Floaties
By 144 Hertz
This will be my last depression related post. The topic is not easy to read about and I’m at a point where I’d rather write about more positive things.
The world lost a hero last week.
His name was Byron Bernstein, known in-game as “Reckful.” He committed suicide on Thursday, July 2nd, shortly after proposing to the love of his life on Twitter.
I had a couple biographical paragraphs written up but decided against including them here. You can Google him if you’re curious, but understand that he was truly an idol for many gamers growing up when we did. As he detached himself from more hardcore gaming and got into a “chatting” style of streaming, he became very outspoken about his battles with depression. Some days he would be in a manic state. Some days he wouldn’t. This openness toward a world as vile and toxic as the internet is what made him a hero.
Many of us use video games to escape from reality, just like others do with movies or books. But the difference with gaming is that you are continuously interacting with other humans, many of whom have no problem spewing hate and toxicity. Keyboard warriors.
No one in the gaming world ever opened up about mental problems before Reckful, mainly because you’d get flamed and called soft by some 14-year-old. But my man did it anyway. He streamed therapy sessions, talked about depression with his viewers, and did everything he could to normalize discussing mental problems. This led to a change in the gaming community. More streamers began talking about it. Before long, the topic was taken more seriously, not just brushed off and memed about.
In World of Warcraft, there are several types of characters dedicated to restoring the “health points” of those around them. They are known as healers. All of them have different abilities used to heal multiple allies around them at once, known as “Area of Effect” or “AOE” heals. Reckful was the first to coin the term “AOE Healing” in a social context. By getting people together to support one another with their issues, the effect was like a group of Restoration Shamans throwing out large AOE waves of oceanic healing. Sure, group therapy has always been a thing. But in a world full of depressed escapists, seeking help was nothing but weakness.
Byron succumbed to his depression, but the effect he had on the gaming/streaming world will be felt forever.
This “group healing” is something I’ve been doing subconsciously for the past couple years, but I always think of it like giving out floaties. I begin this thought with a quote by Robin Williams:
"I think the saddest people always try their hardest to make people happy, because they know what it’s like to feel absolutely worthless and they don’t want anyone else to feel like that."
Spot on.
If you read my last post, you know that I associate my depression with water. Even though I mentioned being through the worst of it, there are still days when I find myself beneath the surface.
The last thing I want is for anyone I care about to find themselves underneath their own waves of depression. To aid with this, I do my best to provide others with floaties. But what are these… floaties?
They come in two forms:
1. Check-in messages via text which progress into gas-ups
2. Relentless attempts to make people laugh and be happy
This is my form of AOE healing. By running through my contact list and sending out some floaties every now and then, I am trying my best to get my loved ones above the surface. You know, just like floaties in real life.
I fully realize that my support can only help others so much with their own problems, but I must tell myself that I’m helping. It’s like the above quote says, I don’t want anyone to feel absolutely worthless like I do during my lows.
If you have a friend who seems almost annoyingly loving on the surface, always telling jokes and gassing you up, make sure to keep an eye on them. If they’re all good, that’s wonderful. But it may just be a mask to hide how they really feel about life. This phenomenon is related to what is known as the “Sad Clown Paradox.”
