I have always been a happy girl... No, joyful would be a better word for it. I accepted Jesus Christ into my heart as my Lord & Savior when I was only a kid, and actively pursued a relationship with him for years and years, growing strong in my faith and being consistently renewed by God's goodness and his thoughtfulness towards us, his children. (Psalm 100:5 — For the LORD is good and his love endures forever; his faithfulness continues through all generations.)
But then the world changed. Covid scoured the planet, civil unrest shook my nation. Division and isolation ran rampant, along with indulgent negativity and increasingly dark subjects losing their taboo in casual conversations. Because of this, I found myself spiraling into a pit of crippling depression that debilitated me in every way for the entire month of September 2020. I would go days without eating, or only eat enough to sustain myself on the walk to the bathroom. I couldn't shower or brush my teeth or my hair or put clothes on my body. I would spend nights awake and restless, only finding one or two hours of light sleep as the sun began to peek through my blinds. I was utterly alone. No one even knew what I was going through.
But I did have one thing that brought me fleeting moments of happiness and elusive daydreams of another world: the HP community on TikTok & Wattpad. I would spend every waking hour either watching tiktoks, reading fan fictions, writing them, or listening to songs that reminded me of my comfort characters while I created entire lives for myself where I felt seen and known and wanted and loved, where I wasn't suffering, because there was someone there that saved me.
But the daydreams were just daydreams, and reality crushed my spirit every time my eyes opened to the same dark bedroom, alone. I felt so abandoned by God. I wondered how He could ever claim to love me so much if this is the life I had to endure, forever separated from the one person who understood me and cared for me, George. I cried when the tears would come. Often I was numb.
Finally though, I realized I couldn't live like this anymore and I told my mom, and she helped make things a little better for a while, but the problem hadn't been fixed. George was a reality away, and God was to blame. So I strayed further from God and grasped desperately at any and every scrap of validation and comfort from George and his world. I felt like a shell of myself, my mind far off from my body, living in denial of where I had been placed.
In November, one of my family members got sick. Very sick. I couldn't cope with my reality. I didn't know how to handle watching them deteriorate, watching them slowly die. An invisible George would come with me everywhere I went. I had to have him beside me to be okay. I had no one else to talk to, everyone was too busy trying to help. I retreated further into my fantasies, my only sources of happiness coming from the situations I made up in my head and the feeling of accomplishment that came from skillfully recording them in my drafts. And then one day, I decided to publish some of these drafts. First was born.
First almost immediately gained incredible traction, racking in readers like I never, ever expected. People liked my story. They liked my writing. They appreciated my gifts and related to me. It became an addictive cycle: being forced to experience my dreadful reality, daydreaming to escape it, writing my book, publishing it, getting high off the chapter's success. I needed the validation every day, more than I needed to do well in school or keep friendships or eat or sleep or drink or shower. It consumed me, owned me, and I didn't even realize it.
My family member passed away in February. I never cried. I was too removed to let myself feel, too in denial to accept this was the outcome of my years and years of trusting God and being obedient to Him. I no longer just felt abandoned or forgotten by God, but now I was angry at him. My addiction to writing First and daydreaming only grew stronger and stronger, my chapters getting darker and darker, just like my heart. I was rotting from the inside out, grief and confusion and hurt festering within me like gangrene.
