text: When I first started doing this, there were no stakes, no pressure. I did it because I loved escaping and creating things. Then we got successful and people loved us. But now... it seems like they're tired of what I do. And I can't think up anything different enough for them to like me anymore. Total failure-ville.
  
  (DOESN'T SOUND PERSONAL AT ALL, RIGHT?!)
  
  In the end, my character Codex helps him deal with his own anxiety and confronts his internet critics to remove what's blocking him in order to be able to create. Too bad I couldn't figure out how to write her into my own life, too.
  
  Bit by bit, I stole enough time over the summer to write the script. But it wasn't fun. Instead of living the last creative days of my show with joy, they were filled with desperation. Because underneath it all, I knew the end was coming. I infused anxiety into every scene, like when I was hard-core into knitting and promised everyone I met I'd make them a scarf, even if I didn't like them. So I'd sit at home, knitting resentment and frustration into each row. "Why did I tell that random girlfriend of a colleague I'd make her a scarf out of CASHMERE?! I don't even know her last name!! Knit, hate, knit, hate, knit, hate!"
  
  As we shot and edited the show, every episode we completed felt like a nail in the coffin of my career. The closer we got to completion, the larger the gaping mental chasm of "Who is Felicia Day after The Guild ends?" grew. Paranoid thoughts plagued me day and night.
  
  I'll never make anything this good again.
  
  Existence, what's up with that again?
  
  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.
  
  Luckily, I forced myself out of that phase, because internet commenters started typing beneath my videos, "Felicia has old face now." Thanks, trolls. You did something good for once!
  
  I developed an irrational hatred toward anything around me that was familiar. My bedroom curtains, the collar my dog wore, my car seats. (I suddenly HATED tan. Or did I?) I felt nauseated and trapped by every single object and person around me. If I wake up one more day and see that Princess Bride poster on my wall, I'm gonna take a sledgehammer to it. It's trapping me here. I'm going to die looking at it. STOP OPPRESSING ME, POSTER!
  
  From people close to me, to the way my desk was organized, every detail represented being frozen in a situation I couldn't escape: my life.
  
  At the lowest point (among some champion lows, I might add), I started fantasizing about deleting my Twitter account and erasing myself from the internet. It escalated to constant daydreams about disappearing entirely. Meaning... dying. My musings revolved around scenarios of how I could end myself. I don't think I ever got to the point where I was serious about going through with my plans, but I was obsessed with thinking about them. I learned later that there's a term for this: "suicidal ideation."
  
  I wonder how people would react to me doing a backflip off a cliff during this photo shoot? Or walking out into Comic-Con traffic? Or electrocuting myself with a gaming console in a French claw-foot bathtub? That would make a cool crime scene photo.
  
  Would anyone vlog about it?
  
  And at that point, when things got THAT weird in my head...
  
  ...I still didn't get help.
  
  [ Heal It Up, Woman. ]
  
  After a summer of mental problems in 2013, I got physically sick for two months straight. And my boyfriend finally muscled me into doing something about it.
  
  "You have to see a doctor."
  
  "I'm fine."
  
  "You can't sleep. You walk around in a haze, and you cough all the time. I think you might be turning into a zombie."
  
  "I'm FINE."
  
  "You look super tired in your videos lately. Eye bags and stuff."
  
  LONG MINUTE of silence. "Calling someone right now."
  
  It's true, it had been a year since I felt energetic, healthy, or normal. Depression can do that, but... could there be something else?
  
  Guess what I discovered when I finally made a doctor's appointment after procrastination for another few months? There were actual REASONS I was sick. And some of them affected my brain area. Experts can know stuff sometimes!
  
  I discovered that I had an extremely severe thyroid problem that was causing a lot of my depression and lack of energy and was probably the reason my hair had fallen out in chunks over the summer. (Led to a snappy-ass haircut, though!) I also discovered huge awful fibroids in my lady parts that were gunking up the works and had to be removed, and BEST PART, at the end of 2013, as a Christmas present of sorts, I discovered that my acid reflux had gotten so bad because of stress that I'd developed a thing called Barrett's esophagus. (It's usually a condition only old dudes in their fifties get.) The lining of my stomach was creeping up my throat and converting all the good tissue to bad tissue, and because of this problem, I was a thousand times more likely to get esophageal cancer than the rest of the population at large, which...
  
  WAIT.
  
  WHAT THE FUCK?!
  
  And THAT is when I decided to get control of my life back. Because for some reason, I didn't merit it worthy enough to take extreme action when my mind got sick. But my body? Emergency timez!
  
  Imagine saying to someone, "I have a kidney problem, and I'm having a lot of bad days lately." Nothing but sympathy, right?
  
  "What's wrong?"
  
  "My mom had that!"
  
  "Text me a pic of the ultrasound!"
  
  Then pretend to say, "I have severe depression and anxiety, and I'm having a lot of bad days lately."
  
  They just look at you like you're broken, right? Unfixable. Inherently flawed. Maybe not someone they want to hang around as much?
  
  Yeah, society sucks.
  
  My mental problems made me feel ashamed. I felt like I had to hide them until I could "work through it" on my own. Which I never did, because I didn't know how. And I didn't feel brave enough to make fixing my mind a priority because I didn't think anyone would understand. Having an increased chance for cancer, though? I'm too neurotic NOT to be a hypochondriac. So damn, did I get ruthless!
  
