This morning I saw a tweet from Rachel Cushing, who’s a contestant on the Schmoedown, a movie knowledge contest over at Collider that is a ton of fun. She’s being bullied, harassed, because she’s a woman. Because she won. Plain and simple. And I don’t want to make this about me, but I have some things to share.

I was bullied, a lot, since I was about five. I was different, I liked nerdy/geeky stuff, I played games, I loved to write stories, create worlds. I was very good at English, at studying really, but because I was different I was bullied. And this affected my self-esteem a lot.

I was ostracized because I was different, in comparison to my other classmates, and I didn’t like things like Football (it’s not called Soccer! XD), but was more interested in karate and baseball. And games, mostly games. tried to make friends at times, but they didn’t last long.

Fast forward to years later, when the bullying has stopped and I am working on a mod for Half-life with a small group of people. I was having fun, but one day I was kicked out of the team, no explanation given. For the longest of times I thought I did something wrong.

Turns out, I didn’t. Some of the people on the small team were just jealous that others on the team liked my ideas and concepts best. But in the end, the entire project fell through, and I was pretty pissed at the time so I deleted everything I worked on.

So yeah, I put gamedesign and development behind me for a while and focussed on playing games. I was in a clan for Counter-Strike at one point, and I think I did pretty well. My K/D at the time was one of the best in the clan, and other started to resent that.

I devised strategies for the maps, and kept myself to it. And this is around the time my depression started to rear its ugly head for the first time in years. Other accused me of sabotaging them with my strategies. Yet, they never used them and got killed a lot.

As you can guess, that didn’t last long either. I quit. Walked away from it all and never looked back. Heck, two of them dared to say to me that I was acting like I was the best on the team, and the people who really know me know that I would never be that arrogant.

When I was 17/18, I also started writing for a website about games. A voluntary website that had its ups and downs. Until one day, the editor in chief and founder of the site asked me to take over the reigns for personal reasons. I was doing work for it at the time and said yes.

I said yes, having no experience with leading a website, so at the start I struggled a lot. I made mistakes, but some of the other writers helped me find my footing and some of the necessary connections. I was happy writing about games, getting interviews and putting in the work.

I had previously screwed up a relationship because I was a big insecure and jealous jackass at the time, so I could do with the distraction. And it worked. Heck, I worked on the website for 12 hours a day at one point. Still proud we managed to get all the publishers on board.

I landed some new writers, one of them became one of my best friends, another I also consider a friend despite us not talking that much at times, and a third whom I regret getting on board. As you can probably guess, the latter created some major issues for me.

Now, I have to say, despite my past of being bullied, I am still too kind towards others at times. And now that I look back, I was too kind towards that person too. I gave him so many opportunities to get his act straight, but in the end he never did.

Those in the Dutch game industry know who I am talking about, but I want to ask everyone who knows him to not name him. I guess I am still too kind and don’t want to pile on his troubles. I never want to hurt anyone that way. Either way, he started to talk behind my back.

He started doing things that I thought were detrimental to the website and I did my best to put a halt to that. I always believed that our website was more mature and more discerning than other Dutch websites at the time. And we did pretty good for our intended market.

At one point, we had enough viewers for marketing departments of the major publishers to take notice. We even got an offer from one of them. Unfortunately, due to the server the website was on, we couldn’t do it. So, two others who worked on the site wanted to invest.

This meant our own server, an updated website and so forth. I couldn’t invest money myself, so they asked if I wanted to step down as editor in chief. After two years of 12 hours a day, trying to maintain a long distance relationship as well, I was kind of happy to.

But when I stepped down, the person I tried to control saw his chance and decided he wanted to invest into the website as well. He didn’t become EIC, luckily, but his reigns had come off and he did things I never agreed with. I left the website, was looking for work then.

When I found a new job at a new start up site, paid and all, my friends and all my contacts at the publishers, started to tell me stories about the guy at my old website. And believe me, I was facepalming hard. But what hurt me the most was that he tried to sour my reputation.

I still don’t know why, but he tried to give me a bad name at all the publishers and he was telling others that he had, singlehandedly, pushed me and one of my closest friends out, away from the website and the forum. Called us “bad apples” to everyone.

At the same time, I was struggling at the new website because I was still mourning the old. But I did my best, brought over all my contacts, and started fresh. Unfortunately, somewhere along the line I was denied a lot of things that I needed to do my job.

Despite me working hard every day, I was not allowed to play games that had come in, just to check them out for a bit, my computer was locked out of any form of social interaction (MSN Messenger at the time) and I had to focus solely on writing news and articles.

This severely hurt my self-esteem, let alone the daily barrage of jokes that were meant to put me down by the then EIC. Now, I admit, I was VERY defensive at times and I called in sick a little too much. I just didn’t want to acknowledge I was depressed because of my past.

But instead of talking about it, I tried to suck it up and do my job. But there’s only so much a person can take, and one day that led to me being as obstinate as possible towards anyone who even looked at me. And that was me being mild, because my parents got the brunt of it.

Went to the E3, had an awesome time, but something happened and one person started to resent me. That person wasn’t even working there, or ever hired to work there, but I always felt that he had more power there than me. And then came in the new hire. Oh boy.

The new permanent addition to the team had been there for a bit, just finished his degree in journalism, had written for a much smaller website and he was doing okay. A week or two later, after some stuff, the current EIC stepped down from his position to focus on the site.

