“the piano player’s playing ‘this must be the place’ and it’s a miracle to be alive”
i wrote this the night of january 23rd and was deeply unsatisfied with the direction i was taking the ending. it felt dissonant with recent emotions i had been feeling and seemed rooted in thoughts and ideals i had come up with over the past year that i couldn’t back up in the moment. since then, i think that my emotional and mental state has worsened in respect to this topic and yet, upon rereading, i know that i do still agree with it on a deeply personal level. i trust the guy that came up with the thoughts (he’s me after all) and so i’ll leave it unedited. due to all of this however, this piece is unfinished and the pacing is off. i’m finding it resonates a lot at the moment though and thus i’m publishing it, as it also gives me a reason to write new things to push this one down the list. thanks for reading it despite it’s brutish state. april me, over and out.
–everything below this line was written the night of january 23, 2026–
heads up, this is something different. writing exercise to an extent. feels raw to put out. interpret this as you wish.
I struggle with loneliness a lot. It’s not something I talk about with most people, and when I do, it’s incredibly infrequent. After all, I’ve got plenty of friends, so it’s a silly thing to say, isn’t it? It comes and goes in waves for the most part. To be extremely clear — I handle myself and my emotions with enough care that there is no need to worry, this is not about depression or any urge to move to the afterlife. However, it can become quite the detriment as time goes on. Overthinking interpersonal relationships, excluding yourself because an errant thought tells you you’re being excluded by them, and suddenly it seems there’s no one to approach anymore… why is no one reaching out to me? Were these people ever truly my friends, or do they just keep me around because it’s convenient?
Of course, these thoughts don’t hold up. I wake up the next day, the fear has dissipated. Life once again continues as normal. Rarely, it becomes a longer term thought and I’ll work through it a bit more. Always, it comes, it goes. A while back though, I struggled a lot more with this. This became most evident during the holidays right before my 20th birthday.
At this point in time, I’m living at college. I’ve got two roommates that, while plenty friendly, were dating at the time and extraordinarily intimidating for me to interact with. Classes are piling up. I haven’t been attending. It’s not a question — I’m going to fail them. Toss in the fact that my current best friend is someone online that doesn’t know she’s my best friend… it’s not looking bright. Sure, you can thank the pandemic for a portion of this (we’re looking at the end of 2021 here!), but this largely reads like a high schooler who desperately failed to adjust to life on their own. The important problem lies in the fact that, while I’ve been dealing with some concerns over friendships and similar topics for a bit at this point, the intensity really ramps up. Everything combined leads to a feeble attempt at maintaining a positive outlook on things, yet this is my first time really having to deal with this. I struggle to reason out that the thought process explained before is poisoned. After all, everyone has lives, everyone is going through their own battles, and everyone has a spiderweb of relationships — just because someone doesn’t check in with you doesn’t mean they hate your guts, they just simply aren’t able to include another dear friend in their budget that barely manages to work as is. It’s hard to say it’s selfish to keep yourself above water rather than drown with someone else.
This logic doesn’t come. I haven’t told anyone this, but the 2022 New Year started with me sitting alone, idly staring across a pond, listening to a beautifully sad song I love with an opening lyric of “That was the last New Year I’ll ever see.” A bit on the nose for sure, I wasn’t quite subtle back then. It’s important to note here, this is as bad as it gets. It’s impossible for me to see the shore when sailing in the eye of the storm, but I’ll soon navigate through it and end up stronger than I started. However, this isn’t a process that starts on its own.
You’ve probably read the title and are wondering how it ties into the content. For any unaware, SethBling was an early Minecraft video creator. He still makes an occasional project here and there, but largely it’s a thing of the past. A lot of people like to attribute to various works, including YouTube videos, “this piece saved my life and got me through a hard time.” I’m pointing this out here because it largely is not what I’m aiming to look at. Instead, I believe I do owe Seth, but rather for something a lot more subtle.
One could argue his influence began early on and shaped my view of computer science. It’s hard to say if this can be attributed to him specifically, as Minecraft largely did form a lot of my early experience programming, but any specific people are difficult to distinguish in the gray blob of memories from the time. Rather, I’d like to point to an event he ran in November 2021 titled ‘SethBling’s Final Video‘. It’s part of a charity livestream. No context otherwise. It’s intriguing. I tune in. Seth has made an escape room.
I’d been intrigued by the idea of escape rooms before this. At this time, I’d played a single escape room myself and thoroughly enjoyed the Zero Escape franchise that had gameplay centered on them. However, my curiosity had always remained unsated. Largely, this is both the beginning and ending of Seth’s involvement at this point. The contents of the room didn’t matter much, it comprised of some neat homemade props and such, but wasn’t anything extremely out of the ordinary. In spite of this, it resonates with me. I quickly take charge in my friend group, “Putting myself in charge of planning a winter break get together,” I state as I begin the planning phase. Ideas bud and sprout. If he can make an escape room, so can I. I enlist one person for help with it and begin drafting ideas. Largely, this goes off without a hitch and is thoroughly successful. With a solid potluck and Secret Santa event, I’ve thrown my first Christmas party and, in the process, massively shifted the way I view interpersonal relationships.
The escape room was the start for me, but the entire party itself is what truly mattered in the scheme of things.
Similar to the rest of this, the escape rooms themselves never mattered. It’d be great to delve into the specifics around physical interactive entertainment compared to digital media (and I probably will at some point!), and it’s certainly a neat idea to think about the fact that through the chain of events, SethBling helped me get a job making a commercial escape room, but again, this is not what I’m exploring. I’ve gone on to run a Christmas party every year, amongst other various events. While part of it comes from a selfish entertainer POV, a large portion exists solely because of what I encountered from that first party. Being able to bring people together in ways that they otherwise would never be able to experience… it’s the proof I’ve needed that no one is malicious in their silence. Every single party, I don’t see people showing up out of convenience for free food. I see everyone genuinely excited to see their friends. There is not a single person show up that I’ve seen any contempt for, nor have I seen someone go unnoticed.
Ultimately, the escape rooms are just an excuse to get people together and having a good time. Rather, seeing the connection between friends grow over the night is what has revolutionized my view on the world. Knowing that deep down, no matter how it may come off or appear, people thoroughly care about their friends (even though they rarely show it), it helps me sleep at night. It helps me in the rough patches where I feel incredibly isolated. People are busy, and so am I. There’s no fault in that. When the path is clear though, they’ll continue to use it until you close it off yourself.