Personal – Shoshana Kessock

Gaming Communities And The Bystander Effect

July 1, 2019 by Shoshana, posted in Criticism, Geek Culture, LARP Discussion and Theory, Not Ready To Make Nice, Personal, Speaking Out

[Note: This is a post written back in 2018. At the time I was too nervous to put up this post due to the intensity of my feelings. I think now it’s as important as ever to talk about and so I’m posting it.]

I owed someone an apology, and it wasn’t my fault.

There’s nothing worse than being involved in a situation where due to someone else’s actions, your very presence caused a problem or harmed someone else. You might only be tangential to a situation, but through the confluence of events, you’re suddenly aware that for your sake, someone else was hurt. For you, someone else was put on the spot.

I had this happen to me recently. I was put in a situation where due to my needs, someone else was put out. Not only put out but hurt, where they should have been cared for and their needs met. I felt the need to apologize, even though the situation wasn’t my fault. And it gave me a great deal of insight into a problem I’ve seen going on for some time but didn’t have a chance to articulate until now.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s back up and start again.

We have a problem with safety in the gaming community. And that problem is complicity.

We live in an era of pretty awful social breaches within our communities, social breaches which run the gamut from rude and inappropriate behavior to all-out situations of sexual harassment, assault, and violence. From politics to Hollywood, from bigger cultural institutions to our own gaming backyards, online movements like #MeToo and other online threads have brought out stories of harassment, degradation, misogyny, mistreatment, and more, leading me to wonder sometimes if there’s any place safe from the predations of bad actors (the answer, my pragmatic side replies to my oh-so-innocent inner naivete, is no).

Yet in the face of all this ongoing horrific disclosure from men and women who’ve suffered some truly horrible nightmares, we’ve seen communities responding in positive ways. Safety policies are being developed and organizers and leaders are finding ways to safeguard their populations by recognizing bad actors and weeding them out for the safety of everyone. The arrest of people like Harvey Weinstein in Hollywood and the indictment of actor Bill Cosby have given people hope that justice, albeit slow and often full of compromise, is possible. Slowly but surely, we’re hopefully climbing towards a better tomorrow.

The fact is, however, there is still a huge stumbling block in the face of truly transforming the spaces we inhabit. Though our communities are (usually) full of well-meaning and positive individuals, whose aim is to be in a social space with others of like minds and interests for the purpose of finding unity of purpose and commonality, there are those who are around because they want the community to fulfill their own destructive, selfish needs. They bring damage in their wake, sometimes unconsciously and sometimes consciously and sometimes based simply on a view of reality so different from everyone else it boggles the mind. These people are the abusers, the manipulators, the tragically thoughtless, the hopelessly deluded. And they are within every community, acting in various degrees of inappropriateness, from the simply hurtful to the downright criminal.

We all have them, in every community, in every space.

And we still put up with them.

Sure, the most egregious bad actors are easier to recognize and target for removal. Those who act for example in an overtly aggressive manner or are violent or caught in a flagrant bad act are easier to target for exclusion from the community. Yet for every bad actor extracted from the community for safety, there are a thousand other little infractions, cuts of various sizes inflicted, which go unaddressed and unattended. These are not simply the sort of slights one does to a single individual, but rather a pattern of systematic abusive or selfish actions which harm others over and over. Often, these individuals are recognized, their behaviors identified as problems, and they garner a label as a ‘problematic’ person. And yet-

And yet these people don’t receive any adjustment in behavior. And yet the bad behaviors continue unchecked. That is until things become so bad they can no longer be ignored, often coming to a head in an action which causes intense harm to one or more people.

How does this happen? How do these ongoing bad actors and their harmful actions continue on and on until things get out of control and implode into traumatic and hurtful events?

The answer, in my mind, is complicity. And we’re all a part of the problem, each and every one of us, one and all.

I had to explain to my father about the internet the other day. Or specifically, the realities of being a woman on the internet.

I was busy trying to listen to the announcements about video games announced at E3 and at the same time trying to explain to my father what some of the terms I mentioned about video games meant. When I expressed my dismay that a particular game was going to have an online multiplayer mode, my father didn’t understand what that meant. I told him about online play, about teaming up with others and getting a chance to play together remotely. He said that sounded like a fun thing to do, playing with others instead of alone.

