Thank You (Patreon)

Declan here, as the founder of the PonyASMR Project I want to personally give my thanks to you. I shared some of this on our YouTube channel last night, but I wanted to make especially sure all of you heard it.   With your support we'll be able to branch out into more scenarios and dramatically improve the quality of each we produce. You're helping sustain and improve something that means the world to me.    

 As we celebrate our second release and mark the two year anniversary of  our project I’d like thank our listeners. Your comments, emails, and support are our daily inspiration, knowing  we've brightened your day or helped you find some relief  from what's troubling you makes all of the time and effort we've put  into this worthwhile. On a personal level I keep many of your comments  posted near my desk to remind myself that we've helped bring happiness  to a community that means so much to me; knowing that something that I  helped create has touched your lives is what gives me the strength to  get through rough days.   

With that being said, our lead writer, Void Whisperer, asked if I would share the reasons behind why founded this project, and my inspirations for the first scenario.

For the past two years everyone on the team has known this project has meant a lot to me on a very personal level, but I've never really shared why. It's been a long road writing this, but I feel like all of you deserve to hear this.  

 So here goes...

In the last 10 years post-traumatic stress disorder has become as an epidemic among veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, and the American government has struggled with providing the level of care needed to treat these psychological injuries. With government facilities unable to keep up with the volume of new patients, or offer treatment beyond sedatives and antipsychotics, civilian doctors across the country turned to unconventional methods to try and help manage the psychological wounds of PTSD and traumatic brain injuries.

The idea for the first scenario originated from one of these methods after hearing about a therapist who used an immersive form of ASMR to help a young American sergeant returning from Afghanistan who was already displaying symptoms of PTSD; insomnia, severe depression, anxiety, self-isolation, and an overwhelming inability to cope with any of these emotions.

Instead of trying to invoke triggers and tingles this attempted to create a three-dimensional safe space by blending the immersive effects of ASMR with traditional sensory relaxation techniques and a binaurally recorded soundscape. The end result was a recording that helped him begin the healing process by providing a strong enough distraction to temporarily dissociate himself with the memories and the depression.

With this as the driving source of inspiration I laid the foundation for the first scenario in the spring of 2015 and co-founded the PonyASMR project in early June of 2015 with FlutterPriest. By the end of the month we'd assembled the rest of the original group, Andorian, Shellah, and Engie in hopes of bringing relief to members of the pony fandom suffering from insomnia, depression and anxiety.

To put things into perspective I guess I need to provide my own backstory.

I've gone by the online pseudonym Asmodean on certain image boards, but I personally go by Declan; I spent 11 years in the military and I've been struggling with post-traumatic stress disorder as well as short-term memory loss for about 5 years.

I spent the majority of my career as a SATCOM radio operator embedded with small, mechanized infantry units. My last deployment was to Northern Iraq in 2009; 8 years later I still haven't been able to put that behind me.

When I got back 2009 the onset wasn’t immediate, I was able to suppress the memories and ignore the warning signs for several years by throwing myself into work and university; it’s easy to avoid nightmares when you barely sleep. 

There wasn't really a steady decline, everything fell apart at once, the stress caught up to me in a matter of weeks.  The panic attacks were so frequent and the depression so severe that the VA doctors cycled me through every anti-depressant in the book and kept me sedated on high dosages of benzodiazepines.After the first year I realized that there wasn’t going to be a point where I could say that I’d hit rock bottom and that the worst was behind me. It felt like an endless spiral into darkness, true hopelessness comes when you’ve lost the ability to remember what life felt like before the pain and sadness.   

The lowest point came in 2014 when ISIS rolled through Northern Iraq with barely any resistance from the Iraqi military we’d spent 6 years training. We lost around 6 soldiers while I was deployed there and over 150 in that city alone since the war began in 2003, and none of it mattered.

Each veteran finds their own coping mechanism, some healthy and others self-destructive; a few of those who can't find a method of coping turn to the only option they believe they have to escape the pain. In America we lose around 20 veterans a day to suicide.

Once you get to a point where you just want to escape the situation no option is off the table if it will ease the pain. You'll do anything to escape the darkness, MLP did that for me; it flipped a switch in my brain that allowed me to momentarily put my day to day misery into the background.  I discovered ponies between Season 4 and 5 and fell in love after the first two episodes; the animation was cute and the characters were adorable, but the strongest appeal to me was the theme of hope. In my darkest hours MLP was my anchor when I didn’t have anything else to hold on to.  

Despite all the characters and scenarios we’re working on, Fluttershy will always be at the heart of our project.  She embodies unconditional kindness, compassion, unquestioning forgiveness, the ability to mend a wounded heart, and help heal a weary soul. I've got own my fair share of regrets, and forgiveness is something I, as do many servicemembers returning from war, struggle to find.

That sergeant I mentioned earlier was a close friend and one of the troops I'd personally trained. I wish I'd had the strength to ask for help when I needed it, before things got out of control, but I made sure he got the help needed before went down that path. There's no magical mystery cure for an invasive depressive disorder like PTSD, healing may take months, years, or a lifetime, but what that recording did was provide a reprieve from his demons, if only for an evening. For something that invades every aspect of your life, robs you of your self-identity, and strips of you of your self-worth, having somewhere safe to escape to can give you the most powerful medicine of all, hope.  

Our project is dedicated to anyone who's struggling with loneliness, hopelessness, depression, and anxiety. It’s what binds our project together, to help bring a small measure of happiness and hope to those who might not otherwise believe there is any.  I hope we can help you be the legend you were meant to be.

Technical Sergeant L. Declan W.

United States Air Force

2003 – 2014