That’s Not Me
Trigger Warning: Depression, suicidal thoughts
Recently, I received a message from someone who I haven’t heard from in a year. We used to spend time together on a roleplay writing website that was, for years, one of my primary coping mechanisms with my OCD and all sorts of other negative thoughts and things in my life.
I joined the website on a recommendation from my best friend, who said that writing on forums like this would be a great way to make friends while also honing my craft. We joined together, and I soon fell in love with the site’s system and the character whose story I started writing. It was an outlet for me to find like-minded friends and fellow writers and a way to write new projects I truly loved.
However, all of this was about to come crashing down around me, as I signed up for this site at the beginning of junior year of college - right when I began experiencing PTSD-related flashbacks from my surgery two years prior, had my first panic attacks, and was plagued with constant suicidal thoughts not out of a wish to die, but out of trying to make that horrible pain disappear.
Each day felt like a year, and soon, my only comfort was the website. I logged in a few times a day at first, but later that turned into ten times a day, then dozens, if not more. It was the only thing that could put a smile on my face and the only way I could feel like myself. All of my interest in writing - my lifelong passion - had disappeared except for this site. It was the only place where I felt like me.
I needed that feeling as much as possible, and so I kept checking the site for updates. The way it worked, every time I wrote something, I would need for one of the site’s volunteer moderators (often called mods) to reply back to me. Like a DM in Dungeons & Dragons, they were in charge of my character’s journey, and I couldn’t write any more until they wrote for me. There was usually a backlog of several days to well over a week as the site was booming in popularity.
But I needed it far more than that. It was like a drug for me, the way I fixated on achieving my goals on the site. At first, people were understanding, but it didn’t take long for them to get frustrated. With my mind in a frenzy and the thoughts about this site my only positive obsessions, it was impossible for me to understand I was being pushy and obnoxious about getting my one character’s story updated so I could write more.
As the panic attacks and depression worsened thanks to my Xanax prescription backfiring, I couldn’t deal with only having one character on the website anymore, but that was the limit for new members. I realized I had to do something, and after checking around for other sites but not finding any I liked, I decided to create a second character under a false name.
In hindsight, I did this deception very badly. My writing style was the same for both characters; I talked to myself in the site’s chatbox and sometimes forgot to change names; I wrote posts for my characters at the same time. But somehow, at first, it worked.
When things got worse in real life again, I did it again, and again. I practiced with different writing styles and got to the point where I had multiple things to write every day. It worked for a while, but eventually, I got caught. It’s been enough years that I don’t remember exactly how I got caught or how things went, but I was scolded sternly by the mod team, who told me to go down to just the one character I’d started with.
At that point, I became fixated on an offhand remark the mod working with me said once. He implied a reward that I might be able to earn if I wrote well enough, and soon, it became all I could think about, all I could talk about to my best friend, all I could sing about and take pictures of and fixate on nearly all day every day.
My nagging soon switched over to this, and after months of escalation, I found myself in a situation where the site’s main administrator (admin) and leader lashed out at me in extreme anger. She said horrible things as I sobbed at my computer, threatening me both online and in real life, and making me feel like I was such a horrible person I didn’t deserve to live.
Thankfully, I was on the upswing from my depression at that point, and my psychiatrist had fixed my medications to the point where I was no longer suicidal. I left the site in deep sadness and although I moved on, I was not quite ready to be done.
Almost a year after I left, the site was experiencing a decrease in active members, and they announced a challenge that if anyone wrote 50,000 words related to the site in a month, that person could have the one goal I’d needed so badly and never achieved before the admin’s harsh words drove me from the site.
“I have a crazy idea, but it just might work,” I told my best friend that night at dinner, and later, we worked together to write a character with such a different writing style than my own (and, well, worse) that it was easily distinguishable from my writing a year ago. I came up with a fake name and backstory for myself, as well, and I was thrilled to get accepted on the site with no indication that anything was wrong.
My plan started as a form of revenge that wouldn’t hurt anyone, as well as a way to achieve closure from my abrupt departure, but I soon came to love the site again. I was incredibly happy to write the 50,000 words (essentially my tenth NaNoWriMo) and felt an immense satisfaction when I earned the reward I never thought I’d get.
At that point, I’d planned to leave, but I wanted to stay. I was having a lot of fun writing this new character, and I was even beginning to allow myself to write to other people in the chatbox after some serious practice.