So then I had to explain to my father about the internet and how it treated women. I had to explain online harassment, the term incels, and Gamergate. It branched off into a discussion about SWATing, about the harassment of women like Anita Sarkesian and Zoe Quinn, of death threats and unsolicited sexual advances, and of rampant misogyny. I had to tell him the story about coming back from speaking at PAX back in 2013 and finding my inbox full of death and rape threats and pictures of decapitated animals and people because I’d been on a panel about feminism in gaming and nerd culture.

It wasn’t the first time I tried to explain things like this to my father, who sometimes just seems boggled by the issues of modern communities. This time, he was horrified and furious. He didn’t understand how this stuff happens today. As he’s often said when I tell him about awful things going on, he’ll blurt out, “But it’s 2018! How does this happen?”

And every time, I keep coming back to the same answer, over and over.

“Because we let it happen.”

With that answer, I in no way mean to blame victims for what happens to them. Far from it. The ‘we’ I mean when I give that response is the collective we of communities at large, who see issues going on and remain in said community without causing disruption to protest bad actors or horrific events. Faced with reports of bad behavior, plenty of communities choose to turn a blind eye or refuse to engage with individual problematic events, or even escalating patterns of bad action, for the sake of maintaining the status quo. Instead, we fall back on the idea of “it’s not my business” or “there’s two sides to every story” or my favorite, “I don’t want to get involved.”

When trying to explain this to my father, I was reminded of a situation from my childhood. There was a family I knew growing up who had serious problems. The father was a violent person who abused both his wife and daughter on a regular basis, while the mother had mental illness issues to contend with while trying to raise her child. The husband’s malicious actions were widely known among both the adults around me and, as I discovered later, the community at large. But no one did anything. In the end, the wife was so badly damaged by the events she was forced to be institutionalized, while her daughter finally ended up in foster care for her own safety. The trauma went on for years with so many people aware of the problems going on. Yet no one acted, because to act would involve them in another bad situation outside their own lives. Members of the community were complicit, and the damage was done.

And back in the gaming community, the damage is being done. And we are all complicit too.

The gaming community has seen an escalation of toxic masculine behavior, fueled by the anonymity of the internet and the lack of repercussions against those who harm others. From verbal and written harassment to stalking, death threats, and harm against property and data, behaviors which many consider harmless have led to real and lasting damage to marginalized populations and women, in particular, to name one group.

Yet with every outcry, there is a larger policy of deaf ears to overcome, a general epidemic of see no evil, hear no evil to contend with. When presented with the stories of harassment and harm, repeated over and over until a larger pattern of toxic encouraged behavior becomes apparent, the population at large seems unable or unwilling to stand up and in one voice say they simply will not abide this behavior. Everyone has heard the same stories, seen the same social media posts, and yet the behavior continues unabated. And those fighting to make it stop happening, who work to mitigate the damage or present new options to change the community for the better, are fighting a downhill-flowing tide of tireless work and horrific situations intending to bury them whole.

They’d have a better chance, however, making a difference if they weren’t surrounded by people unwilling to interrupt their regularly scheduled programming to help make a change.

There’s a very famous story out of New York about a young bar manager named Kitty Genovese. Back in March of 1964, the 28-year-old woman was on her way back from work when she was stabbed repeatedly in the courtyard of her apartment building in Kew Gardens, Queens by Winston Moseley. Kitty Genovese lay dying in the chilly night air outside her building, crying for help, and receiving none. The New York Times later reported that 38 people were witnesses to the event, either hearing Ms. Genovese crying out for help or seeing her lying on the pavement, but each chose to do nothing. The incident became the origin of the term bystander effect, a sociological phenomenon in which people are unwilling to offer help when others are present for fear of taking responsibility or ‘becoming involved’ in the trouble.

Years later, researchers have discovered many holes in the Genovese story casting doubt on the validity of many of the details of that night. But the concept of the bystander effect has remained a replicatable sociological phenomenon. When presented with a situation that is difficult or requires direct action, people will often decline to act because they either believe others will take care of the problem instead or else they don’t want to get involved out of fear of reprisal or simply due to indifference or lack of willingness to become involved. People don’t want to complicate their already complicated lives by involving themselves in the problems of others, in disrupting their status quo to introduce an unstable element that might end up causing them trouble.

