Celeste: Mirroring My Depression
- jiggy J-J
- Dec 29, 2020
- 8 min read
-Climb-
Overview
(Spoiler Warning)
With a distinct lack of game releases this year and being away from my PC this Christmas, I restarted a game that I absolutely loved on first playthrough, Celeste. Celeste is a beautifully crafted, unyielding 2D platformer that follows Madeline’s journey up Celeste mountain. Playing through the game again got me thinking about depression and anxiety, as well as how they impacted my life.
In this blog post, I’d like to share my experience of depression and how I feel Celeste helps represent some of the things I experienced and how I felt during this time. This isn’t going to be a review of Celeste, but an open discussion and account of what I feel I went through.
Madeline has chosen to climb Celeste mountain as both an escape from her daily life, and to prove that she can fight the overbearing anxiety and self-doubt she feels. Meeting a small, wacky cast along her journey, Madeline comes to realise that the power of Celeste mountain is not mystical as some would lead her to believe, but is a power that leads her down the path to confronting and fighting her inner-demons.
For some who may know me well, in year 11, I became pseudo-homeless. Although I had places to stay, they were never secure and I bounced around from place to place for almost two years, never really sure where I would go and never really feeling secure or comfortable in where I lived. During this time, I thought I was okay and felt as though I was content with the lifestyle I now had. Unfortunately, time caught up with me, and after those two years of bouncing around homes, undereating, and sleep deprivation, I eventually asked myself what may have been the most damaging question of my life…
“What happens if I don’t go to school?”
Celeste and My Story
Although I’m not totally sure, as I never was clinically diagnosed, I believe what I experienced was three years of existential depression. This sounds clichéd, and writing it down now certainly feels like it, but I feel it’s important to try to get an accurate understanding of what I went through. The question “what if I don’t go to school?” started me on a spiral of deeper and deeper fundamental questions that eventually led me to…why am I doing anything? Spiralling like this became dangerous and led to me not doing anything, literally anything. Through three years of sixth-form, I: attended roughly 30% of my classes (probably less), any sort of studying was non-existent; never had a job lasting more than a month; disappeared from school for two months without contacting anyone; retreated from talking to pretty much all of my friends; stopped taking part in any of the activities I used to love (music, dance, school house events, sports); and essentially failed my A-levels for three years in a row. This was a complete shift from who I previously was, an engaged kid who loved to learn and had a real passion for the things I took part in. The most I accomplished during this time was hitting some-thousand hours in a video game I don’t care about and watching movies that fed into my existential questions. I lost three years of my life, and I can’t get them back.
It got to the point where I would begin walking to school, telling my sisters that I was finally going in, but would stop half-way and almost have a panic attack due to the anxiety of going to school. This happened almost every time I told them I was going, where I would attempt to go, get halfway, stop, quickly rationalise why I cannot go into school, and would either sit on a bench or walk around for nearly an hour until it seemed like my class was done to make it look like I went.
I think it would be easy to assume there was something in school that was causing me to be so anxious about going. But I think it was that going to school represented a fundamental conflict to the question that I had asked myself, “why do I go to school?”, to which I concluded that there was no point in going and no consequences for not going; if there were consequences, I could dismiss them as not mattering. It was so hard for me to go to school because I had two extremely opposing thoughts in my head, causing me to panic and get extremely anxious about the prospect of attending.
Anxiety is at the heart of Madeline’s behaviour in Celeste. In one sequence, Madeline has a panic attack in front of fellow climber, Theo, on board the mountain’s worn-down gondola. In the most beautiful representation of anxiety in a video game I’ve ever seen, Theo remains fairly calm and teaches Madeline a technique for how to cope with the anxiety and panic she is experiencing. The game draws to a new screen where Theo tells Madeline to keep a feather afloat, requiring her to be light, calm and focused. You have to align the feather within a rectangular box while the screen moves, meaning you have to be light, calm and focused. I love this so much because it represents what I felt when I had these same attacks, like something inside me wasn’t aligning, and that contradiction was causing a physical reaction.
