by Felicia Day
The momentum of the show had stalled between moving from Xbox to YouTube. MMO video games and World of Warcraft had dipped in popularity. The show released months later than it should have because I didn’t have the bandwidth to make it faster. All those factors impacted the fans. And views. Which in turn, made it hard to ask someone to fund a seventh season at a price point that had become unrealistic in the “Everyone has a web series in their garages now!” market.
The project had started to wind down.
Problem was, I had focused myopically on The Guild for six years. My work was my life. Conversations at parties I attended during those years went something like this:
“Hey, Felicia! Haven’t seen you in a while!”
“Yeah, I’ve been working.”
“You’re the hardest-working person I know.”
“I know!”
“Seen any movies?”
“No.”
“Any TV?”
“Not really.”
“Have you checked out my new web show?”
“No. But I’m finishing a new season of The Guild! It’s great, Codex goes to—”
“Sorry to interrupt, I have to get a drink.”
I understood. I thought I was a total bore, too.
Work-play balance is, in retrospect, something that can EASILY get out of whack. Especially if you’re self-employed, you never turn it off. Your fate is in your own hands, so you can’t let up. Taking a weekend away for your birthday? Is your present to yourself RUINING YOUR LIFE?! I don’t think I could have achieved what I did with The Guild if I didn’t have an insane-woman drive, but I made the mistake of transferring my self-worth wholly and completely. I was so excited that I’d found fulfilling work that I BECAME it. Felicia Day WAS The Guild.
There wasn’t a day or night for six years where I wasn’t obsessed with my show. Let’s see what people are thinking on Twitter. And Facebook and Tumblr. Then I’ll check the forums. Yikes, we’re due for another music video, better start writing. Damnit, I forgot to send out the newsletter. And did that contract for the DVD close yet? Why is the website down?! On and on and on. When it looked like the show might end for good, you’d think I’d have been ecstatic. “Yeah! Mojitos for a year!” Instead, I panicked. Because I was facing a world where there’d be nothing of ME left.
That anxiety, plus the stress from working too hard on my start-up, pushed me to the edge of my own mind. I know that sounds after-school-special dramatic, but seriously, guys, I lost it. Big-time.
It wasn’t the first time I’d struggled with depression and anxiety. At the height of The Guild success in 2010, after season three and our viral “Do You Wanna Date My Avatar” music video, I sat down to write the next season and cried for four months straight. The pressure of everyone’s praise got to me. Not in a “Wow, they like what I did! Let’s do more!” way, but in a “Wow, they like what I did. People are expecting great things now. I don’t know what to give them to top it. Let me curl up and die now, please!” way.
I love it when people tell me I’m doing the wrong thing, or that something isn’t possible, or just straight dismiss me. That lights my fire in a perverse way, like a two-year-old who deliberately touches the hot stove after you tell them not to. But compliment me or expect something big? That’s the perfect way to destroy my confidence. There’s a crazy people pleaser inside me screaming, They won’t like you if you mess up. You set the bar too high. They’re all waiting for you to fail! And you’re definitely going to. Good luck, stupidhead!
I gave myself horrendous writer’s block and almost ended the show because of my depression. Season four got written, but the ugly way, like too many layers of nail polish piled on top of each other. I’d start writing, then throw everything out and start from scratch. Over and over again. (Any writing book will tell you this is the WORST THING TO DO. I’ll reinforce it here: don’t do that.) Every time I’d get halfway through the script, I’d panic.
I don’t know what Bladezz is doing here, I don’t think the storyline makes sense. I’ll have Codex get the job instead. But that breaks my whole outline. What do I do now? I don’t have any ideas!
Commence three days of sobbing.
After a while, I was too paralyzed to decide anything at all. I woke up every single morning filled with dread, knowing I was going to have to sit down at my laptop and fail again. It’s hard to understand how someone can get so incredibly depressed about the act of typing letters together, but I did it! That Stay Puft Marshmallow of Doom hovered over me for months. I destroyed a keyboard with my tears once. No joke: the left set of keys just stopped working. Okay, it was a combo of snot and tears and some Doritos dust, but same difference. Anxiety bled over into every aspect of my life (it wouldn’t be the last time; hello, last Thursday!), and I had to be coaxed through the process by gentle and understanding friends.
Eventually, I got a version of the script done, and others around me helped me make it better. It wasn’t pretty, it wasn’t the best season, but we got through. And the year after, I wrote our fifth and BEST season in just ten days on vacation in Hawaii. So . . . that turned out better. (My inner muse loves them mai tais!)
Fast-forward three years, that same “You can’t do it!” spirit returned with a vengeance. Hey, are you feeling happy or confident? Let’s fix that! It was spring of 2012, in the middle of the Geek & Sundry launch, and amongst THAT storm of learning-curve ridiculousness, Kim and I were locked in months-long negotiations with The Guild cast to return the next season. I couldn’t start writing the script with the possibility I would have to eliminate one of the main characters if one decided not to return. That put me, even before lifting my pen, into a state of panic.