This meant that a new EIC was needed. One of my best friends, who followed me from the old website, felt that I should become the EIC. But no, it was the brand new hire who had no experience running a website. I wasn’t really surprised, but my friend was.

At the same time, my freedom and the things I was supposed to do at the website was curtailed even more. I felt suffocated. After a one year stint there, and having managed to get a lot of stuff done in that year, I was told I “didn’t fit the team anymore” and didn’t get a full contract.

I was done, I was out. In that one year, I managed to keep up PR at the site, wrote at least twenty articles/news items a day, and managed to often loan a PS3 system built for early previews and reviews. I would reduce my work and hand over whatever I was working on, in one month.

My friend misinterpreted something I said, which can happen, I don’t blame him for that (I still love you buddy XD), and this was picked up by one of the shareholders. I was accused of deliberately wanting to sabotage the website and thrown out, couldn’t defend myself.

Even after I explained what I meant, the owner of the website told me that I was let off with a warning. The shareholder didn’t want to listen to me, and later I heard the owner got screwed by the shareholder as well. So make of that what you will.

In that same year, my old website had a redesign, but stories about them fighting with publishers reached my ears. And it was somehow cathartic that the website that bullied me away had basically died. I still mourned for the site, but that was for the old one. Not the new one.

So I finally left the paid gig, fell into a depression (it would take years for me to acknowledge I was depressed), felt alone (broke up with my girlfriend just before I started to work there) and ended up in a wheelchair for 10 months due to two operations.

Oh boy, this is turning into a story… I just now realized I should put this in a WordPress blog, not in a Twitter thread. 😀 Anyway…

If you’re still with me, remember when I said I wasn’t allowed to play games at my new gig? Turns out, when my buddy was still working there after I had left, they were playing a lot of games themselves now. They sorta started when I was still there, but it had turned for the worse.

The new EIC turned out to be extremely lazy. He put in the minimum amount of work and started up either CoD or WoW. One of my publisher contacts, and friend, had told me earlier that he found the guy lazy when they were both working at another website. Still, a shame.

To make a long story short, my friend left soon after, and ultimately the website died. The shareholder screwed over the owner, as I said previously. Two years later I ran into him and the dude who didn’t work there, at a convention. Only to be told: “You were right.”

Fat lot of good that did me, right? I am not the type of person to rub in someone’s face I am right, even though plenty of people I have known (or know) deserve it, and the vindication doesn’t help. It only makes people even more resentful.

But having had projects fall apart around me when I am pushed out, or I walked away, has shown me that at times I know what I am doing. Not every time, mind you, I made my share of mistakes, but I learned a lot in those years. I learned I let people walk over me.

I learned I was depressed after losing another job because I was following a course in digital film making, my mom was diagnosed with ALS, and the woman I dated for three months broke up because she too was depressed and wanted to move back to the south of The Netherlands.

I learned I let myself get bullied out of a lot of things, things I really enjoyed doing, things I worked hard for. Just because others somehow can’t stand me or what I do, how I work. I put in hours and hours of work for voluntary website, and it paid off every time.

I am still fucking proud of the work I put in. Of all the previews I visited, of the games we got sent, of my one week in LA during the E3, of the terrible video interviews I did where I saw myself grow a lot more confident during the last interview of our trip.

But I was still bullied out of writing about games, and I can say I chose to leave that behind and focus on my own creative writing and designs, it still doesn’t change the fact that I gave up. I gave up when I was 11 and wanted to leave life behind. I was two steps away from giving up last year. Literally.

And somehow, there’s still a spark within me. A spark that won’t let me give up. A spark that is waiting to be turned into a grandiose fire, if you’ll excuse my overly dramatic writing, that is still wanting to show the world what it can do.

Bear with me, I am coming to and end of this rant. I think.

While I am struggling with crippling fears and anxieties, with the fear of taking the first steps, of finding a job, that spark is still there. Somehow slowly, but surely, pushing me to get out of my shell, my safe space. I am not sure I am ready, or ever will be.

I am suffering from depression, PTSD (being bullied extensively for twelve years and being beat up a couple of times does that to you), severe imposter syndrome, and yet I am still strong enough to speak my mind and help others. I refuse to be bullied away from things I like.

I have made the mistake of walking away too many times, of giving up. I regret letting great opportunities pass because of the fear of being bullied. I regret not having the courage to show what I have been working on to people I trust, I regret not finishing my projects.

I don’t want anyone to make the same mistakes I did, or at least make them and not deal with the fallout. I never learned how to deal with that regret, because I never learned how to deal with me being bullied. And the people I love the most always get that anger that is inside of me because of that slung at them.

More regrets! Because I pushed a person I care about a lot away when I needed them the most, and I wanted to be there for them as well.

I want to end this on a high note, because it needs to be positive, dammit.

Seriously, I know how many of my stories and concepts end when I create them. How they should end. And yet, when it’s about me, I can’t seem to find the proper ending. I just ramble on and on.

Maybe something like this: Don’t let yourself be bullied or harassed out of something you love. The geeky, nerdy thing is for you to enjoy, it’s not for them to shit on you. And if you see someone being harassed like that, stand up and help them. Don’t let others take anyone’s fun away.

PS: Sorry, it turned into something about me, I guess I just needed to get all of this off of my chest as well. This is the reason why I comment on stuff like that, why I push other people to do the work and stay strong. It helps me, bit by bit, to do the same thing for myself.