Godspeed You! Black Nerd
I have been “The Black Nerd” since I was 19 years old. It was a name given to me by my friend Bob, from before we were friends, and I was an intern on his radio show. It’s a name that has served me well because I am, as you may know, a nerd. I spend a lot of time playing videogames, watching anime, reading manga and comic books, and collecting figures and toys of my favorite series and characters. I own every current modern console and a very nice gaming PC. I love to talk about the things that I enjoy, and I want to share that joy with others and hear about what they love. I’ve written for various gaming outlets, hosted podcasts, streamed, and generally immersed myself in nerd culture.
And I bring this up because I also have mental health problems, every day I live with OCD and anxiety, but I don’t want those to be the things that define me. I want to be known for the things I’m good at; baking, photography, writing, podcasting, etc. I don’t want to be known as the guy who is sad or angry or tired all the time. I want to live a happy life.
But I have to talk about the bad things first. I have to get these feelings out and seeing as I am a writer, I need to do it this way.
This is my story about my mental illness. This is no one else’s story. You may relate to the things that I say or know someone who does but mental illness affects everyone differently and I hope you find something that helps you. For me, it’s using pop culture to explain how and why my brain does what it does.
So, content/trigger warning for mental illness, suicidal ideation, drug/alcohol use, and sexual assault.
“And I find it kind of funny
I find it kind of sad
The dreams in which I’m dying are the best I’ve ever had
I find it hard to tell you ’cause I find it hard to take”
— Tears for Fears “Mad World”
I am loathe to talk about my own problems to an audience other than myself. Anxiety feels fake. My brain screaming at shadows on the wall. And I have been to therapy, I know all the tricks to reroute bad thoughts but that’s not enough. My sane brain knows that I need medication to function, knows that I need to write or talk things out because I am the only one speaking to me.
I don’t know if I have always had some kind of mental illness but even as a kid, I had a lot of self-doubt that was unfounded. I would often think about why my friends would want to spend time at my house when they were the ones who had giant swimming pools and more videogames than me. And the self-doubt festered as I got older and to this day, it’s a fetid pond that sits in the base of thoughts stinking up the place and making it worse for me.
The self-doubt continued in my teen years with my anxiety getting worse but never knowing exactly what was wrong with me. I didn’t go out on dates or really go out much with friends because I felt unimportant or like a bother to those around me, but I kept those feelings inside. Still do for the most part.
I remember crying myself to sleep a lot of nights because I felt sad and angry and lonely and miserable. I thought it was because I was a teenager and teenagers have emotions and whacked out hormones. I thought I was just not strong enough to handle these feelings, so I just kept them inside.
As an adult, it’s different. When I’m not on medication, there’s a relentless anxiety attack. My heart constantly feels like it’s racing and trying to push its way out of my throat. I feel exhausted all the time. One, from the illness itself and two, from having to pretend I’m fine. Keeping the mask up for the sake of not wanting someone to know that I’m struggling. My mental illness brain believes that I don’t want anyone to have to worry about a problem that isn’t theirs. I don’t want to be an emotional burden on someone because my brain is making up fakes scenarios to be scared of.
It’s like Peter Parker and the symbiote. It’s another being that resides somewhere in my form that whispers in my ear and makes all my emotions worse. It makes me feel like a monster.
I’ve been on and off a few different meds since my twenties. First for generalized depression, then anxiety, and cycling through different medications to find something that works until recently when my doctor prescribed Prozac for OCD. And I gotta say, it’s really nice to have some quiet time in my brain for once. I can’t think of a time in my life where my brain wasn’t going at 1000 miles per hour.
A quick diversion into the past where I wax poetic about the interactions between mental illness and traumatic life events.
Mental Illness and Being Black
A lot of my life I was the only, or one of the few, black people/persons in a social group of white people. It was mostly fine but there were a lot of jokes at the expense of me being black. Or not being black enough. Sure, it was just a “joke”, but you let too many things slide off your back, it starts to pile up behind you. When I was 14, I had a girl tell me that she couldn’t date me because her parents were racist. And that just wormed its way into skull. I would never eat fried chicken or watermelon in front of white people because someone would inevitably make a joke about it. Sure, it wasn’t serious, but wasn’t it though?
When I went to high school, I went to a school that was 96% black, it then became that I wasn’t black enough. I didn’t grow up listening to rap, I watched Wes Anderson movies, I loved post-hardcore and dressed weird. I was constantly reminded how I was not black enough, that I didn’t speak black, that I was not actually black.
You can’t change the color of your skin or other genetics, I am what I am and what I am is black.
Mental Illness and The Internet
Social media is a bad place. Especially if you have a mental illness. It’s an overstimulating nightmare of an infinite number of opinions about every subject under the sun. There’s an air of simmering hostility over everything. I can’t even check in on things I enjoy without having to be blasted in the face by a grenade of someone having an extremely negative opinion in a way that feels hostile to humanity. I’m just trying to read pro wrestling news; I don’t need to see the misogynist or racist thoughts of some freak.
It’s how people interact with one another. It’s how much awful news is being beamed into my eyes. It’s too much to take any other time, but in the throes of anxiety, it’s enough to make one want to collapse.
In terms of videogames, I haven’t used a public voice chat in almost half my lifetime. I stopped playing Overwatch because I was called a nigger three times in one day. It’s all these things that don’t matter, really. But they do. If everything just slides off your back, it eventually starts to pile up behind you.
