You Can't Speedrun Healing

Prologue

[Please read the warning and trigger warnings left in the description. This short story contains 18+ content. It was created with no intentions to make sense or be an enjoyable read, but rather to help heal from trauma in a way the author feels most connected to.]

You always hear that victims will feel ashamed of what happened, and if you're like me you wondered why. Why were they ashamed when it wasn't their fault? Why would they not tell police about it and not report the crime for many, many years until after it's too late to put the culprit behind bars? And then you'd wonder why there was a time limit on crime anyways because time doesn't make you less guilty.

It turns out that I can't explain where the shame comes from, exactly. I can point fingers at society all I want, but I'll never actually know for sure. All I know is from day one after it happened, every part of me wanted to keep it hidden away and buried. It was the secret I didn't tell anyone while it destroyed my life and made me feel completely numb to the world. But as long as nobody else knew it happened, I told myself I'd be okay.

Then when it happens more than once, you start to question what you're doing wrong. You wonder if some deity wants to watch you suffer or if you deserved it. You convince yourself that it was your fault because how else could it happen multiple times? So of course, I buried it deeper.

"Okay chat, do you think I'm gonna get a sub 40 on this run? If I hadn't messed up literally everything and got a better spawn I probably could've got it last run instead of my hour and a half time," I scoffed as I started my latest speedrun attempt of Subnautica. Most people told me they'd go insane if they had my job of speedrunning games on Twitch all day, but I didn't mind the endless grind for faster times. I didn't mind playing a game for thousands of hours, but I rarely felt any emotions anymore. I could fake realistic reactions for the camera all day, but I always really felt empty. I wasn't the same since it'd happened, anyways.

Somebody told me to just swim faster, so I laughed a bit while also sighing. This 'somebody' was my self identified number one fan by the username of K1TTYC0D3R, but we just called him Cody. In a sarcastic tone I replied, "Thanks for the advice Cody, I never would've thought of just going faster."

This run was off to a great start, but once I started getting towards the middle I was having poor RNG. I still tried to salvage the run anyways, but I ended up getting a final time of 40:56:29. That was nearly 40 seconds slower than my current PB, ouch. I was about to start a new game when my phone pinged to notify me of a new text. Chat told me to check my notification before doing the next run, so I did.

My roommate had asked me if I wanted anything at the DQ they'd be going to shortly, so I replied to them with my usual order. Before I was done I got a second
text that chat wanted me to read as well, so I did.

As soon as I'd read the contents of the new text, I was absolutely horrified. I started to tremble, which made me glad I didn't have a facecam. If anyone saw how visibly upset I was right now, chat probably would've started asking questions or telling me to stop the stream to deal with my personal life. I chose to not respond to the second text, laughed, and said, "Second text was just spam, guys. And I think we've had a decent little break here, so let's hop right into another try at that sub 40."