Living with PTSD
For the past five or so years, I have been completely unable to control how I feel on any given day. Usually, once or twice a week—sometimes more—I will just completely break down. This happens randomly, and I have no way to control it. I can consistently make it happen by doing, seeing, or hearing specific things. Let me explain how this started to give you a better understanding of what I deal with.
It's nostalgic thinking about 2020. I remember playing Animal Crossing and Tetris on the Switch. That was when I first got into Tetris and got my computer. Before that, I played Terraria (Calamity mod) and I Wanna Maker on a bad laptop. It was a good time. The first thing I did when I got my computer was spend five hours setting up Tetris Giant on an arcade emulator. I also remember getting Deemo on the Switch and playing it with the other games in bed at 5 a.m. Deemo is one of my favorite games of all time. I've been playing it since 2014, and it's one of the main reasons I care about music as much as I do and why I wanted to learn piano. This was also during the golden age of Vtubers. I was extremely obsessed with Vtubers at that time, to the point that they were the only thing I watched. I could genuinely be a VTuber historian of the 2020 era. By the end of the year, I had lost everything: all my friends, my grandparents, and my childhood home. All in one year.
For the next few years, I was completely alone. I would wake up, work on music, play League of Legends, and then sleep. This marked the beginning of my random breakdowns and crying spells, which only worsened over time.
Fast forward to the end of 2023. I installed VRChat and got really into it for a few weeks, but then I was ready to uninstall it because my VRChat phase was running out. One of the last times I played, someone joined the world I was in. They were a little cat avatar who ran around writing to people with pens. I don't know why, but I felt like I had to be friends with this person. I went up to them and talked to them. They are now my best friend.
I remember getting so excited every time they joined and crawling on the ground beside them, staring at them. We would talk and play all day. After some time, we went to a theme park world. It was really scuffed, but I remember we went into a little tunnel area. I broke down crying because that's when I realized I had actually made a friend after years of being alone. They are also the reason I have the friends I do now. The first few months we spent together are some of my most cherished memories.
Of course, everything was too good to be true. About five months after we started talking, we got into a few random dramas and severely damaged our friendship. Things are better now, don't worry, but for most of 2024, I was miserable. I was terrified of losing him, and every day I woke up thinking it would be the last time we talked. Even with all my friends, we would have random, dumb dramas every once in a while. I wish we could just play games and have fun together.
This is a very TL;DR version of what happened because there's a lot I still want to keep secret, and I've suppressed a lot of it from my memory. Next, we move on to 2025, when I started streaming, and everything was amplified 10x. There was so much drama from streaming: viewers who expected me to be their friend, people wanting things from me and invading my personal life. It just became too much. It got to the point where there was a brand new drama every single day, both related and unrelated to streaming. Any normal person would have quit streaming, and I almost did multiple times.
By the end of 2025, everything had started to improve. Everything that went wrong turned around: the friends I lost returned, and streaming has been going much better. Everything is just good. Today, there's still drama, but it's nowhere near the level it was in previous years. I still feel scared a lot of the time. I feel like no matter what I do, people will hate me after enough time. I still get sad when I'm not with my friends. I'm terrified of being alone. I really, really, really love my friends, and I don't want to be away from them. I don't want any drama; I just want to play games and have fun with my friends.
If I haven't made it clear, my PTSD is based around friends. My past experiences and everything in my life going wrong in such a short amount of time make anything related to friends extremely difficult. A few things I've found that can make me break down completely on command are
- Looking back at old pictures
- Listening to certain music
- Being alone for enough time
- Any sort of media involving friendships (Song, Animations, Etc)
It makes streaming extremely difficult, too. Many days, I just don't stream. If you look at my Twitch tracker, you'll see that there's always at least one day missing from the week of streaming. I've only streamed every day I was supposed to in a week a few times. 90% of the time, there's a missing day, and this is why. It's not something I can control; it just happens.
This is getting too long, so I'll end it here. I hope this gives you an idea of what I have to deal with every day. It's hard to accomplish anything when I'm constantly afraid that one thing will go wrong and ruin my entire day. I feel like people are always angry with me, and I feel like it's better to never talk to anyone.