Saturday Update - Espoir's Story

I want to make this update a little different, since I don’t have much to say about this week.

I want to talk about why I made my username “Espoir du vide” (hope of the Void)

I want to make a video about it someday, in fact I’ve written the script for it three times now, but it just feels uncomfortable remembering it because I’d want to find images that represent the things I went to. (I may end up making a voice over video that just has unrelated gameplay of something)

So I want to tell a chunk of that story here! Content warning, there will be mentions of suicide and depression, but also hope and overcoming it.

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TL:DR

I got super depressed over several year because of everything and wanted to make a game before I died but the game gave me the HOPE to keep going, and although I was still struggling with depression I took a chance and made a youtube channel, and plus I was learning French because of musician named STROMAE, so I put Hope in the phrase l'appel du vide and called myself ESPOIR du vide!

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So why the French?

Sometime in 2014-2015 I watched Markiplier play the game OFF. I noticed how the art in the game looked like pencil drawings straight from the paper and I thought “i could totally do that”. So I started making a game in RPG MAKER that would be hand drawn in pen and have an almost Tim Burton style. Games like Yume Nikki as well as FNAF were starting to become really popular as well so I wanted to make a “storybook horror” game.

A while back I had the urge to draw a boy character that had a feminine name and the name/song Aloutte popped into my head (probably inspired by the game La Pucelle Tactics?). I knew I wanted Alouette to look frail but cute and I also had a thing for Plague Doctors and wanted to draw something like a “baby plague doctor” as if they were a kind of creature. And thus Alouette was born.

So I also realized that I never learned the translation for the song Gentille Alouette and when I looked it up, it was definitely something that could become a storybook horror! An innocent bird slowly losing its eyes, beak, feet, and wings?! Granted I’m sure the bird is already dead and it’s just a cooking song (right?). But that sounds like a cool horror rpg maker game concept right?!

At the time I also got big into a musician named STROMAE, he is by far one of my favorite musicians! Please look him and his music up! To understand his music a bit more, I started learning French from an audiobook in my spare time. I also wanted French words to be scattered through the game as a small tribute to the developer of OFF who is from Belgium as well.

But Things were starting to get very bad very fast

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Depression and The “Void”

Ever since I was very little, I was a people pleaser, I put others wants and needs before my own and always gave more than I had. Most millennials will tell you that we were taught to basically work ourselves to death and be thankful for it. I grew up thinking that, if I was nice to everyone and didn’t have any real needs of my own, and took care of everyone, and worked harder than I could manage then I would, I don’t know, be a good person, or get something in the end?

And here’s where it gets hard to write because it involves people close to me. I felt ignored by my friends, I felt like my parents didn’t want me, and I felt like the world was taking advantage of me. 

I love to listen to other people’s passions, I love to learn about the world in their heads. but whenever I tried to open up like that, no one seemed to want to listen♠ 

I felt betrayed by my father who only seemed to care about me when I was doing what he wanted for me♦ 

I felt that if I wasn’t everything everyone needed all the time, than no one would love me, but all that got me was taken advantage of♥

And slowly I started to get it in my head that everything I believed and all the positivity that I tried to hold onto, and the future I thought I wanted was all hopeless♣

The biggest blow was from my previous job. For 2 years it was a dream job, I had so many friends and I felt confident about working there forever. But I was basically tricked into working in a department that was plagued by problems, and I know it was a manipulative trick because I saw the same thing happen to someone else. I was told it would be temporary, I was told I had a choice to go there, but I ended up in that terrible department for 7 years, becoming a permanent employee there without any of my consent.

I was bullied relentlessly by a new hire with anger issues who was mostly hired through nepotism, and it wasn’t just me but basically everyone else in the department. Everyday for nearly 5 years I was in extreme survival mode, trying to “tough it out” as people I trusted told me to do but ignoring how sickly I was becoming. And when that person went away for a year, the supervisor, who hired me in the first place, who became a good friend to me, whom I trusted, started bullying me and the others as well, completely abusing her power. (She even called me racist because I was calling out the dude’s bullying).

All these realizations “shattered my heart”, all my optimism left me and it was at that point depression really set in. I adopted a new phrase in french. “abandonnez tout espoir, vous qui entrez ici”. It became a mantra every day I dragged myself to that place. Because what was I going to do, not have a job, and all the negativity that society puts on jobless “lazy” people?

Over time the depression just spread, and eventually I wandered about just disappearing. I felt betrayed by every person that I loved and alone, and the worst part of it all was that my own inner world, the OCs I had developed through the years as a means of coping, was starting to disappear. I was starting to just forget the characters that helped me cope throughout my childhood, and my imagination was left a colorless wasteland. I seriously considered suicide. If living meant suffering at work and then suffering at home, what was the point?

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A Deal with the void

It was sometime around 2017, I started acting like a doll. No one really noticed the change in my behaviour. If I was fired for not caring so be it, I was going to die anyway. I was sure I wouldn’t live to see 2018. So sure in fact that I frequently sold a lot of my belongings and started saving up money, possibly for a funeral. 

But I started to really enjoy not caring. For once I didn’t put others’ needs above my own, for once I truly didn’t give a single “F”! No one listened to anything I said anyway, so I could say whatever I wanted, really it wasn’t until my thirties that I started actually cursing.

