Shoulder to Lean On

Drowning

TW: skipping meals (starvation, E.D.), nightmares, fainting/passing out

Dream felt awful.

Mentally, physically, emotionally. Everything felt jumbled and clouded and it hurt.

He knew why of course; this wasn't a new feeling. It wasn't like he could be surprised at any of this. Like he could pretend he didn't cause it. He wished he could blame all of his problems on outside sources so he didn't have to own up to the fact that he was the only thing making him miserable.

Dream honestly had a pretty amazing life. He was twenty-one, already moved out and living in his own house. He had skipped college and gone straight into a career and ended up playing video games with his best friends for money. A very decent chunk of money, at that. And speaking of his friends, they were always wonderful and supporting and they made him stay up till 3am laughing his guts out every other night.

So why did he still have days where the emptiness consumed him? Where the pressure of his "easy" YouTube job became too much and despite being on a voice call with Nick or George or even Bad almost 24/7 he still felt a crushing loneliness, and despite having all of the money and expensive gaming equipment a young man could want he felt a sense of loss, of something missing. He was so successful, yet he felt like a failure. So many people adored him, so obviously he was a likeable person. So why couldn't he like himself?

He didn't say anything to George or Nick. He wasn't even sure he had anything to say. It all sounded so stupid if you said it out loud. It sounded like he was complaining, or like he was ungrateful for all of the blessings in his life. He also didn't want it to sound like they weren't enough for him. George and Nick meant everything to him. His close friends who lived so unbearably far away. The voice calls helped. He even Facetimed Nick occasionally.

He didn't know why he had never offered to Facetime George. Or even Skype him or something. One of his closest friends had never even once seen his face, except for a picture of him as a four-year-old in a costume. Most people would consider that insanely weird, but for George and Clay it was just normal. Natural.

Refusing to show George his face had started out as a joke, a way to tease him. He was planning on showing his face to George at some point and had been waiting for the right time. A prize for winning a Minecraft challenge? A perfect meme opportunity? He didn't know what he was waiting for, but he felt like he would know when the time came.

That playfulness had morphed into something else entirely, something dangerously irrational. Clay was struggling a lot, and one of the things he held on to was thinking about how happy George would be to finally see his face. That was something that helped get him through some of those bad days. He knew that he had something worth staying for... that even if his personality drove all his friends away, they'd stick around to see his face. His excitement eventually turned into a sick sort of dread. What if it wasn't everything he hoped it to be? What if George wasn't all smiley and blushing and happy? What if he was disappointed?

Clay didn't know when this all started. Being an online entertainer is always rough. You have a large and adoring audience, but you also have to deal with a tough crowd sometimes and even haters. Hate comments were easy to ignore at first, he was young and excited and confident and he was having a blast doing things he enjoyed and slowly gaining success. It was only when his success became so solid that he should never have to worry about what a small minority of people thought of him that he started to worry a lot.

Plenty of comments rolled in. People saying that he was too cocky, that he was arrogant, that he was rude to his friends, that he was creepy as a Hunter, that it was boring when he won all the time and that he should let his friends win more. People commenting that he wasn't funny, that they didn't get the hype over his rapidly growing channel, that he cheated on speedruns, that his videos were unoriginal and his coding was easy and boring. He had even received death threats.