Let me first take the time to say that this is detailing my experience. I can’t speak for anyone else, nor can I offer any advice to any particular condition. I can only speak to what has worked for me and maybe encourage you to do the same. I first need you to understand the place I was at mentally and emotionally before I discovered Skyrim and why it turned out to be so important to my life.

I am 28 years old and have suffered from mental illness since I was 17. What exactly I’ve been diagnosed with and how it got there is not important. No, the most important thing is that for the majority of my late teens and early 20s, I would suffer through a range of symptoms from crippling panic attacks to not being motivated enough to even turn over in bed. At first, everyone told me it was puberty. I was moody, unpredictable, cried almost constantly, and had an overwhelming feeling of dread that something was coming after me, even though nothing was. But, I was also 17 and starting my senior year of high school, so isn’t that kind of the M.O.?

I knew something wasn’t right though. It started with my dreams, which had always been awesome. I have been able to lucid dream since I was a little kid, which means I was able to control what my dream-self did and where I went. When I started reading Harry Potter, I couldn’t wait to go to sleep and dream of adventures with Harry and Hagrid and the rest of the gang.

Slowly, however, my dreams became nightmares. The comforting control was replaced with panicked running—from what I didn’t know yet—and I would either be in complete darkness aside from the road I was running on (Picture 11 in Stranger Things when she does that sensory deprivation thing) or in some dark forest where everything was essentially a demon. Demon trees, demon grass, demon animals—you get the picture.

After the control of my dreams was taken, control over my emotions went next.

I had always been emotional in all forms. If I was happy, I was really happy. If I was sad, it would feel like I had been forced to watch six hours of the Sarah Mclachlan “Angel” ASPCA commercials. If I was angry, well I am also a redhead, Irish, and a Scorpio, so anger management were not two words I wanted to hear together. Again, that all was slowly replaced with most days feeling like nothing. It was like seeing the world underwater; sounds were muffled, my views were distorted, I felt like I couldn’t breathe properly, and I began to give up all of the things I loved doing because it was hard enough not to drown. It was at this point that I think my mom knew something wasn’t right either, so she took me to see a therapist.

My therapist was a pleasant looking woman with long brown hair in a tight bun at the nape of her neck, a mechanical pencil and yellow legal pad in her hands, and, most importantly, the most blank, emotionless expression I had ever seen. I went to her for the majority of my senior year. (She was one of the only therapists covered under my mom’s insurance.) After a couple of months, the sessions started to help.

She encouraged me to start writing in a journal, as I wasn’t comfortable sharing much out loud. She talked to me about my physical health; I was terribly overweight, and my poor diet and zero exercise probably added to my issues. I lost 50 pounds by the middle of the school year and was even brave enough to join choir and robotics club, things I never thought I’d be able to do. One of the best things that came from therapy was dating. I was finally at a good place to start dating, and I eventually found my current boyfriend.

Then, high school graduation was suddenly around the corner, and that was when things went from ok-ish to the flood from Day After Tomorrow—you know, the one that took out the Statue of Liberty? Yeah, that one.

I was panicking at the thought of graduation. My school was the place that had the libraries where I could hide from bullies and get lost in Harry Potter; it was the place that had English and science classes where adults actually listened when you talked—all of that was going away. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life either. My dream school, Stanford, had just rejected my application, and I hadn’t really applied to any other schools because I really didn’t have a lot of money to apply to other schools.

All I knew was that I had no desire to follow in any of my family’s footsteps—we can just say they were all nice enough to show me what not to do in life. Ultimately, all of the problems came flooding back ten-fold. I knew all of my issues might come back one day, but I never thought they would get that bad.

I couldn’t sleep anymore for fear of my nightmares, I could either barely eat or would eat until I got sick, and I spent my entire summer in bed, locked in my room, watching hours and hours of TV. I wasn’t processing anything though. I would watch an episode and have no idea what even happened. My mom would talk to me, and it took so much effort just to keep my eyes open that I couldn’t listen to her. My responses became one word or nods, and after a while, I just stopped speaking altogether.

My therapist had no idea what was causing the relapse, and she grew impatient. The last session I went to, she hinted that I was doing this for attention. I stood up and walked out. I realized that she didn’t really care about me. Everything she knew about me came from books, classes, experience with “similar cases,” and other things to make it one of the fakest relationships I’ve ever had. If she had truly known me, telling me I was doing this for attention would have seemed ludicrous. Why would anyone put themselves through this torture all for something I already got?

After all, when you’re mentally ill, you receive a lot of attention already. Everyone knows about your issues, and everyone thinks they can solve your mental illness by talking to you like you’re a deaf newborn puppy. “And how are we feeling today?” or “Oh, I see you painted a picture of a mountain, good job, wow, look at you holding the paintbrush all by yourself.” And I would always think to myself, “I’m crazy, not a toddler.” I then tried a variety of self-help suggestions until I knew it was time to try medication.

Of course, every doctor on the planet seemed to get excited once I was willing to try meds. Honestly, that should have been a red flag, but I was desperate not to feel like this anymore.