“What do you mean we need to draft another version of the contract?”
“One of the cast’s managers has a comment about the overtime provision.”
“That will take another two weeks! Cancel the season, I don’t want to write it.”
“Felicia, calm down.”
“I can’t calm down! I have a script I haven’t started that I need to finish! Give them whatever they want; I’ll pay it out of my own pocket! Oh God, heart attack.”
This attractive shrill tone in type has NOTHING on my attractive shrill tone in person. But I’d never learned how to deal with problems any differently. I grew up ruled by constant anxiety, and when my fears proved a tiny bit possible, even just a hint, I panicked and lashed out at myself and everyone around me. All in all, a real treat to work with! Many times, people in my life, including Kim and my Guild director Sean Becker, who headed most of the show after season one, tried to get me to enjoy the process of making the show, but underneath I couldn’t let go of the idea that my dysfunctional anxiety was the REASON for our success. Like broody writers and their penchant for hard drinking. The idea that we could succeed without my obsessive problem-anticipating skills never sunk in. (To be super honest, I think I was just too proud to admit I had a problem. Denial is strong with this one.)
After two months of freaking out and bashing my head against the wall and pulling the plug on the season many times over, I finally found a theme in one of the guest characters I had created, Floyd Petrowski, a superstar game designer, who inspired me to write.
FLOYD
When I first started doing this, there were no stakes, no pressure. I did it because I loved escaping and creating things. Then we got successful and people loved us. But now . . . it seems like they’re tired of what I do. And I can’t think up anything different enough for them to like me anymore. Total failure-ville.
(DOESN’T SOUND PERSONAL AT ALL, RIGHT?!)
In the end, my character Codex helps him deal with his own anxiety and confronts his internet critics to remove what’s blocking him in order to be able to create. Too bad I couldn’t figure out how to write her into my own life, too.
Bit by bit, I stole enough time over the summer to write the script. But it wasn’t fun. Instead of living the last creative days of
my show with joy, they were filled with desperation. Because underneath it all, I knew the end was coming. I infused anxiety into every scene, like when I was hard-core into knitting and promised everyone I met I’d make them a scarf, even if I didn’t like them. So I’d sit at home, knitting resentment and frustration into each row. “Why did I tell that random girlfriend of a colleague I’d make her a scarf out of CASHMERE?! I don’t even know her last name!! Knit, hate, knit, hate, knit, hate!”
As we shot and edited the show, every episode we completed felt like a nail in the coffin of my career. The closer we got to completion, the larger the gaping mental chasm of “Who is Felicia Day after The Guild ends?” grew. Paranoid thoughts plagued me day and night.
I’ll never make anything this good again.
Existence, what’s up with that again?
I’d better breed and make babies, because I’m getting old and my uterus is drying up like the Sahara.
It didn’t make me fun to be around or work with. I needed to take a long break to find myself again, but with Geek & Sundry going a thousand miles per hour, I couldn’t make the train stop even for a second. I was trained to get an A in life from everyone, so I never learned how to take care of myself even if I had a right to.
“I’m recovering from an operation, but yes, I can appear in your web series for free! Please like me!”
The pressure just got more and more intense, from myself and from the world. And in the spring of 2013, a few months after The Guild finished, when I was restructuring the company and still working eighteen hours a day nonstop, my problems got serious.
Stress started killing me. Literally.
I developed severe panic attacks in the middle of the night. At 4:30 a.m. on the dot, I’d wake up with my heart pounding in my chest, like someone was standing over me with a butcher knife, trying to kill me in my sleep. (There was never anyone there, FYI.) I’d lie there panicking about the show’s end, my business, internet comments, yelling at people in my head until I fretted myself to sleep again. Every night for months.
During the day, I became frantic to find a way to validate myself again. I started five different new projects, then abandoned them just as quickly because I couldn’t get them done immediately to show people and get external praise. I became more and more desperate to make Geek & Sundry a bigger success. This put pressure on everyone around me in the company, especially since I started planning ridiculously far ahead, alert to every random disaster scenario possible.
“Do we have a backup system in place in triplicate for our videos? What’s going to happen when the big earthquake hits in 2048? Will we have master copies of our web shows in storage?! Commence emergency protocol, go go go!!”
My fear of the future became paralyzing. It strained my relationship with Kim, my business partner of six years and probably contributed to her leaving our company, one of my biggest regrets. That ended one of the most wonderful, artistically rewarding relationships of my life.
Keep reading, it gets worse!
My moods were reliable—in that they were consistently, ABSOLUTELY INSANE. They’d roller coaster so far and fast day to day, hour to hour
During all of this I continued to appear at conventions and conferences around the world, making speeches and doing panels and signing autographs. Which you’d think would make me feel better. People enjoying my work seems like a nice ego boost? Nope, I dodged those bullets of hope like a pessimist pro! The appearances actually made all my impostor feelings even worse. I would sob before going out to meet people because I felt like such a fraud. I didn’t deserve their compliments. Why do they want to talk about my work? It’s all in the past. Months old. Can’t they see what a worthless piece of crap I am now?
