hen for the crime family. He had a hilarious apron collection.)
It wasn’t the exact same group of people for each roleplay. Humans are social creatures, so we tended to move as a group from story to story as our friends did, but people joined and left and rejoined at will. It all depended on whether or not they felt they had something to contribute to the story.
These people were my rock during the beginning of my college career. I worked hard to get my homework done early in the day so that I could have free time to chat at night. I never talked about anything important, but just knowing that I had people to talk to was enough. We chatted about school and work and life and relationships in between telling people that we had responded to their last post and were now waiting on a new response. It was like a study group that never did any studying full of people whose real names I didn’t know.
The story petered out around February of 2011, and no one mentioned starting anything new. Looking back, I’m not surprised that this is when the depression I’d been ignoring took a turn for the worse. What had once been a general feeling of “I’m lonely” became a more specific “I wonder if anyone would notice if I was gone?” This scared me enough to drive to my best friend’s apartment several hours away just so I wouldn’t be alone, but I still couldn’t make myself say anything.
I never attempted anything, and things started getting better after spring break. The friend I had made who lived in another dorm introduced me to another group of her friends, and we all got along well. I was invited for coffee or fro-yo or out to the thrift stores. I found out that one of the guys in my department who lived in my dorm had the same procrastination problem I did, and we started annoying each other into working during late nights in the dorm lobby. I met people in classes for my other major that I fit with much better than those in my first major. The campus Quidditch team started meeting for regular matches instead of the one-off event they’d held in the fall. I flew home for an unexpected visit. I got better.
Some people worry about the connections we make online. Not because of the stranger danger we were first taught, but because they can’t substitute for in person friends. And these people are right. They can’t. But when you find yourself in a place where real world friends are thin on the ground, online friends are a blessing. I may never have told them how hard things were for me, but I have no doubt that they are still the reason I survived long enough to find my place at college.
When I was 18, I did what a lot of people do and moved away to go to college. I had grown up in one town my whole life, but I wasn’t nervous about moving 400 miles away. I wanted to study what I love, I was self-sufficient enough for dorm living, and I was looking forward to making a new group of friends.
That last part didn’t work out as planned. I lost track of everyone I met at freshman camp. I didn’t click with anyone in my close-knit department. To this day, the last time I spoke to my freshman roommate was October of freshman year, and we lived together until May. I didn’t even have much in the way of old friends, since there was only one guy I barely knew who came from my high school. The only friend I made was the girl who randomly sat next to me in the cafeteria, and she had a different major and dorm. Freshman year was pretty lonely.
Luckily, I had my internet friends. I had joined my first online roleplay group at the beginning of 2010 at the insistent nudging of one my real life best friends. This wasn’t an MMORPG; it was essentially collaborative fanfiction written by fans playing different characters. We used LiveJournal as our platform of choice, constructing threads of the story in comment threads. At the same time, we also had a chat running in AIM every night where we switched between speaking as ourselves and speaking as our characters, a fanfiction of our fanfiction. We all got along well, and it was a great way to spend an evening.
:format(webp)/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/57993335/aolrunningman.0.png) |
| This logo became a fixture on my laptop screen |
My first group was based on the recent Star Trek reboots, setting the characters in modern day San Francisco. Since my best friend was playing Scotty, she helped me set up the character of Scotty’s younger sister (using Karen Gillan's face since the character didn't exist) so she could help guide me through the process instead of just throwing me in the deep end. This game didn’t last, with updates stopping in early February as many of us migrated to a new, Supernatural-based story. I had only barely started watching the show at this point, but I didn’t want to leave my new friends. Since it was the season of the apocalypse on the show, they let me be the Horseman known as Famine (though mine was played by David Tennant instead of James Otis). This group didn’t last long either, but since I had One Act Play competition and high school graduation to worry about, I wasn’t too bothered.
The third community I was in was actually started by my best friend. I had gone home for a visit in October of 2010, picking her up from her school along the drive. We invaded our high school’s theatre room to surprise our favorite high schoolers (we were both theatre nerds). It was as we were camped on the couch left on the room’s stage that she told me about it.
“I’m playing an FBI agent played by Jared Padalecki,” she explained, “and Heidi is going to be the leader of a crime family played by Jensen Ackles.”
“And they fall in love?” I guessed.
“Of course,” she said. “Who do you want to be?”
“Has anyone taken Matt Cohen yet?”
 |
| I just think he's pretty |
(No one had. I fashioned him as an amnesiac soldier turned mother hen for the crime family. He had a hilarious apron collection.)
It wasn’t the exact same group of people for each roleplay. Humans are social creatures, so we tended to move as a group from story to story as our friends did, but people joined and left and rejoined at will. It all depended on whether or not they felt they had something to contribute to the story.
These people were my rock during the beginning of my college career. I worked hard to get my homework done early in the day so that I could have free time to chat at night. I never talked about anything important, but just knowing that I had people to talk to was enough. We chatted about school and work and life and relationships in between telling people that we had responded to their last post and were now waiting on a new response. It was like a study group that never did any studying full of people whose real names I didn’t know.
The story petered out around February of 2011, and no one mentioned starting anything new. Looking back, I’m not surprised that this is when the depression I’d been ignoring took a turn for the worse. What had once been a general feeling of “I’m lonely” became a more specific “I wonder if anyone would notice if I was gone?” This scared me enough to drive to my best friend’s apartment several hours away just so I wouldn’t be alone, but I still couldn’t make myself say anything.
I never attempted anything, and things started getting better after spring break. The friend I had made who lived in another dorm introduced me to another group of her friends, and we all got along well. I was invited for coffee or fro-yo or out to the thrift stores. I found out that one of the guys in my department who lived in my dorm had the same procrastination problem I did, and we started annoying each other into working during late nights in the dorm lobby. I met people in classes for my other major that I fit with much better than those in my first major. The campus Quidditch team started meeting for regular matches instead of the one-off event they’d held in the fall. I flew home for an unexpected visit. I got better.
 |
| I couldn't find any pics of me on the team, so have one of our original Quidditch shirt |
Some people worry about the connections we make online. Not because of the stranger danger we were first taught, but because they can’t substitute for in person friends. And these people are right. They can’t. But when you find yourself in a place where real world friends are thin on the ground, online friends are a blessing. I may never have told them how hard things were for me, but I have no doubt that they are still the reason I survived long enough to find my place at college.
Comments
Post a Comment