But the Void still had its claws in me, the thought of dying, or “l'appel du vide”, was still pretty strong.

So I made a deal with the “Void”.

I was going to make a game that spells out all of my traumas and feelings, and if I still felt this bad by the time I finished it, then after it was uploaded somewhere I would kill myself. Edgy I know, but depression is dangerous. Perhaps deep, deep down I knew this would save my life because I KNOW I rarely ever finish games and that I’d have a loooong time to get better!

So I went back to Gentille Alouette and changed the story completely.

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ESPOIR

Over the course of several years working on Alouette, I created characters that experienced trauma similar to mine, I put the things I loved into this game, and so many pieces of “me”. Developing the lore of this world filled my head with new stories and soon, it felt like I had rebuilt my imaginary world and created a newer, stronger family of OCs. So much of my favorite anime Revolutionary Girl Utena was in this game, and coming up with the symbolism, learning about french playing cards, learning the french names of birds for characters’ names was so much…fun. I was having fun again!

Alouette is a very small, weak, ugly little bird child and everyone isn’t shy about letting him know that. He’s unfairly mocked by Milo, another main character, and disregarded by older characters. Yet I wanted one character who wholeheartedly believed in and cared for Alouette.

In that phrase “abandonnez tout espoir, vous qui entrez ici” there’s a word I picked out from it, “Espoir”, hope. Almost everyone in the game has a bird’s name, but I wanted this one character to be Hope, perhaps the embodiment of Hope. 

Espoir is an idiot, hands down, she cannot read the room, she is an airhead, a moron, a clumsy little nuisance. But she knows this, and she doesn’t care. Despite all this she keeps going. She carries around a letter (that she forgot that she wrote herself) that says “l'espoir ne meurt jamais”.

l'espoir ne meurt jamais

“Hope never dies”

(And because of this, she also thinks that she is some kind of unkillable super hero.)

l'espoir ne meurt jamais slowly became my new mantra. Espoir’s determination inspired me. Because no matter how dark the void is, a small tiny pinprick of light can guide you out of it.

(and I did get out of that incredibly toxic work environment and into a new department)

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Youtube

At some point, still putting in the lowest effort at my job and relationships, a thought crossed my mind that probably saved my life.

If I’m not afraid to die…why should I be afraid to live?

Why should I keep being a nice person to survive? Why should I work hard or work at all? Why should I not say curse words, or let go of people who don’t want to be in my life? Why make myself miserable when I could make myself happy?

January 9, 2021 I started my youtube channel.

I’ve always been very shy, quiet and demure but in a self destructive way. Never would I have had the nerve to put myself on youtube and express myself! But I took a chance, and I did. 

I’ve learned that the way I express myself and even my love language is sharing cool stuff I’ve found with my friends, so if anyone wanted to hear what I had to say they could come to my channel and watch my videos, and if they didn’t then they didn’t have to watch. Honestly one of the reasons I did an Undertale playthrough was so I could possibly share this amazing game with my best friend who still hasn’t played it to this day.

At the time, I still felt very isolated, I was still very much in the void. But now I held onto the tiniest shred of Hope that I got back. So I took the phrase “L'appel du vide” , the call of the void and made Espoir du Vide.

I wanted it to be Hope IN the Void but that would be “Espoir dans le Vide”, which doesn’t roll off the tongue as well.

To me, this name means that, while I am positive and hopeful, I am still healing, I am still fighting, but I’ve come a long way and I will never go back to that feeling of wanting to die. I want others who are going through this kind of crisis in their lives to feel Hope as well, to know that this world is so wacky and almost anything can happen.

I always believed that you always get what you put into something, but that isn’t true. Yes, hard work and effort is important, but it’s not a guarantee. Yes the very worst thing can happen, but so can something amazingly great. The only thing you have to do is to choose to keep moving forward and to, above all things, put yourself first. You are all you have and you should treat that you right. 

I’ve heard that you have 2 lives, and the second one starts when you realize you have only one.

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That was a lot!

So now I am in the best time of my life! Things are still a little “uncertain” but I try not to worry about the far future like I used to.

I’ve let a lot of people go, I’m not at that job, and I’m putting effort into those who put effort into me!

I’ve met so many wonderful people like Sleeeeepybug, Epykslion, HelloYinny, Quincel Vtuber (psst, go check out their youtube channels) and so many more, PLUS the wonderful people in my comments!

I truly love every comment I get because that’s effort that someone out there is putting into ME, me of all people!

I’ve gotten so much better at taking care of myself, and most of all setting boundaries! Actually, most MOST of all, I’ve gotten better at saying “no”!

I do get very terrified of my possible future, honestly I always have this feeling that I’m “doing something wrong” or that I’ll “get in trouble” or yelled at. I always feel like I’m behind or not doing enough, or that I don’t deserve all that I have. But that’s just the Void talking, past trauma and trauma responses that are still trying to protect me from dangers that aren’t there.

But I’m happy, and this is fun, and I’ve brightened the days of a bunch of people, which is all 10 year old me really wanted to do when she grew up.

Thank you for being here, thank you for choosing to stay here, thank you for reading!