Yup. As the title implies, I’ve got depression. The meds help (a lot) but there are still times when apathy paralyzes me and I simply want to lie down and stare at a wall. On the flip side of that, there are times when I need to pace as anxiety and frustration build for no particularly good reason and I cannot find an appropriate outlet.
You see, what a lot of people don’t seem to know about depression is that it doesn’t always make you sad. It can do any number of things to your emotions and the symptoms can be different for everyone. Funny how little chemical imbalances in the brain manage to affect nearly everything in your life.
Where Video Games Come In
Dogs help. Dogs always help. Since this post is kinda dark, I’m going to include cute animals as we go.
Video games have not always been a great mix with my depression. Sometimes, when I would get into one of those moods, the video games were not so much a balm or a crutch, but rather an enabler. Games let me zone out and ignore my feelings or lack thereof. Worse yet, they could encourage me to surrender on the days when I probably could have pulled myself out of the darkness if I had been willing to work a little harder.
Those sorts of days, especially when sequential, can have a cumulative effect. Sometimes, especially in my isolation while I was living overseas in England or Japan, games became more of a habit than a solution. The moment I started to feel down, I turned on a game rather than trying to work through the feelings or being productive. The games were no longer even fun. They might as well have been a symptom of my depression for all the good they did.
There are other times, though, when nerves and despair mix into a percolating sludge of poisonous energy that oozes through my muscles and settles beneath my skin. When that happens, I once again pace, wandering the house or streets or forest with no guide or goal except for the need to move. Yet, even then, the frustration mounts as a part of me shouts at myself to be constructive, to do something fun, to do anything other than roam and prowl aimlessly. Then the frustration turns to anger and the clenching in my stomach radiates through my throat and chest, stimulating those parts that make me want to cry, scream, and hit something. Even then, though, I cannot decide which to do. Even if I perform some combination of these to vent my feelings, it does not bring solace.
When The Games Do Good
Well, maybe screaming works for this guy. Not me.
This is when I need to be around friends or find an engrossing distraction. In quarantine, the former isn’t going to happen any time soon. For better or worse though, I spent a lot of time alone even before this fiasco, due to the places I have lived. I’ve got some experience with this. During the times when I am too jittery and bitter to concentrate on a book or work, but am too hopeless or weak or conflicted to exercise and there are no friends to be had, video games are almost exactly what I need.
In those moments, it’s easier to flick a switch and watch a screen light up than it is to change into my gym clothes or stay still with a movie. Even as I stalk a room or want to curl up and forget, once I turn on a game, lights illuminate the walls and sound begins to enliven the air that seems so muffled and thick. Already there is something, a demanding stimulus that promises to take my mind away from myself. Turning on a game then is just a way to weather the storm and it works.
Even if I don’t find the game necessarily fun because of my emotional state, at least it is distracting.
Cats are good too.
On the days when I know that I cannot work myself out of a mood and there are no friends to be had, I need to be engrossed in something. A good book or writing fiction might work, but when those fail, the visual, auditory, and interactive aspects of video games are often still effective. A game makes the time fly by and distracts me from my thoughts and emotions long enough for my brain to stabilize after whatever shenanigans it gets up to in my skull.
The Drawbacks
Games can help but, as I mentioned, games are not a perfect solution. They are a break in a series of marathons that I have to finish eventually. If I spend too long in a video game world, spend too long distracted and ignoring reality, then coming back can be harder. I might look at the clock or the calendar and know that I have wasted hours upon hours or even days without really accomplishing anything.
That by itself may send me back into a downward spiral of self-doubt and anger, even as I try to redeem myself with productivity. If I let myself play games every time one of my moods threatens (and that has been happening frequently during the pandemic), then I threaten to let it become a habit again. A habit just makes it that much harder to cope and have a normal life.
Well, if the cats deign to grace you with their company, that is.
Yes, I might need a break from the marathon if I am truly exhausted, but maybe it’s the runner’s plateau that I’m feeling. Maybe if I can just bear it long enough and push through the pain, it will vanish out of nowhere, leaving me clear to run on.
The only thing that truly helps prevent those moments, the ones when it feels like my body and mind are failing, is making progress in a task. When I reach a benchmark in a project, create something that is fun or useful, or when I finish a series of chores or self-improvement jobs, that sense of accomplishment is when my boosted self-esteem helps drive the gloom and poison back before they can take root.
Games are great, but when it comes to my depression, they aren’t a solution. They just help cope with a symptom temporarily.
The Gist of This
Then there is the embodiment of peace: The capybara.
The point is that everything in life is about balance. When it comes to mental health, everyone has their own balance that they need to strike, so I cannot give perfect advice to anyone. All I can say for sure is that, even if you are stuck at home and feel adrift, then you can find something to help. The best thing I can suggest is to find a project, preferably something that you have wanted to do or have put off for a long time and start it. Never going to have more free time than now, right?
Seeing and feeling your progress could do wonders for your self-esteem and state of mind. Short term coping mechanisms like video games can be useful but they are simultaneously dangerous in their promise of a swift escape. You cannot be too reliant on them for fear of letting yourself slip further from your goals and making them seem that much more unobtainable. That discouragement is, at least in my case, enough to set me back to square one.
Then again, if there is a time when you simply cannot cope and everything inside of you wants to rupture, hemorrhage, shatter, and shriek all at the same time, then there’s nothing quite like an engrossing game to bunker down with until the feeling passes.
One way or another, to everyone out there regardless of your mental health, just remember that you are not alone. If things get really bad, you still have a phone to let you speak with someone you love. I’d be willing to bet they wouldn’t mind hearing from you anyhow.
We’ll get through this.
Featured image courtesy of Creative Commons uploaded by user cottonbro.