Arguably more detrimental is when I started to question why I feel. I’m not an expert in depression, and am writing solely about my own experience, but I felt like the worst part about being depressed was losing what makes me human. Those who go through depression may talk about how numb they are, and I found out exactly what that means. You might think depression means being sad, upset, annoyed, or angry, but what it really means is feeling nothing. I didn’t feel happy, I didn’t feel angry, I didn’t feel sad. Anytime I thought about something that could have made me emotive, I simply said to myself, “it doesn’t matter”, and the feeling would pass me by without evoking any real response. An example of this would be an event that took place roughly two years into my depression. With my sisters having taken care of me through my depression and putting all their energy into restoring some sort of future for me, I remember them taking me to a café somewhere and trying to get through to me. They were almost yelling in this café about how I have to do something in life, that I need to begin to make changes because they won’t happen naturally, and that seeing me in this state had put them in a world of hurt. This is one of those memories where I remember exactly how I felt and how I reacted. I reacted with an almost faceless expression, silent as though I was waiting for the voice inside me to come out on its own, and indifferent to the point where I didn’t move a muscle. I had no response, physically or emotionally. All I could hear in my head was, “it’s okay, it’s fine, it doesn’t matter”.
The scariest part about depression is how it takes away who you are and your basic humanity, where the ones who suffer are those who have to watch you lose yourself.
Who I Am
My move away from this state came from a great shift in my life – going to university. While this represents a large step for many young people and a great change in their lives, for me, it probably saved me from being depressed. Not only was I in a new environment, I was being taught things that I used to love, I had to critically engage with the some of the existential questions I had been asking myself for so long, rather than simply see the pointlessness of them, and most importantly, I met new people and discovered new things that took me outside of the world of my own head. It was so easy for me to devolve into the state I did when nothing external could influence me, but when you have to interact with the world and the world interacts with you, at least for me, I escaped a state of mind I never thought I’d get out of.
Celeste really tries to encapsulate the feeling that significant change can go a long way to changing your depression. Madeline seeks out Celeste mountain as she’s looking to escape her current life, where she has been becoming increasingly anxious, irritable, discontent and full of self-doubt. Throughout the game, Madeline occasionally runs into the Old Woman, who sarcastically jabs at Madeline’s prospects of successfully reaching the summit, while also preaching the powers that the mountain holds. Madeline is also haunted by an alter-ego reflection, Badeline, who’s constant attempts to derail Madeline’s actions and verbal and emotional attacks fill her with more and more self-doubt and anxiety. As you progress through the game, Madeline increasingly comes to terms with the fact that Badeline is not something that she can simply escape from, but a part of who she is that can be used to help propel her passion, love and confidence – a revelation culminated in the game’s final passage where the entire mountain is scaled in one fell swoop by the harmony and cooperation of both Madeline and Badeline. The power of Celeste mountain is nothing supernatural, but that Celeste provides clarity, showing truisms about who you are, and how you can find meaning and purpose amongst the darkness of self-doubt, depression and anxiety.
For me, being removed from the place of all the bad times and struggles I had experienced was what saved me from being depressed for what may have been my entire life.
Final Thoughts
If some of what I’ve written seems contradictory, it’s because it is. Depression isn’t an ideology or a theory where your thoughts are dictated by logical and systematic decisions, it is a state of mind where your person changes significantly and cannot be thought of as something that just naturally “makes sense”. I’m very lucky to have been able to change my life and get out of depression. It has made me who I am today, and, knowing that I cannot get back the time I lost, it has given me the determination to make up for it.
Depression is different for each individual, and I can see why so many struggle with depression as a life long issue, many aren't able to change their lives for a variety of reasons - even with undergoing large changes in one's life, for many, there is no “quick fix”. If you haven’t experienced depression, it can be very difficult to understand what it is like, and that can make it difficult for those suffering. I’m not sure if we will ever truly understand depression, as it is so individual and takes so many forms. I certainly do not have all the answers.
This may not have been the cheeriest discussion to end the new year, but I wanted to get my experience told in a way that I could hopefully help some people understand. Seeing as how this blog has become a predominantly gaming blog, I saw it fit to introduce the wondrous Celeste as an excellent representation of mental health in video games, with its ability to capture the difficulties and complexities of a subject that is so frustrating to come to terms with. This year has been tough, and I have no doubt depression will be prevalent for many people this year, made worse by the distinct lack of social contact and social support. But if there’s something we can take away from this year, I hope it’s that we will reassess what our priorities should be. The pressures people are put under are too great and too far reaching, and Covid-19 has only exposed those issues. I hope that in the years to come we can place a greater emphasis on ensuring and supporting mental health, so that we don’t all have to climb our Celeste just to be free from depression.
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