Today, Dan decided to stay in his room. He does this sometimes. Stay in his room for days, almost refusing to eat. I try and send him food. But, he never eats. He says he is fine but I see he isn't. I can hear him cry sometime those days. It is quiet but when there is no other noise and you are scared, you hear everything.
Then, after some days he comes out of his room and eats everything in the kitchen. And he begins to smile again. But he still slowly becomes himself. it is very sad to see him dip into that state and come out fine.
Dan never admitted to that and when we went to events while while he was in that slump it made it worst after because during he had to not act like it.
I would ask him when I would bring him food how he feels. He would always answer "just tired." and I would leave him be. He would always be covered in his blankets and his laptop at his side, either on or off.
It was hard to see him that way, but he never told me how to help, and I had no idea how to. He didn't want help, even though I could have. I knew what he had, he may have denied it, but I knew. He called it an "existential crisis" so everyone laughed instead of wonder what was wrong. He made fun of it, like most comics, but it only masked the problem.
One month the down lasted longer and I almost never saw him awake, but he never wanted help. After that time he never acted the same. His normal self was like him functioning during the downs. I had no idea what was going on. Until I finally looked.
A couple years before we decided to do a prank for April Fools and it needed to be planned months before, Valentine's day to be exact. It was more out of my character but not to much to not look like a prank but still look like a prank. We probably thought to hard about but we were determined! This was going to be great. Weel, Youtube was in its early stages so everything was a work in progress, so we planted the prank on Valentine's day and wait. Well, youtube updated and some weird thing happened and well, it got unprivate and it wasn't even April Fools yet. Oddly, I didn't get much problems from that, but I never realised what dan got.
Dan got the brunt of all of it. His brother was almost force by all our viewers to deactivate all his social media accounts and if he didn't he changed his name. Dan never told me so I never got the whole story. But of what I could gather is that everyone was bullying him, Adrian is his name, and he had enough and dan and him never talk because of it. If Martin had troubles during this, he handled it well. I never knew about it.
That is about when I realized he started to have the downs or his "existential crisis" but I never thought twice about it. But now that I realised it everything pieced together. Dan started to get far away from me, did things on his own, and others things I should have realized. I almost feel bad now. It wasn't my idea or my fault that he is now depressed. It was a group effort to have an April Fools joke but neither of us could have stopped youtube's problem.
We never talked about it ever again. I the most worried he would hit a deeper depression. I worried I would lose a friend, and I never wanted to. I deleted the video as soon as I realized the pain it had caused him. I was scared it may be brought up again and I would lose him.
I did everything I could to protect him during 2012. This was the worst year we ever went through, and I didn't want it to be the last. Somehow we got through it. And we might as well be brothers after that.
I could never have thought something so bad could become so good.