That Time Celeste Made Me Realize I Had Depression
Who knew a game could help uncover something you didn’t even know was inside you?
I first played Celeste back in March after seeing it pick up a bit of steam in the speedrunning community. I had been looking for something new to speedrun after burning out on Super Mario Odyssey and I thought that Celeste might be a worthy contender. I admittedly didn’t know much about the game other than that it was really hard and that it dealt with deep subject matter. I didn’t know what that subject matter was, just that the game had a message and delivered that message well.
In Celeste, you play as a character battling deep seeded anxiety, self-doubt, depression, and everything in between. Those feelings are manifested in a clone of yourself that follows you around and haunts you throughout the course of the game. In order to complete the game, you must guide your character through a series of increasingly difficult platforming levels to reach the summit of Celeste Mountain and overcome your demons.
The developers do an incredible job of instilling all the self-doubt and anxiety that your character feels into your very being. There are levels where you have to quickly weave your way through obstacles while your doppelganger mirrors your every move just a few steps behind you, with any hitch in your progress resulting in death at the hands of the manifestation of your inner demons. With every death, every failed attempt at progression, you start to feel the creeping dread that maybe you just can’t do this. But then you break through and conquer those fears with every completed level until you finally come out on top of the mountain.
When I first played the game, I was going through of a bit of writer’s block rut. I couldn’t seem to get out of my head and put out content that I was proud of. I was thinking that what I wrote just wasn’t good enough. I was simply going through the motions.
The thing was, though, I didn’t realize those things were happening until I played the game. As I progressed through the story, everything hit me like a ton of bricks. I was this character in a sense. This allowed me to really feel the weight of the story and appreciate it on a level that I didn’t think possible going in.
So that was in March. Since then, I’ve improved much more on the writer’s block side of things, which is great. On the other hand, I’ve been getting my ass kicked to the moon and back with bouts of anxiety and depression of my own.
There have been days where I’ve just felt off. I couldn’t place my finger on it, but things just didn’t feel right. I didn’t feel happy. I didn’t feel anything really. I wouldn’t want to do anything, either. I thought maybe I was feeling burned out from work or something. Whatever it was, it wasn’t great.
It wasn’t all the time, though. It would simply come and go at different times, leading me to believe that things were fine. I surely should have known better, but I’m sure many of you know how these things go.
I started going to therapy about a couple months ago and with the help of my therapist, I’ve come to the realization that I’ve been dealing with a pretty sizable amount of anxiety that quickly turns into depression. While that’s a realization that I’ve only really come to terms with in the last week or so, it’s one that I’ve known was there since March. I just didn’t recognize it yet.
This week the always fun Summer Games Done Quick speedrun marathon has been taking place. For the uninitiated, GDQ events are when a bunch of speedrunners converge on a convention center or hotel and run seven straight days of speedruns for charity. Just about every genre of game shows up at these things as they have to fill 168 hours of programming during the week. It’s really a fun time as you get to see the runners personalities while hearing about all the cool skips and glitches that allow them to finish games as quickly as possible.
As one of the bigger speedrun games in the last few months, Celeste was almost a no-brainer inclusion. Since it’s on the short side, they opted to do a race between the top two speedrunners of the game. (It was a really fun run to watch and you should definitely check it out.) With this being a speedrun, though, they skipped through all of the story elements and cutscenes. Still, just seeing the game brought all the memories of playing it a few months ago back into the forefront of my mind.
It was in thinking about this game all night (quite literally since I was up covering Korean League of Legends for work) that I realized that Celeste had basically opened my mind up to my anxiety and depression struggles back then. I just hadn’t put two and two together yet. Rather, I didn’t want to.
I know plenty of people that deal with these same issues. But I would always think to myself “Well, what I’m experiencing doesn’t look like that, so I don’t have anxiety or depression.” Because I wasn’t feeling the same things as others, I thought I was exempt from the stranglehold that is anxiety and depression. Of course, this was a silly thought and little more than me simply being in denial about my own problems.
It wasn’t really until I said all this stuff out loud to my therapist and had her basically say “Yeah, you anxiety that leaves you in a depressive state” that it all came together for me. Admitting things is hard for me, apparently. Once I did finally come to terms with this, I felt a lot better. Sure, anxiety and depression still suck major ass and leave me feeling debilitated at times. But at least now I know what the issue is, which allow me to eventually work through it as best I can.
That this realization first came to me while playing a video game is just further proof that games are more than just things that we play. The stories they tell and the feelings they emit are what matters. It goes deeper than just pressing buttons and taking your character from point A to point B. Sometimes they can hit you in ways that you’d never expect and shed light on parts of your life and your mind that you didn’t know were there. That’s why video games matter just as much now as they did 30 years ago.
Even if it took a few months for me to finally come around, I’m thankful to have played Celeste. Thankful to have been given my first insight into something deeper at work within me. Thankful to have been given that slight kick in the ass I needed to start opening up my mind a bit.
There’s a bit of dialogue between your character and their doppelgänger towards the end of the game that stuck out to me. As they finally start working together instead of against each other, they have this brief exchange:
“We wasted so much time.”
“Well, at least we’re talking about it now.”
After playing through the game today after the realizations that I’ve made, that line resonated with me on a whole new level.
Now that I’ve begun to realize and come to terms with what I’m dealing with, I can stop wasting time ignoring it and face it head on. It’ll be a tough journey no doubt. But it’s one that will leave me stronger and better after having gone down it.
It’s time to start climbing my own Celeste Mountain.