#loved

It's a rough world out there for people who were teenagers during the exact slice of gaming history where indie video games had become feasible to develop and distribute globally, but the definition of "indie" didn't yet encompass corporate studios and million-dollar budgets. They'll tell you their favourite game when they were a kid was, like, a point-and-click visual novel whose protagonist dreams they're a vast formless sea monster that learns about the concept of colours after finding a discarded helium balloon, or a hypertext fiction/precision platformer hybrid exploring gender as a mechanism of social control, and you think they're either being pretentious or deliberately fucking with you, but no, that's just what the indie gaming scene was like for a couple of years there. The sea monster thing got a front-page feature on the same site that made Bloons Tower Defense a household name – it was literally played by millions of people.

i see you. i see you thriving. i see you trying. i see you growing. i see you evolving. i see you healing. i see you becoming more of the person you're destined to be. i see you doing the best you can right now. i am proud of you. i see your strength. i see your power. i see it all. i hope you choose to keep holding on to the fact that you are already enough. you don't need to change yourself. you don't need to conform to who you're not. you are loved as you are. you are valued as you are. you are worthy as you are.