  I said "NO!" to everything. A very good friend of mine told me once, "Of everyone I know, you need to build a bubble around yourself." Well, I took steps to inflate that bubble. Anything that gave me the remotest iota of stress, I dumped. I set extreme parameters around my company. "I'll be working from home now. I'm only coming into the Geek & Sundry office once a week, and if I don't feel like doing that, I won't."
  
  "How long?"
  
  "However long I need."
  
  Once you tell people exactly what you will and won't do, it's amazing how they'll adjust. Or they won't. And then an opportunity or relationship goes away. And that's okay.
  
  Once I got my body on the right track, slowly but surely healing, day by day, I started working to repair my mind. It was not easy, because everything felt shattered into a thousand-piece puzzle. But I finally sat down and tried to put those pieces back together, one by one.
  
  I started with months of self-involved and semi-crazed journaling. I filled five notebooks with every insecurity and rage and sadness I could think of. I wrote down everything I felt, including terrible things about people I loved, in order to move through and get to the TRUTH of what I couldn't see through my fogged state of mind. And I hate to say it, but the more ruthless I got, the better I felt.
  
  "I hate X's face! I've hated him for years!"
  
  Working through my initial reaction always got me to understand what was really going on.
  
  "Okay, I don't really hate him. I really feel upset about that one time he forgot to invite me to his birthday party. I mean, everyone we knew was posting so many fun Instagram pictures, and I pressed a heart on all of them even though the whole time I was curled up in my bed sobbing!"
  
  Also, deeper and less funny stuff than that.
  
  I dug and dug and kept digging. All that introspection helped me get perspective and realize, This thing I'm feeling, it might NOT be the TRUTH...
  
  There's a great Eleanor Roosevelt quote, "No one can make you feel inferior without your consent." Well, I discovered that, even though the feeling had ruled me my entire life, no one could make me be anxious without my consent. It was an amazing realization.
  
  And yes, I did seek professional mental help. But avoidant habits die hard. So instead of going directly to a certified specialist, first I decided to try the softball approach and hired a "creativity life coach." Boy, did this woman embrace the clichés of her profession hard. She wore a lot of tie-dye. I had to carry crystals to "ward off the negative spirits." Just entering her office every week gave my sinus cavities aromatherapy seizures. Oh, and she loved the hypnosis.
  
  "You are a tree. You are the trunk. You have to cut off the branches that are draining you and concentrate on that part before you can reach outside yourself again. Repeat after me, I am a trunk."
  
  "I feel stupid, but I am a trunk. I am a trunk."
  
  Talking to a real objective human who was a captive audience (since I was paying her) was a good first step. But when she wanted to move on to some strange rebirth regression therapy with screaming and stuff, it occurred to me that she wasn't accredited and could legally blog about how weird I was later. So FINALLY I moved on and got my very own certified psychologist. With a lying-down couch and everything!
  
  Showing up each week and having someone to complain to without the fear of someone tweeting about it was spectacular. I would recommend ANYONE try it. We're all a garbage dump of dysfunction, but if you get in there and churn the problems, they turn to mulch faster so new things can grow out of them. (I have no idea how to mulch, so I hope that analogy is accurate.)
  
  Even with all those efforts, recovery was slow. A few months in, I was ready to give myself an Olympic gold medal for minuscule things. Like mustering the effort to refill an empty toilet paper roll. Look at you taking initiative. Go, girl!
  
  But after a while, and I mean MONTHS of learning how to be a real human and attending several new-wave '80s concerts (hearing "The Safety Dance" in person can be incredibly healing), the pressure I'd put on myself my whole life... lightened. Eventually, I emerged from my own private Hades. And I used the time to re-form my brain to be less anxious, live in the present, and not panic about the future or regret the past. (As much as I could, having installed so much messed-up hard-wiring before.)
  
  I started getting creative ideas for the company again. I got motivated to throw out my old stretched-out bras that hung open at the top like a pocket. During that time of self-care, I became a different person. But it was fine. Everyone adjusted to the "new me," including me.
  
  Eleven months later, during the summer of 2014, I was eating a burrito in my car before a Geek & Sundry meeting I was super excited about. I thought about all the people in my life who'd helped me through the horrible year and a half before, and realized, Wow, it must have been really hard on my boyfriend/business partner/friends for me to be so unhappy for so long. And I started crying. Because it felt like I had finally recovered enough to be able to think about other people again. (There was also a Mumford & Sons song playing at the time. Banjo + Black Beans = Waterworks.)
  
  Yeah, yeah, success is a ladder, a marathon instead of a sprint and all that crap. Everyone can TELL you stuff like that, but you really have to understand advice in relation to YOURSELF, or it's all just nice intellectual theory.
  
  Weathering the rough times requires a lot of self-confidence outside the things you can't control, like career and what other people think of you. You need to be able to feel proud of yourself even if you were living in a tiny hut in the middle of nowhere, taking care of goats. You are unique and good enough JUST AS YOU ARE. As a theoretical goat herder.
  
  It was the toughest lesson of my life, learning how to let The Guild go. And how to manage a business bigger than a one-garage web show. Even tougher than the forty-man raids in World of Warcraft. I have many new projects with my company and outside it that I care about now, but none of them will ever be all of me. I learned better than to let that crap happen again.
  
  In the end, I'm able to look back without shame or regretful nostalgia, and think, You made something great. And something new will come around. Or not. Either way, do the work you love. And love yourself. That's all you can do in this world in order to be happy.