We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Luis Arroyo a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Luis, sincerely appreciate your selflessness in agreeing to discuss your mental health journey and how you overcame and persisted despite the challenges. Please share with our readers how you overcame. For readers, please note this is not medical advice, we are not doctors, you should always consult professionals for advice and that this is merely one person sharing their story and experience.
If my life was a movie, the screenwriter has used several painful inks, but this year I decided to learn to be the director of this story. Beyond being “the “Gears of War guy”” who has an extremely sarcastic humor that many recognize in the collective memory of the community of the gaming niche on YouTube, Twitch and socials, I have sought to move forward in order to have a life that can lead me to be a healthy person. I have gone through a process of depression that began to become tangible in September 2021 after going through a period of dark months where I found myself getting an addiction to Xanax and alcohol because their effect would allow me to feel comfortable with my own self plus I was able to sleep for long hours avoiding my problems to the point I started to dissociate until one day I fell asleep on a Monday and my roommate woke me up on a Thursday… that’s where I got conscious of the problem I was getting in and it allowed me to start facing my demons, but it was not easy considering that I had work, love and family (big) issues going on at the moment and just a few months after that… I got ran over by a car, and with this, I just want to tell you that it has been years of introspection trying to gather all the pieces of the puzzle that ended up making me a sad person with such a problem of depression. It is worth mentioning that I am very grateful for life because objectively speaking I have had an enormous privilege to be able to face this problem in a condition where work has never lacked for me, and with this comes a wealth of tools that have allowed me to access many experiences over the past years, in addition to the fact that I have had the fortune to gather dear friends whom I have sought to sustain as a fundamental pillar of my life for a couple of years now, when I understood that “anything is possible with a little help from the right people.” A message that not only makes you seek the right people but also makes you seek TO BE the right person for that people in an act of reciprocity with them and with your own life. From traveling around the world thanks to my work and my personal love life, to having access to psychological and philosophical information that has allowed me to get to know myself better and reduce the biases with which we often live without realizing it. Part of this process has led me to start writing an autobiographical book (which I do not plan to publish during my lifetime – at the moment – unless someday I end up becoming someone “famous” or “important” to a considerable extent to think that there are enough people interested enough to read it. But it doesn’t prevent it from being something that perhaps I will let a select group of you read someday for free), the reason for this is that I started writing too much about everything that happens to me in life that has not been easy, and I believe it has been too interesting if someone sees it as a spectator.
At 24 years old, I have been able to harvest some of the most surreal and dystopian experiences that any young person or average human does not live under normal circumstances, and without knowing if it is a punishment or a reward, I have had to experience these things after sowing many good and bad seeds for years. In less than a year, I almost lost my life due to a twist of fate with the Narco of Nuevo Laredo in Mexico, I traveled to the United States and visited almost the entire “east coast” of the country starting with New York with a woman who taught me what it means to “be loved”, I met the creator of the video game that gave me a job along with a career in the gaming and entertainment industry, which was a very cathartic experience. I visited Las Vegas under very privileged circumstances. I traveled to Europe and was able to visit Spain, Germany, Qatar, Armenia, and also Brazil. I lived a year that is undoubtedly one of the best of my existence, and this was not because of the places but because of the people who accompanied me on the journey. From people I met on flights to relationships that by the twists of fate existed as fleeting friendships along with other relationships that have been longer-lasting, leaving a very important mark on my life. This accumulation of experiences has led me to take steps along paths that I didn’t know they existed.
