How Anime Saved My Life
(Minor content warning for mentions of suicidal thoughts.)
It was February of 2014 that I hit my lowest point. It was the middle of what was to be my final semester at university and while I hadn’t yet hit the point of being actively suicidal I was getting there. Classes were on break for a week and I was spending most of my time either laying in bed or putting on a show for my online friends to convince them that I was okay. I only left the townhouse I was living in a couple of times that week, and even then I wasn’t really engaging much with the world around me, not that I had been particularly lively in the weeks and months preceding this.
I have suffered from depression for so long that I am honest when I say that I cannot imagine life without it. Self-loathing has been as constant and expected to me as breathing and for a long time I didn’t even question this. I just accepted that there would always be a voice in my head outlining why I was a failure, why I was unworthy of love, why I was deserving of every rotten thing that had happened in my life. My life was going to forever consist of occasional bouts of genuine happiness interspersed among long periods of abject sadness or dull apathy. With the help of friends, family, and counseling I’ve come to realize that this isn’t true, and I’ve taken many steps in the two years since, but at the time—living alone in a stressful school environment — I was in no position to take any positive action on my own.
But I digress, this article isn’t about how I began to solve my underlying issues, but how I was able to survive long enough for me to even begin doing so.
My time online during this period was devoted entirely to finding ways to distract myself from the incessant voice in my head. I was partially successful in doing this, but playing video games and random browsing only did so much for me, the inner voice never went away, it just waited for the quiet moments in between these activities to pounce.
It was during one of these sessions that I stumbled across the page for My Teen Romantic Comedy SNAFU on TV Tropes — a website I have used to wile away the hours since high school thanks to its ability to help me lose myself for however long it took me to read through a page. The page caught my attention primarily thanks to the series’ odd title and in the course of reading through its page I learned that the series could be found streaming legally on Crunchyroll, a site that I had apparently joined four years earlier but never really taken much notice of, given I was on occasional anime viewer at most, watching anime only when I was asked to or if I happened to stumble across it on television. I quickly signed up for a free trial and started watching this odd series that I had stumbled upon entirely thanks to happenstance.
Suffice to say I enjoyed the series, the hours it took for me to marathon all 13 episodes of the series passed me by in a blur and while it didn’t magically fix any of my problems for me it did provide me with a reasonably long-lasting distraction that held my attention — both because of the content of the series itself and the fact that I had to read subtitles in addition to my normal viewing habits. In the days, and even weeks, that followed I watched an incredible amount of anime, more than I could right now. I watched just about any series that caught my attention to completion before eagerly jumping to another. In the course of this I watched a huge variety of anime, some that I still think highly of for one reason or another and others that I think… less highly of, for equally variable reasons.
In retrospect, many of these series had very little impact on me in the long run. I honestly didn’t even remember the title of My Mental Choices are Completely Interfering with my School Romantic Comedy, for example, until I went to grab an image for this very article, and I doubt I’m going to remember it by this time tomorrow. But looking at the art and thinking back on what I do remember from the series gives me a warm feeling that is hard to describe. The series wasn’t particularly original, it didn’t look particularly good, and the writing was par for the course among the dozens of schlock anime that are released every year. Despite all of these points against it I still look back fondly on this series — heck, I apparently rated it an 8 on My Anime List at the time, an exceedingly generous score — because there’ll always be a part of me that will link this anime, and others of its ilk, with what it felt like to essentially be removed from my problems for a time. I may call an anime series “trash” but inevitably a part of me will append “and I love trash,” even if it is just internally because it’s the truth: I love trash anime, I love great anime, I love anime that leaves no memory because there’s just nothing to it, I just love anime in general, flaws and all.
I recognize that it is an incredibly shallow reason to give a pass to something because it provided an effective temporary distraction in the past, and I do make the effort to be more critical when it’s deserved, but those temporary distractions kept me going for three months when I couldn’t do it alone. So I would like to end this article I’ve been working on off and on for weeks now with a thank you. A thank you to anime for saving my life; a thank you to the people who make anime for saving my life; and a thank you to the people who license anime for saving my life. Thank you, even if sometimes the anime is bad.
