You're Never Weird on the Internet (Almost) (28 page)
Read You're Never Weird on the Internet (Almost) Online
Authors: Felicia Day
“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
Harry Potter
?” Things I KNEW that I knew! (Rupert Grint, sorry, pal. I’ll never forget you again.) The sheer act of
thinking
felt like sloughing through thick molasses. I couldn’t trust my own mind anymore, which was the scariest thing I’ve ever experienced. Once, I stared at a plate of food for fifteen minutes, unable to figure out if I liked green beans or not. I honestly couldn’t remember. To be unsure of what you like, what you feel, who you are? Believe me, it’s utterly terrifying.
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!
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?