I discovered that life is like being in a vehicle on a road. Not everyone is in the same car, in fact, some are not even in a car. Some are on a bicycle, others on a motorcycle, a cart, a sports car, an economic car, etc. Not all of us go through the same potholes, not all of us make the same stops along the way, sometimes we bring passengers, other times we come with a co-pilot, but the long and important stretches of the road are meant to be traveled alone, and the most important thing is that not all of us go at the same speed and although it seems that we are in a speed race, in reality, each one is in their own endurance race no matter how cliché it may sound. The only thing that is relevant is that we are all headed to the same destination. Death. That makes every kilometer traveled valuable. Depression is the equivalent of suddenly driving that vehicle surrounded by fog without knowing where to go completely alone, afraid of falling off a cliff all the time, feeling like that cliff is in front of you, but unable to verify it and unable to stop because that would cause you to affect the vehicles around you. The lights are not enough to see, and you don’t know when it will end, and the uncertainty that the fuel might run out while the fog is there is overwhelming.
What sets us apart from animals is knowing that we exist and that with each passing moment we are closer to ceasing to exist, a fact that motivates us to seek new ways to manage our “vehicle” on “the road”, this being the representation that we are conscious beings… (some more conscious than others, but we are all to a certain extent by default). And the beauty of this is that this consciousness can be expanded as we grow and live.
One of the most efficient ways for this expansion is one that is also magnificent, complex, sublime, abstract, uncontrollable, satisfying, intrinsic, involuntary, and above all cathartic because of how painful it can be… LOVE. Few things in life can compare to feeling a euphoric love for another being that makes us grow because we know that this growth will allow us to take care of that feeling that is not only ours but is also from that other being who is a half of a whole circle that puts us in many of the most complex paradoxes of the human experience to the point where love becomes this circumstance that while it is more satisfying, it also becomes more dangerous.
Perhaps whoever is reading me at this moment has already gone through an experience similar to what I just described. And whoever hasn’t probably feels that what I am writing at my 24 years of life is cheesier than what you normally would expect from a content creator of a video game like Gears of War.
But if something is real, it is that I feel very comfortable sharing this with you because I know that more than one of you who read this will eventually face growing as a “human being” by expanding your consciousness thanks to a broken heart, the loss of a loved one, depression, or a combination of all of the above. I know it sounds sad and depressing, but I once heard in a song that happy feelings are enjoyed individually, even though we want to share them. But sadness brings together people who suffer from the need we have to not end up alone, even if we don’t want to share it, we do. We are sad and we find that there are more people who feel lonely, helping us realize that we are paradoxically accompanied by more lonely people.
I think that this process of depression that I have experienced in recent years, combined with the loss of loved ones along with a deeply broken heart, allowed me to seek ways to move forward in my life to the point where I was able to meet many of the people who today I know I want to have in my life for as long as possible, appreciating every moment I can live with them. I learned to exercise my mind to be able to live in the present and stop worrying about wanting to control my future because I realized that I punished myself terribly every time those futures were changed, canceled, or frustrated by factors external to me… and I have to clarify that this exercise is something that I continue to seek to practice every day and many times I still fail because it has not been easy for me to structure all this under the context of feeling for a long time in the wrong future. Longing for things that will never happen. Wishing to be with people who, due to their own growth process, have changed so much to the point where the relationship we once had has suffered the erosion of two personalities that were molded until they became incompatible and left me with the ghost of the affection I felt for the person I once loved.
This is not only limited to an ex-girlfriend or a woman with whom I had a romantic or loving interest (which definitely played a very important role as the trigger for all these processes that I have experienced). It also extends to people who, due to illnesses and various circumstances, changed or eliminated close members of my family and friend circle, leading me to experience on more than one occasion a process of mourning generated by “futurealgia”… the nostalgia for a future not lived but that we longed to live. The loss of dreams. The loss of our idealization of ourselves with someone in this life.
I’m still depressed, I struggle with it every day. Part of that struggle is transparent in these kinds of thoughts that invade my mind, and the only thing I have to not keep them (for fear that they will make me sicker than they heal me) is to write them down. This is part of what I have written every day of my life as a therapeutic process since I was ran over by a car in February 2022. I have put thoughts and feelings on paper for people who will never read what I have written to them. And that is painful, but it becomes a very nice process when I read myself again in the future and realize that all this time, I was talking to myself, but at another time in my life. A process that I have somehow replicated in the content I produce on the internet where every time I see an old video, I can remember what I was experiencing the day that video was recorded. I can understand why some people think I am a frequent consumer of drugs like marijuana, but if you have reached this part of this text, you will realize that I have no need or intention to lie to you, and sometimes I would like to abandon my sobriety, but I don’t and I won’t.