Mental Illness and A Social Life
I’d like to think I’m an outgoing person. I love talking to people and I get energy from entertaining or being in a crowd. But on the other side, there’s a scared child who’s nervous around all these people and feels people judging him for a variety of reasons; from his weight to his hair, his voice, his mannerisms, anything and everything is up for judgment.
But they’re all fake thoughts created from nothing for the purpose of fear. I generally do not like to go out and do things by myself, such as going to the movies or going out to eat because my insane brain insists that everyone is judging me, looking at me, hating me for any reason imaginable. It’s an exhausting loop of intrusive thoughts.
Once at a party, I was cornered in a quiet kitchen and touched and grinded against, unwanted. The other person was obviously extremely drunk so I tried not to think anything of it but it was a violating experience and I’ve never once talked about it.
It both did and didn’t affect me, if that makes sense.
And I haven’t been on a date in more years than I’d like to admit. It’s the hedgehog’s dilemma taken to its extreme. I don’t want to get hurt or hurt anyone while also knowing the notion itself is flawed. I want to be close to someone, but the paralysis and paranoia of an ill mind makes it FEEL impossible. The older I get, the more I feel like I’m trapped in some kind of arrested development because I don’t have the muscle memory of intimacy. That I’ll be a disappointment to anyone who would deign to be with me.
And again, that’s the mentally ill brain speaking. There’s also the sane brain that knows that I cannot keep myself to myself because it is assured destruction.
“Just give me a reason to carry on
To carry on”
— Sam Roberts “Words & Fire”
I saw this post on Facebook a few months back and it has really stuck with me and was further inspiration to write this because I have and continue to experience these issues from time to time.
Earlier this year, I lost access to my anxiety medication. My pharmacy always contacts me when I have a refill coming up and I received a text that read something along the lines of “This is your last refill, would you like us to contact your doctor to make sure this is okay to refill?” And of course, I answered yes.
Well turns out that didn’t happen. I was without my medication for about 10–12 days, and it was one of the worst experiences in my life.
I don’t know if I’d call it a nervous breakdown, a dissociative episode, or what but it’s like a mounting static. A haze of dark speckles with increasing volume, both size and sound, a shadow over a time that feels like a dream. It was a time where I could only focus all my efforts on getting my actual job done so I could take care of my bills. I would try my best to cover my face while at work just in case I started crying for no reason. Wearing a mask and a hoodie for stealth purposes. If I wasn’t at work, I was staring into the middle distance or lying in bed while I rewatched the same YouTube videos over and over again.
My stomach hurt constantly, and I would eat maybe one meal a day. I think I ended up losing 10 or so pounds. I don’t remember much of this time. There’s a veil of fog around times like that that feels impenetrable.
But in all honesty, I was trying to think about not killing myself. And I don’t want to, I have never wanted to. But I did want to. There’s passive suicidal ideation, outlined in this article and there’s the actual suicidal feeling. Knowing that you can’t take it anymore.
It’s hopelessness. It’s darkness. I could overdose on Xanax and booze. I could drive my car into the ocean. There were a number of things I could do that I didn’t want to do. That my sane brain knew I couldn’t go through with that my insane brain demanded. But there are friends in my life that checked on me. Reminded me that I’m human.
And I would never want someone to think that the reason I ended my own life was because of something they said or did. There’s a ghost you meet in the game Baldur’s Gate 3 who is dragged back to the material plane by a former lover to make sure he wasn’t responsible for her taking her own life.
But she just straight up says it’s because she was so sad.
And that’s just it. It’s bleakness and darkness. It’s a lightless lead vault of misery.
Besides, there’s plenty of reasons to be alive. Maybe Jesus will be mad at me. I wouldn’t be around to pet my dog anymore.
“So break through it all
And don’t look down
You won’t fade out
Cause the fire in you never dies
It comes around
To light the flame
They’ll know your name
Burned into their memory”
— Sonic Frontiers “Break Through It All (feat. Kellin Quinn)”
I’m not ashamed to admit the amount of nerd things that have given me hope in dark times. In 2016, I was in a similar darkness and Kingdom Hearts was the series that pulled me out of it. During the pandemic, All Elite Wrestling running small shows in Florida helped keep me sane when I couldn’t see anyone. The amount of anime I watched when I had covid and couldn’t leave the house was staggering.
One of my all-time favorite wrestlers, Eddie Kingston, said “he doesn’t want people dying no more.” I can’t disappoint the Mad King. He’s a constant inspiration and I don’t think he’ll ever see this, but he truly helped save my life. https://twitter.com/AEW/status/1572575120207462400
And you have to find things to be happy about or you’ll eat yourself alive.
I love how excited my dog gets every single day when I grab his leash. I love going grocery shopping with my brother every weekend. I love the group chat I have with 3 of my guy friends. I love that I’m still in contact with friends I met in World of Warcraft when I was 16 years old. I love the concept of living, just experiencing things and doing stuff that makes me happy.
And I want you to be happy. I know what it’s like to feel misery dragging its claws across your throat. I hope you find the things that you love.
And I would just ask that if you know a friend has mental health issues to just say anything to them. You don’t have to shoulder a burden or go into personal details, but sometimes a person just has to hear from another person.
