Video Transcript

Emily's Story - The war in my head: When anxiety and depression compete. 

[EMILY PLAYING IN A GAMING ARCADE]

00:04 Emily:

When you're little and you fall down people ask you like, where's the graze? Where's the bruise? Nowadays, it's like what do you put your head in your heart.

[EMILY SITTING IN HER KITCHEN}

00:19 Emily:

It's really hard for me to remember my parents saying that they're proud of me.

[MONTAGE OF HOME FOOTAGE OF EMILY WHEN SHE WAS LITTLE]

Sometimes I'd be so scared of letting them down that I just wouldn't come home sometimes. So, I would go and sleep on park benches or stay in like the school library, like hide behind the bookshelves until the librarian went home.

[SCENE OF EMILY IN SCHOOL WHEN SHE WAS ABOUT 5]

00:38 School teacher: 

Well done Emily, you are a very clever girl.

[EMILY SITTING IN THE PARK PAINTING]

00:43 Emily: 

I felt this growing emptiness inside of me and it was like this sink that could never be filled because at some point I'd lost the plug and no matter how much I tried to fill up with friends, with family, with studies and I just felt like it could never be filled.

[EMILY SITTING ON HER BED PLUCKING HER VIOLIN]

01:00 Emily: 

I just felt like I was a burden to everyone. So if I couldn't change situation I was in I would just I guess remove myself from it. So when I was 14 I tried to end my life.

[OLD FOOTAGE OF EMILY PLAYING GUITAR AND SINGING]

01:16 Emily: 

Not many people knew. I just put the mask right back on and went back to school.

[EMILY WALKING IN THE CITY WITH A VR HEADSET]

For me there's like a wall of masks and like I'll go into different situations and no one would really see the real me.

[EMILY SITTING IN HER KITCHEN TALKING TO CAMERA]

01:32 Emily:

It was so weird experiencing anxiety and depression at the same time because my depression made me want to like stay in bed all the time but my anxiety would just make me so anxious about not doing anything. Or I want to sleep all the time it makes it would like keep me awake with these 'What if' thoughts?

[EMILY CHATTING TO A FRIEND IN THE PARK WHILE PAINTING]

What if that person who like said that they liked me the other day was actually lying? It's this awful second thought that like everything that you believe to be true is not actually true.

02:02 Emily: 

A few years later, I started uni I've been in therapy the whole time but it just, I was so tired.

[EMILY PLAYING PIANO]

You know fighting that unwinnable war my head. So when I was 18 I tried to in my life again. I didn't necessarily want to kill myself, it was just more so I wanted the pain to stop.

[EMILY SITTING IN THE PARK WITH HER EYES CLOSED]

[EMILY ON THE COMPUTER]

02:27 Emily: 

When you google like depression or anxiety or anything like that comes up with a million articles that are written by people who might not have experienced it. Whereas for me I like, went into this really big deep dive on like what someone else actually feels like.

[EMILY TALKING TO CAMERA]

Like am I the weird emotions that I'm experiencing and these colors and this heaviness? Is that just me?

[EMILY LAUGHING WITH HER FRIEND IN THE PARK]

02:51 Emily: 

I discovered these online forums where people were sharing their different experiences and stories of mental health. And I can't really tell you how healing it was really find out that I wasn't alone.

[MONTAGE OF EMILY WITH FRIENDS AND PLAYING MUSIC]

I felt genuinely motivated to actually get better.

[MONTAGE OF EMILY GAMING]

03:14 Emily:

Creative stuff has always been really important to me in my healing journey and video games are like one of the few places where I really felt like I could be.

[EMILY WALKING DOWN A CITY STREET]

I can shape the world and me to be the person who I believed myself to be not who everyone else wants me to be.

03:36 Emily: 

There's so much stuff I would want to tell my younger self.

[MONTAGE OF PHOTOS OF EMILY GROWING UP]

There's nothing that you need to do or be just being you is enough. That for me that was that was the game changer. I'm okay where I'm at and I've built a life that I want to keep living.