I continue to fight against depression and the desire to hasten my death. The people who read or listen to me keep me sane enough to sell myself and buy into the idea that I have a purpose in the lives of the people around me in the real world and in the digital world, regardless of whether I sometimes talk about a deep topic like this or talk about a trivial topic like information about my favorite video game on the internet.
I understood the value behind “one day we are fine and the next we are not, that’s life and that won’t change. Sometimes to smile you have to cry because crying has never been a crime and rainy days are sometimes the most beautiful because they teach us to appreciate with more affection the days when the sun shines, which serve to make you realize that you feel better because the bad days have passed and we just have to trust our best doctor who teaches us every day that since we are not experienced in the things of life, any problem that has some degree of difficulty seems impossible but in reality all we have to do is trust time… because it is the one that gives us sweet solutions to bitter difficulties” as some smarter people than me once said.
Time and love share 1 important characteristic in how they relate to us. That characteristic is that both concepts are far from being understood, but we all believe that we have the ability to master them, and we lie to ourselves thinking that we understand them, but that lie makes us fall in life, which as a consequence makes us learn to get up. I am learning to get up and someday I will return to this type of texts that I wrote to remember what I was experiencing when I was a young man who had the privilege of becoming aware of these types of concepts from my first 24 years of life because today I know that there are people who die without feeling and without understanding these things that seem simple, but they are not. I also learned through hard knocks that here, as much as you love, that’s what you’re worth.
-Luis
Thanks, so before we move on maybe you can share a bit more about yourself?
My name is Luis, but everyone knows me as Wicho on the internet and entertainment industry. I’ve dedicated the past 9 years of my public life to create content for one of the video games that changed many lives around the world: Gears of War. But behind the scenes I have worked on different projects that involve my presence on TV Production, Marketing behind projects all around the world and most recently I became a Talent Manager to expand opportunities for people that does a similar job to mine. The interesting part of all this is that as many people do, I never got to decide that I wanted to end up going through these paths. When I was in high school, I started to gain some traction to the point that some of the students began to recognize me and I had to fight against stereotypes from the adults of the historical moment we were living considering that my teachers were hating the fact that there were young people out there making better amounts of money than the ones everyone would have access to on conventional jobs. That put me into a couple of difficult circumstances because even though it shouldn’t be this way, school, job and life gets easier or harder depending on your socials skills because people who like you will open doors to you and people who dislikes you will try to close doors to you. Some of them will even try to do it hiding their intentions from you, so you don’t even notice there were doors that could get opened at some point.