I practiced neurotypicality, first with rules - how much I could write in a certain amount of time, how to properly respond to other members and mods when they spoke to me - but soon, I felt comfortable enough to try to be myself, even if just a little bit.
I had a pseudonym, a fake life, but other than that, I was soon acting like myself - and people liked me.
People liked how I was so active on the site, always willing to pitch in. People liked how I was passionate about my characters as well as the site events, and I wasn’t taking things too far. I started to make friends with plenty of new people, even some mods like the friend who reached out to me recently.
But before long, the admin who said those things to me a year ago killed my character thanks to a decision I made in-character. I knew it wasn’t personal, but it still hurt hard at a time when I was struggling in grad school.
Instead of lashing out, I decided to stick with it. I created a new character - my sloppily-written deceased character’s brother, Alexander - and began a journey to earn my special reward back.
This time, although I faced the same nearly-impossible challenge for the reward, I appeared calm. I may have struggled to keep myself from obsessing, but I did it. It took me a full year in real life to earn the reward once and for all, and from there, my activity and euphoria on the site soared.
When a position opened up on the mod team, I applied and was quickly accepted. I made it my mission to make up for the things I had said and done, even if no one knew it had been me saying and doing those things, by writing for people’s characters as well and as often as possible. People started requesting me as a mod, and before long, I became head mod, third-in-command on the site and in daily contact with the admin who had treated me so cruelly.
I was confident until I started exploring the archives. As head mod, I was able to see the hidden records of the site that even regular mods couldn’t see. I found an area for “problem members” and didn’t take long to find the longest thread: me.
I knew what had happened, but I couldn’t resist looking through the records. There were old messages from the mods at the time talking to each other about how to deal with me, which was upsetting enough to see, but then I found records of my own messages.
I recognized my writing, but I also recognized things I couldn’t see at the time: desperation, anger, a raw need for the one thing that was making my days bearable. I saw the extent of my pestering and rudeness. I saw how my words and actions were stressing out the mods, who, at the end of the day, were volunteers who also went to school and had jobs in the real world.
Immense guilt overcame me as I continued to read. I could tell when things got worse from how my tone got resentful, sharper, meaner. “That’s not me,” I kept telling the computer screen as I scrolled more and more, watched things escalate until the day the admin went off on me and I left.
I had always seen things as being all her fault for being so cruel to me in our final interaction, but reading through the logs let me see that both of us were at fault. I might not have been myself mentally, but I was still an adult who should have known how to be responsible for how I acted, even if my thoughts had landed me in hell.
The admin wrote, in the end of the thread, that she’d gone too far, but neither she nor anyone else expressed remorse. I, however, felt immense regret from seeing what I’d done, and redoubled my efforts to be a better moderator. I tried to practice patience and urged it from other mods, especially the admin whose temper sometimes got ahead of her. I tried to get between her and people who were in a bad mental health state, even if it hurt me to insert myself into what was going on, because I didn’t want someone else to suffer on the site in addition to whatever they were suffering through in real life.
There were many problems with the site aside from this, and although I loved getting my character stronger, I realized there wasn’t much time left. Soon after Alexander became the strongest on the site, the site’s waning popularity meant that it went down for a while, and many of the existing mods (including myself) became excluded from the admin’s preparations for a relaunch. At that point, I decided to leave. I’d made amends as best as I could, and it was time for me to move on with my life as I was moving to Chicago in the near future.
I still miss writing my characters to this day, and hearing from my old friend from the site made me unbelievably happy. Tentatively, I brought up something about Alexander, and she responded in kind; it felt great to reminisce about this time in my life without going into the details of why it had all gone wrong.
Nowadays, when I look at the 250,000 words I wrote of Alexander, my last and favorite character on the site, and think of the tens of thousands more I wrote across many other characters, I am able to feel proud of how far I’ve come. I took something horrible and created something beautiful, even if it took me years to do so - and now, I have someone to share this passion with once again.
So thank you, friend, for reaching out - and for seeing that I’m more than the obsessions and depression and pain. That wasn’t me - but there is a person in here worth getting to know, and I’m incredibly glad to have the chance to re-meet her as my true self.
Ellie, a writer new to the Chicago area, was diagnosed with OCD at age 3. She hopes to educate others about her condition and end the stigma against mental illness.