Looking at the gaming community, we have a hell of a lot of bystander effect going on. Because we, like many other communities, are either full of folks who are simply deeming themselves too busy to get involved in standing up against problems, or believe someone else is going to fix the situation for them, or feel powerless in the face of such overwhelming negativity, or are the victims of it themselves. And many are simply too frightened to stand up and make a change, afraid of being targeted themselves or perhaps even having their own actions picked apart and targeted.

So we all sit back and wait, wait for someone else with the power to make the decisions, or for someone else to seize that power to change things up. We hear the cries of the women harassed by Gamergate, or harmed in our tabletop RPG communities, or in the Sci-Fi and Fantasy fiction world like those bombarded during the Sad Puppies debacle. And rather than speaking up in one voice, we do not seek action. We remain complicit. We continue to enjoy our social activities and communities without taking an active role in solving the problems at hand.

We may not agree on solutions, or even if the problems are necessarily what they seem to be. Communities can disagree over problems, but as long as they engage with them in a direct manner, they are breaking the chain of disinterest which allows problems to fester. By bringing them to the forefront they allow the problems to go from being problematic to being recognized problems with the possibility for solutions. By burying problems instead and avoiding conflict, we leave the work to a few individuals to make the change for us. And when it doesn’t happen, we bemoan the difficulties in our world. But in the end, we did little to nothing to change things for the better.

This makes us complicit. And therefore, in our own way, part of the problem.

And yes, I’m saying we. Because I am certainly, in my own way, part of the problem.

Anyone who knows me knows I’m someone who knows how to speak up for myself. When I need to, I’m capable of making a lot of noise to raise awareness of an issue, be it personal or otherwise. And yet faced with the situation I mentioned at the article’s opening, I didn’t do a damn thing to mitigate the damage done in my name. In fact, I sat there quietly and profited from the experience. I was complicit.

During an event I attended, I needed assistance from a member of staff. To provide me with assistance, that staff member callously brushed aside the needs of another person who was in crisis and needed, at the bare minimum, to be left alone. But instead, my needs were put ahead of this person’s and they were hurt. Now, I could go on about how that situation needed to be addressed, and what the staff member should have or could have done to not harm another person in question to help me out. Yet the part I keep coming back to since the event isn’t what this other person could have done in the situation – but what I could have done better.

Instead of speaking up at the time, I remained silent in the face of someone else getting hurt. I saw someone’s feelings get ignored by a person in power, someone whose job it is to look out for others at an event. I don’t know that it was done maliciously – in fact, I believe it was a thoughtless action brought on by short-sightedness. Yet that is no excuse for the harm caused, and I’ll do you one more: there’s no excuse for me not speaking up. By keeping my mouth shut, I made myself complicit in the actions taken. By not speaking up, I was implicitly aligning myself with the bad behavior.

To twist the NYPD slogan: I saw something, and didn’t say something. And I profited from the situation at another person’s expense.

And so we’re back around from my experience to the larger bodies involved. Take my experience and expand it to how many other incidents, how many other safety questions and harmful situations ignored. How many issues exist, some as tiny as mine and some massive problems that cause life-threatening incidents in communities, which go unresolved, festering and growing, until they boil over?

“But Shoshana,” you may ask, “how can we make change? We’re just little tiny parts of a larger system? A larger body that drowns out little old me?”

Well sure, it can drown you out. If you’re only one voice, it might. But if we changed the culture of complicity, if we really took up the idea of “If you see something, say something” and stood up for our fellows, we would disrupt the power structures enough to see real change on a faster timetable. We might be able to disrupt things enough in fact so things can change on a more permanent basis and quicker so as to make sure fewer people are hurt as we press towards a safer and more progressive tomorrow.