When I was 17 years old, I got to study my first period of academic studies for cinematography. During these periods back in 2018 Mexico had the 50th anniversary of the “Tlatelolco Massacre”, a very important moment of Mexican history where the government of Ex Mexican President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz decided to use the army to kill more than 2,000 students in order to prevent them to ruin the Olympic games that were going to be celebrated for the first time in Mexico in 1968. Students wanted to expose the academic problems they were experiencing through the media of other countries that would be visiting Mexico for the event and the president decided to shut them down. The point of all this is that I was competing against other students to create a short film to commemorate the anniversary of this on October 2nd. The historical moment of one of the biggest academic institutes of the country was a bad one during those days. In the period of the time I was studying in one of their schools I had to see teachers exchanging good grades for intercourse with some of the girls of my generation. One of them was murdered to prevent she would expose these kinds of things. This information plus some other things we were experiencing as students provoked that I decided to put this information into the short film because those were things that people were not noticing on the Mexican Society. The competition was simple, if you won the “best short film”, then your film would be played in front of the whole school including parents, teachers and authorities of the institute during a week in one of the biggest schools they have. So, by the time I was creating this I was already into the YouTube Industry, so I certainly knew how to create the best short film of this subject and I won. But I decided to create 2 versions of this short film. The one that would make me win and the one that would make me expose the problems I was visualizing. This put some teachers and authorities into problems so they would put rocks into my path so I couldn’t stay studying there after I exposed several things that were wrong from this system. While all this was happening, I was already having a certain amount of success on my content on the internet that was based on entertainment for the Gears of War Gaming community of those days. So, I was also earning my own money, and everything seemed to be focusing on getting my presence into that work more and more every day. But my parents wanted me to take care of my academic life, so I had to try to find a balance. I started making extraordinary exams in order to pass through each class I was supposed to approve but just when I had one of the most important exams, I got an invitation from Microsoft to fly to Vancouver, Canada to be one of the testers of the next Gears of War game that Xbox was going to release during 2019. I had a hard moment deciding what to do, and I knew that there was not a certain way to explain my parents what was happening. While this happened, I had a cousin who was the one that thought me everything I knew about the game, Mauricio. He was an important part of the abilities I had in the game that made me gain recognition along the community of the game on the internet.
Sadly, he got cancer months prior the invitation I got from Microsoft. So, I decided to talk to him, and he asked me to go and record the game and bring it back to him with early access because he was sure that he would be death before the game was coming out.
The decision was kind of simple but not easy and I took my way into this new path. By the time I came back I have tons of issues with my parents to the point I was asked to get out of my family’s house. So, I decided to move with one of my friends and started to take internet as a more serious thing on the long run and that took me to work in projects I would have never dreamed of. That path has been taking me to several interesting stories including moments of my life as working with one of the biggest TV companies of Mexico known as TV Azteca, the biggest company of movie theaters in Mexico and LATAM known as Cinepolis or know many great people during my journey to the ppint I could even appear on the radio. I got to know impressive people as the creator of the game that gave me a job in life and thanks to all this and my personal life, I had the chance to know a lot of cities around the world in the US, Europe and South America. For the past 5 months I had the opportunity to get into the industry with a different perspective as a Talent Manager to be able to provide this kind of opportunities I’ve had to other content creators based on the experience I have gained over the last 9 years. That would be a cool summary of my professional career so far. On the personal side of my life, I have had tons of dystopian experiences that I would love to share one day because all this process took me to roadways I didn’t even know they could exist and sadly some of those paths have a hard fight with depression during my life time.
Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?
Communication and communicativeness, consistency in not being afraid to accept challenges for which I was not prepared because that led me to force myself to acquire the necessary knowledge to develop those projects and social skills based on transparency with the people around me to be able to have the right relationships for the right times.
Looking back over the past 12 months or so, what do you think has been your biggest area of improvement or growth?
Mental Health. I have had a big problem with depression for the past years as I mentioned. The main issue with me is that I’ve experienced so many things in good and bad contexts to the point I lost the “capacity of wonder”. I have a hard time getting in touch with being able to amaze me by anything good or bad. I lost the ability of desiring normal stuff as a normal person. Changing what I just described implies trying to know yourself and reuniting the pieces of your life in order to understand how to grow and move on. It is like having a broken leg without knowing which bone is the one that is broken but realizing this after years of walking in a condition where you got used to hobble along the journey as if that was the normal way of walking. It is not easy to get conscious of this broken bone because you need to do it through allowing yourself to feel the pain making sure you are sobber enough to feel your pain and then start looking out for help to find out which is the broken bone inside your leg and then try to find help to find out how you broke this bone. After this you need to find a way to heal and the process might take you to understand that it might always hurt but you need to learn to walk on better ways to move on with that pain no matter what. Always looking forward while you learn to enjoy every step you make and appreciate every step you have walked until now.
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