How RPGs gave me hope

I Kept GMing While My World Fell Apart

Last year, I went through a really bad period of my life. I was dealing with severe anxiety, tinnitus, a brain tumour, and an overwhelming sense that I was becoming someone I no longer recognised. Work lost meaning. Reading turned to fog. Some days I couldn’t get out of bed. But I kept doing one thing: running roleplaying games.

Not because I needed distraction and not to escape. But because when I was GMing, I wasn’t that wreck of a person clinging to reassurance. I wasn’t begging for comfort or trying to explain my pain. I could be what I believed to be a truer version of myself: someone who created, listened, adjusted. Someone who offered something to others.

At the worst point, I asked my wife and children to play Vaesen with me every single day. I didn’t want therapy, I didn’t want to talk about my symptoms, I wanted a world we could build together. I wanted to be a version of myself they could still relate to. Not the anxious, exhausted wreck they saw every day, but the GM who built stories, voiced characters, interweaved plot threads, and made the fictional world feel alive.

That wasn’t an escape from reality. It was in fact the most real part of my day.

What matters in RPGs isn’t just the plot or the mechanics. It’s the people. The shared moment. The way the table lets you connect without pressure. You don’t need to explain your life. You just need to show up and play. And when it’s good, the game becomes a quiet agreement, a powerful shared world of imagination.

Playing a character gives you space. The mask doesn’t hide who you are. It frees you to act without the weight of your personal story. You’re not stuck being the person others expect. You get to respond, improvise, take risks. And that feels more honest than real life.

And because everyone is stepping into a fictional world, the usual roles fall away. It doesn’t matter if you’re sixteen or sixty, rich or broke, confident or awkward. No one is at home in the game world. We’re all new to it. We’re all learning how to live there. We are all responsible to keep it alive. And that makes the space more equal than most things in real life.

GMing isn't about control or power. It is about attention. You listen for what the players need. You try to make the world feel meaningful for them. You set aside your own preferences to shape something they can step into fully. And here’s the strange part: if they’re enjoying it, if they’re feeling something—fear, joy, sorrow, awe—it echoes back. Their emotions reach you. The connection keeps you going. GMing is an exercise in empathy. 

I ran games with family, friends, strangers. And often, the strangers became friends. And when they were already friends, the games deepened our bonds, like a team that’s been through a lot t together. Not war, sure, but something that leaves a mark.

RPGs don’t solve your problems. They don’t give you definitive answers. But they do give you a place to act like the world listens, and sometimes, to find out that it does. That is why they create meaning and hope in me. 

Not because they are fiction. But because the fiction is shared.

PS: going through this phase where I could not cope with my disease has led me to embrace my natural tendency to philosophise, which in the past I did not take seriously. If you’re interested in the deeper philosophical development of my ideas around meaning, and why I believe that reaching toward others matters even when nothing feels certain, I explore it in my  short essay “Reaching across the solipsistic void”, published at the Essentia Foundation.