Staying Afloat

Content notification on bipolar disorder

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On a warm August day in 2015, I officially moved into my first college dorm. I only brought the essentials: lamps, bed sheets, a 15-inch television, and my biggest pride at the time, my Xbox 360, with a small selection of games, including The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, the game that I had been hearing rave reviews about for years.

Throughout my first semester, I made three good friends who all thought I was “just quirky.” The fact that I didn’t sleep for days at a time was seen as endearing, and, for better or for worse,  actually allowed me to help one of them as they went through a health crisis in the middle of the night; the fact that I was months ahead in my class assignments was a testament to my hard work and, according to them, to my utter boredom and lack of social life.

What none of us seemed to realize was the fact that there was something else going on under the surface.

By the middle of the semester, I was spending all of my nights perched on my bed playing Skyrim until I had to start getting ready for my 8 am classes. On weekends, I would sometimes have 24 (or more) hour play sessions, stopping only to grab food from the cafeteria on the rare occasion when I was hungry.

My friends soon took notice, but none of them knew how to broach the topic with me. Our mental health was just not something we talked about.

They saw me drowning.
None of them knew how to help.

Toward the end of my first fall semester, I began noticing that something was changing with my health. I was passing out, collapsing, and falling; I was beginning to feel like my body was deteriorating at a pace that I could not explain. With that, my mental health was also beginning to fail.

My nights of not sleeping turned into nights of sobbing. My weekends of working on my schoolwork and as a tutor transformed into days of lying in my bed without the energy or the will to continue on with the small college life I had built.

Skyrim became a fragile beacon amid my sea of darkness. It was an escape, a way for me to cope with a world that I felt was trying to kill me. I could express my frustration by leading my character into battle and landing hits with my mace; I could show that I was still capable of caring for someone by adopting a child.

As I was devoting more time to my life in Skyrim, I was slowly seeking help for my mental health as well. My college’s counseling center turned me away because of their overwhelming case load. Since this was before telehealth became a mainstream option, I was left adrift on campus, told to manage my emotions in the best ways that I knew how. And that meant playing more Skyrim.

By the time winter break came around, I was able to get an appointment with my outside psychiatrist, who could not believe that the college had failed me to the extent that they had. She subsequently diagnosed me with Bipolar 1 disorder and recommended an even stronger regimen of therapy and medications.

I returned to my college for the spring semester with a considerably better plan. But I had absolutely no more support than I had in the fall. The only thing that kept me somewhat tethered to reality were my adventures in Tamriel.

To this day, I can’t look at my copy of that game without a pang of sadness. Even though it got me through a really tough time in my life, I’ve never been able to play it again without tearing up.

Skyrim gave me a glimmer of hope in my darkest hour.
There’s no question about that.

But the intense emotions that I experienced still lie within that game, too. At first, I saw it as a vessel that I could keep closed at all times and never have to think about opening to relive these moments. Was that a healthy coping mechanism? Probably not. So I’ve slowly been lifting the lid to share my experiences in the hopes of helping someone else know that it’s not just them going through these things; that they’re not fighting alone.

There are always people who care.
Sometimes they don’t even need to be “real” to keep you afloat.