Written on 03/14/2022

This game can be a lot more than just a game about clicking circles. Or at least for me it has been.

For a long time it was my coping mechanism for things that I didn't know how to address in my life, things like loneliness, anxiety, depression, and a long list of other things that had full control over my day to day life and emotions. Osu! helped provide an escape from all that, and granted it was probably just because it was a game that *I* connected to, and not because of anything the game did on its own. Nonetheless it still gave me that outlet to get out of my own head and enjoy something which from 2014 - 2018 was something that I didn't find often. Then around May of 2018 my life outside of osu! really started to turn around. I found a community of people who I absolutely adored (yeah they're the damn furries, call 'em cringe or whatever, idfc, they've been the *most welcoming people I've ever met in my life*) and a job where I finally felt fulfilled at (Starbucks dude, I swear that job truly was amazing before the pandemic). Depression finally started to fade away, at least for the most part. It'd come back from time to time but I had such a robust support group that every time it would rear its ugly head, it'd be crushed back down just as quickly, and for longer each time. And during this time I fell out of osu! because I just didn't have much of a need for that escape anymore. The game was still fun to me for sure, but I had so many other things that I wanted to do more like travelling and doing things with friends that I made time for those instead.

Time went on, life was great, then my whole world fell apart in the spring of 2021. The love of my life who I had been with for 2+ years and was about to move to Canada to be with left me after Covid kept us from seeing each other for a full year. I had been waiting on a visa to move there since March of 2020, and had been strung along by lawyers telling me "oh the border should open up after another month or so" for that entire time. Slowly draining through all of my savings due to my rent getting increased right as the pandemic hit. Then moving to a small town 3 hours away where cost of living was lower just so I could pay my bills. So when 2 days after my partner left me and I got an email at work saying that the border had finally reopened and I could move there within two weeks, I was crushed beyond belief. I hoped that it was just some kind of sick joke, but it wasn't. I walked out on my shift right then and there, with nothing left to keep pushing for, and went and stood on the roof of my apartment building, looking down at the street below. That was the lowest point of my entire life and if I'm being honest, I don't even know what made me come back inside. As painful as it is to write down, I think it was the fact alone that the drop only would have hurt me and not finished the job. The next month I don't think I left my room. I was a broken shell of a person, and I didn't care enough to try to be anything else. Eventually, my money ran out, and I moved back in with my parents.

Months of therapy and medication only started to scratch the surface of how fucked up I was, especially with a few more setbacks that happened along the way... but then I started livestreaming. I had dabbled in it a few years prior, back in my "prime" of osu!, and had enjoyed it a decent amount as it was a more social way to play what was otherwise a completely solo game for me at the time. Never had a lot of viewers of course, but also didn't want a lot either, I loved the small, intimate setting that was my twitch chat, where I could actually interact with people while I played. So because I had nothing else to do because I was too depressed to hold down a real job, I started up OBS again and started trying to stream a few times a week. For a while I streamed to no one (that's just how twitch be at the start lmao) but eventually Storm came along. He was the first person to be in my chat on a regular basis, first person to request that I play one of his favorite games, Omori, on stream, was the first mod that I had in my chat. At the start of my getting back into streaming, I was a bit discouraged because god, streaming to no one fucking *sucks*. But as soon as I saw Storm there regularly it was like a switch flipped, and streaming was suddenly fun. I had someone who liked spending time out of their own volition in my channel, and I ran with it. Set myself a schedule of streaming 5 days a week, 3-5 hours each of those days. And I knew that I wasn't gonna grow like crazy because I was mainly streaming osu!, but that wasn't ever the goal. I was just happy to be playing a game I thoroughly enjoyed to people who thoroughly enjoyed watching me play. I met some fucking amazing people, like Kiri, Solar, Pezz, Dog, and Cukyii, who all helped me in ways they didn't even realize by just spending time with me. And while these things that were happening in my life weren't a permanent fix for the issues that I was dealing with in my own head, both osu! and streaming had become that escape from reality that I once again so desperately needed. They allowed me to start to pull myself out of the hole I had fallen into.

Slowly, day by day, I started getting a bit better. The pain gradually started to subside and I was able to start taking care of myself a bit again. The summer ended with me learning about something I had unknowingly been missing out on for years: osu! tournaments. I had always known about OWC of course, but I had always assumed that tournaments were only for top players alone. Oh how wrong I was. It started with getting a random message from fooooooood asking me to tryout for the US 5 digit world cup team. At the time I was EXTREMELY caught off guard, I assumed that he had actually *found me specifically* and was wanting me to join. Looking back at that knowing what I do now is absolutely hilarious, turns out the people heading the tryouts were just messaging everyone around the high end of the rank range LMAO. But I didn't know any better back then of course, so I latched onto that and fucking *ran* with it, building a strategy for the tryout, taking notes on each song, putting in hours of practice on the same handful of maps... and didn't make any of the teams that year. I'm an extremely comptetitive person so this burned a bit (especially because I thought I should have made one of the teams kekw) and I was salty for sure, so salty that I joined the "for fun" tournament they had for people who didn't make it with the sole goal of proving I deserved a spot on one of the rosters and ran a train through it (with the help of Redbirdkai and Harrharrqi, those two are so fucking good) winning the whole thing after losing our first round match. That tournament felt so vindicating, winning it helped prove to myself that I was actually pretty damn good at this game. But it also did more than that; it made me realize just how important the social side of gaming in general is to me. The main reason I had had so much fun and gotten so invested in it was that there were likeminded people surrounding me who were all training for a common goal. That's what it was all about for me.

So with that... I was off to the races. I think in the span of the 9 months since that tryout I've played in 14 tournaments, and over 50 individual matches. I've met so many amazing people throughout these too, crikhard, KillingCopper, calculus, bahoopla, danthesodacan, and honestly far more than I can put down in a list, all of who have made this game ten times more enjoyable than it ever has been in my entire career. Y'all are fucking amazing and I'm so grateful to know all of you <3. Thanks to all of these things, my life has started to get back on track a bit again. I've been able to hold down a job since the start of January, and while I did take about a month off from streaming due to getting a bit burnt out, I'm already starting to get that itch to get back into it more. I'm close to being able to move out on my own again too, my mental health has improved immensely and as strange as it sounds, I owe most of my recovery to this game about clicking circles to the beat.

So why did I write all this here? Honestly... I'm not sure. I think that the main reason is that I want to help people, even though I know next to no one will see this message, to reassure them that no matter how bad things get, they *will* get better someday. It will most likely take a lot longer than you hope for, and DEFINITELY won't happen the way you expect it to, but it will get there. Mental health is such a fickle thing, always ready to flip one way or the other at any given moment, but with enough time, you'll get used to dealing with the ups and downs. You'll settle into the place you're supposed to be in in your life, and one day you'll look back on all the shit you've gone through and be like "damn. I'm one strong motherfucker."

And at that point you can handle anything.