The cocktail of drugs they immediately put me on did help with my anxiety and lack of motivation because I became numb to everything and felt like a completely different person. There are things still from those long months that I don’t remember. Life events, such as family members passing away and friends getting married and having kids, that I don’t remember at all. I’ll get foggy snippets of things I think could be real, but mostly my memories from that time were constructed through my boyfriend and mom telling me the stories.

My first two years of college—I ended up at a private school in Irvine that gave me a scholarship—were foggy as well; I passed all of my gen-ed requirements though. I don’t know if that’s a compliment to me or a knock against the education system for being too easy, but, either way, I was still able to pass.

The side effects were probably the worst, and I am very sensitive to them. You know in those commercials for drugs, how they will list a bunch of horrific side effects like bleeding, kidney failure, suicidal thoughts, your brain falling out, etc? Yes, I think I experienced all of them. Once again, people did not believe me. Luckily, though, it didn’t matter because I was an adult, and if I didn’t want to take the pills anymore, I didn’t have to. I gave it my best shot for two years, but I was getting worried for my own safety, so I stopped immediately and never went back.

Now, we made it to my 25th birthday, which is when my boyfriend bought me The Elder Scrolls V. It is an action role-playing video game in the open world of Skyrim. I had played the other Elder Scrolls games a few times at department stores or at friends’ houses but never in a serious way. I was curious about this new game as it claimed to be one of the largest worlds on the market in video games.

My boyfriend said the guy at GameStop couldn’t talk about anything else, so I loaded up the game and played the introductory mission. The first couple of hours of gameplay are fairly standard: you learn the premise of the game, you find some clothes, weapons, food, etc., and you receive instructions for your next mission in the campaign. However, as soon as that mission was over and I was left to my own devices, that was when my life changed.

Video games have always been something I enjoyed a lot—more so as a distraction from the day-to-day than a hobby. But Skyrim offered me something that I was seriously missing in my regular life: control. I had full control over where my character went. I designed her to look like me, a red-haired Nord. She could do ANYTHING. She could become a mage at the magic school, a thief with the guild, an assassin with the Dark Brotherhood, or even a hero to save the entire world. Suddenly, I had something to look forward to every night going to sleep.

I would dream of my awesome kick-ass Dragonborn Warrior Mage. She was unstoppable, and slowly over time, I felt like I could be as well.

I would play for hours, getting lost in the forests hunting or exploring mines, or looting caves. The world was so endless that my anxiety seemed to get swept away and replaced with a giddy sense of freedom. My character was not crippled by any mental issues like I was. She was strong and confident. She became a second voice in my head, someone to combat the really bad voice in my head telling me to freak out at every possible second and that I would never get through this. She was my champion. She taught me that I didn’t need therapy or medication; instead, I could save myself, and all I needed was her bravery.

One Saturday I was out with some friends trying to be social. A friend’s favorite band was playing at a small local club,  and she begged us all to go. In the middle of the show, it suddenly became extremely crowded. My anxiety kicked in full force and fast. I became sweaty, my heart raced, my eyes began an endless jump from one face to another panic-stricken that they were bad people, and I felt like the walls were growing closer threatening to trap me. I pushed my way out of there as fast as I could.

As soon as I was outside, I reached for my phone to call an Uber. I could barely type my address my hands were shaking so badly and my mind still felt trapped inside that club. While waiting for the car, I opened Safari to try to distract myself so I wouldn’t pass out. It was there that I saw a page I was looking at the night before—it was a question about how to become a werewolf in Skyrim. The strangest thing started to happen: I began to relax. It was if a slow wave of calm washed over me. After a few seconds of reading the article, I began to breathe steadier, my hands stopped shaking, my heart rate slowed, and the sense of dread was replaced with excitement.

I knew I was going to go home and play. It was that moment that I got an idea to create my own health plan based on my love of Skyrim. It literally saved my life.

Now, at 28, I have been able to manage my symptoms for three years. I force myself to make time for the things I love doing that put me in a happy place. It sounds terribly cliché, but it really helps. If your mind is in a state of contentment, it is easier to confront negative thoughts. You can look at them objectively and ask yourself if this is a reasonable response to a certain situation.

I play Skyrim at least one hour a night after I come home from work. I have also added exercise for two hours, as there is a large national forest in the back of my house, and I started exploring it. Like my Warrior Mage counterpart, I wanted to get in better shape to feel strong and capable, something I had lost all those months laying in bed or in my brain fog.

I no longer wanted to feel like a victim in my own body and mind, constantly struggling the urge to punish myself or get lost in thoughts of anxiety about my future, my boyfriend leaving, or any of the normal fears adults have but are amplified in my head. I also finally became brave enough to start writing, which had always been a great passion of mine. I first wrote on gaming forums for Skyrim, but after some positive feedback, I started to branch out and write for a few different websites, this one included.

Without a doubt, Skyrim changed my life. I will always cherish the confidence the game gave me and the influence it had on the rest of my life. I became a new person, more like my brave Nord counterpart and less like the dark persona that pervaded every part of my brain for so long.

If you are suffering from any kind of anxiety, or the other end of the spectrum and hardly feel anything at all, and therapy and medications just don’t seem to work for you, I would try video games. I am not a healthcare professional by any means, but it truly helped me, and if you can find even a few minutes of peace playing in a fantastical world of magic and sword fighting, isn’t it worth it? So what do you say, Dragonborn?