Article : Gears of War Saved My Life

Trigger warning. This post contains discussions of self-harm, anxiety, depression, and suicide. If you’re experiencing these thoughts and are seeking help, please call or text 988 or visit https://988lifeline.org/.

Earlier this week, at the time of this writing, I clicked publish on a video I had long wanted to make. It is a story of self-harm, depression, anxiety, and suicide. It is a story of struggle and sadness, but also hope and perseverance.

Gaming for many people serves as a respite from the real world. We escape into fictional settings and play hero to solve problems larger than our own. 

In some cases those fictional heroics can guide us through real world events. In my case, gaming has served to guide me through a number of situations since I first picked up a controller at age 5. Gaming walked alongside nearly my whole life, as has the dark cloud encompassing depression, anxiety, and self-harm.

In college, I slit my wrists. I have the scars still 20 years later, nearly invisible to everyone else but quite obvious to me. Some years later, I nearly took my own life. To this day, I still battle anxiety, forms of self-harm, and regularly consider how death impacts those around me. I often hear people say that suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem. For me and many others, these problems are not temporary. They are constants. 

Discussing those darker topics can sometimes be considered taboo depending on culture, gender, and societal norms. In my life, I’ve noticed it is frowned upon when men acknowledge their struggles with depression and anxiety. I see this on various social media sites. I see this in school systems. I see this in my day to day life. 

I reject this premise. 

People struggle, human beings are imperfect, and we seek guidance from any number of sources. I am fortunate that, in my journey, I have been surrounded by incredible humans to include my parents, my wife, my friends, and the community built surrounding The Xbox Expansion Pass. I find it important that we as human beings, and myself as a man, be capable of discussing these topics.

The video I published is a portion of my story. A fraction of it. It is an excerpt relevant to an intended audience but one relevant to my fellow gamers, my fellow warriors in the never-ending battle with anxiety. 

In the peak of my dark times, I sought guidance from any number of sources, and I found it in gaming. I found it in the fictional characters of Gears of War. Cliff Bleszinski and Epic Games had created a world of destroyed beauty that unintentionally mirrored my own psyche, and I found myself drawn to it. 

My dark times included a failed romantic relationship, the loss of a job I defined myself by, and the observation of a former friend turned murderer. This all took place in the span of one month. I crumbled, I fell apart, and I became a shell of a man. Despite the best efforts of those around me, I could not recover, and I made a heartfelt decision to end my life. I made the plan, I put the plan in motion, I was ready… until the most irrational of thoughts occurred to me. If I was gone, I would not find out what happened to Marcus, Dom, Cole Train, and Baird. I would not know how the Locust would fall. I would not know how the Lambent would succumb to the efforts of Delta Squad. Would Marcus and Anya make it? Would Dom?

In times of despair, we are not logical. I should have been thinking of my loved ones, but I was stuck on not knowing what was going to happen in Gears of War 3. I took my finger off the trigger. I put down the gun and made the decision to wait. Not to change my mind, but to wait. 

This decision was one step in a much longer journey towards the reassembly of my life. Things are not perfect 15 years later, and they shouldn’t be. If they were, there’d be no reason to keep fighting. My story details how the struggles of Delta Squad, the battle for hope against overwhelming odds, and the struggle for survival gave me inspiration.

It’s silly, but it’s not silly. Delta is as real to me as anyone I’ve met, as are a number of fictional characters from which I draw strength.

I don’t think it matters where we find hope, where we find strength, so long as we do. To my fellow warriors fighting the fight, fight on.