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 <happy SAD motivated DEPRESSED angry MANIC!!!>. My warped and anxious state of mind spiraled tighter and tighter, compressing to the point where I lost my memory. Completely, like a character with amnesia in a pulp detective novel. Romantic? Not so much. I literally couldn’t remember things from my childhood, people’s names, even simple things like, “What’s the name of the redhead actor in 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.