Last Night, The Warcraft Community Did Great!

This morning, as I do every morning, I scrolled back in my Twitter timeline to where I'd left off reading yesterday. It was a bit of a mega scroll back as I'd gone to meet my fella from the train station and then didn't even glance at Twitter for the rest of the evening.

I'm glad I missed everything that happened though - it's a little too close to home for me to deal with in real time but this morning when I was reading 10 hour old tweets, it still hit home. In case you missed it, someone posted a picture of a pile of pills and a message that indicated something crazy was about to go down.

I moan about drama llamas on Twitter sometimes but this didn't seem like anything to joke about. The tweets in response were all immediately supportive, calling for the poster to respond please. There were so many, even in my own timeline and I don't follow the person who started it all but it was heartening to see so many jump in to try to help.

I don't know who it was in the end but someone managed to get real life details for the original poster and Twitter and Blizzard were contacted too to see if they could do anything. Luckily, the emergency services were called and made it in time to help. This morning, I'm glad to see a response from the original poster on Reddit and I'm also pleased to see so many heartfelt comments and replies and over 600 upvotes. The relief on my twitter feed is almost palpable!

It's at times like these that seeing this 'community' come together to help, reinforces my own belief that there is good in everyone - even the trolls and dickwads who inhabit the internet have a little decency left in them. A last minute, desperate plea for help was heard across the world in our small part of the internet and something good came out of it - a life was saved. That's pretty amazing to me.

I've had my own battles with depression and flirted with suicide as a teenager. Life wasn't so hard back then, I just didn't know how to deal with it at the time. Now life is throwing curveballs at a regular rate but from somewhere, I have found the strength to deal with them. Maybe it's maturity, having someone who understands exactly how depression works along side me or just experience but so far, I'm winning the current battles.

The trick I've found is baby steps - break everything down into manageable pieces. That may mean hanging on & just breathing for the next 10 minutes or it may be get through the morning at work. Once that baby step is achieved, it's onto the next baby step - breathe for another 10 minutes then repeat. At some point, you will look up and realise you've got through a whole day or a whole week and looking back, it wasn't that bad after all. That gives me the strength to keep taking those baby steps - in the famous words of Dory "just keep swimming". It works, it really does and when it doesn't work, give yourself permission to retreat to your bed or to cry for 5 minutes then restart taking those baby steps.


(500 Word Challenge - Day 15 word count 560)

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