[AMBIENT MUSIC]
When you're little and you fall down, when people ask you, like,
where's the graze, where's the bruise?
Nowadays, it's like, what do you point to your head
and your heart?
[GAME SOUNDS]
It's really hard
for me to remember my parents saying that
they were proud of me.
Sometimes I'd be so scared of
letting them down that I just wouldn't come home sometimes.
So I would go and sleep under park benches or stay in like the school library.
Like hide behind the bookshelves until the librarian went home.
Well done, Emily. You are a very clever girl.
Would you like to give Emily a clap?
I felt this growing emptiness inside of me.
And it was like, this sink that could never be filled
because at some point I lost the plug,
and no matter how much I tried to fill it with friends, with family,
with studies, it just felt like it could never be filled.
I just felt like I was a burden to everyone.
So, if I couldn't change the situation I was in, I would just,
I guess, remove myself from it.
So when I was 14, I tried to end my life.
[EMILY PLAYING GUITAR AND SINGING]
Not many people knew.
I just put the mask right back on and went back to school.
For me, there’s like a wall of masks and like
I’ll go into different situations and no one would really see the real me.
[AMBIENT MUSIC]
It was so weird experiencing
anxiety and depression at the same time because my depression made me want to like
stay in bed all the time,
but my anxiety, would just make me so anxious about not doing anything
or I wanted to sleep all the time but my anxiety would like,
keep me awake with these what if thoughts.
[DISTANT CHATTER]
What if that person who like said that they liked me the other day was actually lying?
It's this awful second thought that, like everything
that you believe to be true, is not actually true.
A few years later, I’d started uni.
I'd been in therapy the whole time, but it just.
I was so tired.
[WIND BLOWING]
You know, fighting that unwinnable war in my head.
So when I was 18, I tried to end my life again.
I didn't necessarily want to kill myself.
It was just more so I wanted the pain to stop.
When you Google like depression or anxiety or anything like that
it comes up with a million articles that are written by people who
might not have experienced it.
Whereas for me, I like went into this really big deep dive on
Like what someone else actually feels like.
Like am I the weird emotions that I am experiencing
and these colors and this heaviness,
is that just me?
[MUSIC GROWS LOUDER]
I discovered these online forums
where people were sharing their different experiences
and stories of mental health and,
I can't really tell you how healing
it was to really find out that I wasn't alone
[DISTANT CHATTER]
I felt genuinely motivated
to actually get better.
Creative stuff has always been really important
to me in my healing journey and
video games are like one of the few places where I really felt like I could be me.
[DISTANT CHATTER]
I can shape the world
and me to be the person who I believed myself to be.
Not who everyone else wants me to be.
There's so much stuff I would want to tell my younger self.
There's nothing that you need to do or be
just being you is enough.
That for me, that was,
that was the game changer.
I'm okay where I'm at, and I've built a life that I want to keep living.