In my warped state of mind, I had nothing new to offer my fans and I probably wouldn’t ever again. I deserved to be hated, not loved.
These were the worst days of my life.
In retrospect, crappy chemicals in my brain were working overtime, driving me to destroy myself, like that thing that makes lemmings throw themselves over a cliff. (That’s actually folklore based on a Disney documentary where the filmmakers in the 1960s flung lemmings over the edge of the cliff for their movie. Horrible. But the video game was awesome, amiright?)
I tried superficial things to control my world, like losing weight, but that just left me gaunt and freezing all the time. I’d lie in bed and feel my bones, aware of how much closer my skeleton was to the sheets. It felt . . . good. In a twisted and perverse and self-destructive way. If I couldn’t control my life, I could control THIS, however bad it was for me in the end.
Luckily, I forced myself out of that phase, because internet commenters started typing beneath my videos, “Felicia has old face now.” Thanks, trolls. You did something good for once!
I developed an irrational hatred toward anything around me that was familiar. My bedroom curtains, the collar my dog wore, my car seats. (I suddenly HATED tan. Or did I?) I felt nauseated and trapped by every single object and person around me. If I wake up one more day and see that Princess Bride poster on my wall, I’m gonna take a sledgehammer to it. It’s trapping me here. I’m going to die looking at it. STOP OPPRESSING ME, POSTER!
From people close to me, to the way my desk was organized, every detail represented being frozen in a situation I couldn’t escape: my life.
At the lowest point (among some champion lows, I might add), I started fantasizing about deleting my Twitter account and erasing myself from the internet. It escalated to constant daydreams about disappearing entirely. Meaning . . . dying. My musings revolved around scenarios of how I could end myself. I don’t think I ever got to the point where I was serious about going through with my plans, but I was obsessed with thinking about them. I learned later that there’s a term for this: “suicidal ideation.”
I wonder how people would react to me doing a backflip off a cliff during this photo shoot? Or walking out into Comic-Con traffic? Or electrocuting myself with a gaming console in a French claw-foot bathtub? That would make a cool crime scene photo.
Would anyone vlog about it?
And at that point, when things got THAT weird in my head . . .
. . . I still didn’t get help.
[ Heal It Up, Woman. ]
After a summer of mental problems in 2013, I got physically sick for two months straight. And my boyfriend finally muscled me into doing something about it.
“You have to see a doctor.”
“I’m fine.”
“You can’t sleep. You walk around in a haze, and you cough all the time. I think you might be turning into a zombie.”
“I’m FINE.”
“You look super tired in your videos lately. Eye bags and stuff.”
LONG MINUTE of silence. “Calling someone right now.”
It’s true, it had been a year since I felt energetic, healthy, or normal. Depression can do that, but . . . could there be something else?
Guess what I discovered when I finally made a doctor’s appointment after procrastination for another few months? There were actual REASONS I was sick. And some of them affected my brain area. Experts can know stuff sometimes!
&nbs
p; I discovered that I had an extremely severe thyroid problem that was causing a lot of my depression and lack of energy and was probably the reason my hair had fallen out in chunks over the summer. (Led to a snappy-ass haircut, though!) I also discovered huge awful fibroids in my lady parts that were gunking up the works and had to be removed, and BEST PART, at the end of 2013, as a Christmas present of sorts, I discovered that my acid reflux had gotten so bad because of stress that I’d developed a thing called Barrett’s esophagus. (It’s usually a condition only old dudes in their fifties get.) The lining of my stomach was creeping up my throat and converting all the good tissue to bad tissue, and because of this problem, I was a thousand times more likely to get esophageal cancer than the rest of the population at large, which . . .
WAIT.
WHAT THE FUCK?!
And THAT is when I decided to get control of my life back. Because for some reason, I didn’t merit it worthy enough to take extreme action when my mind got sick. But my body? Emergency timez!
Imagine saying to someone, “I have a kidney problem, and I’m having a lot of bad days lately.” Nothing but sympathy, right?
“What’s wrong?”
“My mom had that!”
“Text me a pic of the ultrasound!”
Then pretend to say, “I have severe depression and anxiety, and I’m having a lot of bad days lately.”
They just look at you like you’re broken, right? Unfixable. Inherently flawed. Maybe not someone they want to hang around as much?
Yeah, society sucks.
My mental problems made me feel ashamed. I felt like I had to hide them until I could “work through it” on my own. Which I never did, because I didn’t know how. And I didn’t feel brave enough to make fixing my mind a priority because I didn’t think anyone would understand. Having an increased chance for cancer, though? I’m too neurotic NOT to be a hypochondriac. So damn, did I get ruthless!