How do we do that? There’s some simple ways to disrupt rather than be complicit:

Speak up about larger issues: If you are aware that your community has a problem that is systematic and widespread, take a stand publicly against it. You don’t have to be on a soapbox and yelling constantly about it, but in the face of harmful behavior, if you stand up and say something it might encourage others to do the same.
Vote with your dollars and presence: If an event, a product, a community or a team does not address toxic situations, removing yourself or protesting will hit their bottom line if you remove yourself and therefore your contributions. That includes not buying products whose communities or companies don’t address bad actors or situations.
Intervene on a personal level: Bad behavior on a wider scale is perpetuated onward when small incidents are allowed to fester and remain unaddressed. Bad actors can be identified and either situations resolved or individuals removed but ONLY if people curb their conflict avoidance and instead engage the problem directly. Speak up and handle the situation or else seek help to mediate out the issue. If your problem is harmful and even dangerous, seek community leaders for backup. But don’t let your unwillingness to confront difficult situations help make you complicit in the harm they’ve caused.
Recommend solutions: Identifying problems is only one step in the process. But making sure once you stand up you contribute resources to solving the problem? That makes it all the better. It might take some energy to get involved (and you should not feel obligated to put out more energy into a situation than you can handle) but with what energy you CAN spare, help present possible solutions to the problem to your community leaders. This is an active step not only beyond complicity all the way to becoming a community reformer.

And above all: do what you can. Not everyone’s ability is going to be the same. Not everyone has the same physical ability, emotional bandwidth, psychological make-up, time, responsibilities, or wear-with-all to take on problems. We’re all different and have different restrictions to keep in mind and respect. We can’t judge how much someone else is doing necessarily in terms of hours put in and content. But every person can do SOMETHING at a minimum to confront problems in their community, each within their own capability. Together we can take on issues, each in their own way, supporting one another and aligned towards a goal of a better tomorrow.

I hope I’ll get the chance to someday to make up for being complicit in that uncomfortable situation I mentioned. I’ve already made my apology, but I’m not sure that’s enough. Instead, I’m using the situation as a reminder that the communities around us are made up of individuals, and if each person stood up for what they believed was right, then we could transform our spaces towards a shared goal of social and justice evolution.

A Single Piece Of Paper And The Lies It Told

July 1, 2019 by Shoshana, posted in Personal

I got an email this afternoon. It, like many other emails recently, disappeared into my overzealous spam filter (which rules my inbox like a terrifying digital helicopter parent) so I only discovered it late after midnight. It was a message from Ancestry.com. At first, I thought it was spam and therefore had been sent appropriately into the oubliette to be forever ignored. But then the subject caught my eye. “LOOKING FOR MY DAD.”

I stopped. It wasn’t an ad. It was an actual message from someone who was looking for her father. I didn’t hesitate. I clicked on the link. In the message, a young woman asked me if I knew about my biological family. She said Ancestry.com had matched our DNA and said we were cousins. She’d been looking for her father, could I help her out.

It was only then I remembered I’d done one of those swab-your-mouth DNA tests and sent it off months ago. I’d forgotten all about it. I politely penned back a message apologizing for my inability to help the young woman. I explained I was adopted and didn’t have any information about my biological family. I clicked send, then looked up at the menu bar across the top that said DNA.

This is it, I figured. The moment of truth. I’d get a chance to prove what the adoption papers said was true, justify every time someone asked me about my ancestry and I proudly recited what those dang papers told me. See, I’d been told by some very vague pieces of paper that my genetic family was Irish and Scottish and Scandinavian and Native America. Specifically, that they were at least 1/4 Cherokee. And there was going to be my DNA results, right there for me to see.

So I clicked the button.

And apparently discovered I was complicit in some serious multi-generational cultural appropriation.

When I was eleven years old, my parents told me I was adopted. There’s a weird story involved, in which I was reading a Babysitter’s Club Book in which Claudia believes she’s adopted and goes on this wild goose chase to discover why she’s so different than her family. And I laughed about it in my eleven-year-old way to my parents, who then sat me down and told me I actually WAS adopted, unlike Claudia, who only learns a valuable lesson about being different in her own special way. I instead learned that sometimes, the universe has a perverse sense of humor.

My parents didn’t have a hell of a lot of documents about the adoption. I’d been given up as an infant by my birth family, signed away in a closed adoption before I was even born to a private agency who specialized in matching couples by their ‘appearance compatibility.’ By the time years later I wanted to look into my biological family, that agency had long since closed and their records disappeared into the darkness of the pre-digital age. ‘Uncle Ray’ and ‘Auntie Barbara’ were the adoption brokers, the heads of the agency, and not just family friends as I’d imagined when I was growing up.

I remember being my eleven-year-old self, sitting on my parents’ bed while my mother pulled out a manila envelope. In there were some documents, like the adoption certificate, and some papers she kept, photocopies of records about the birth family. The adoption was sealed but there were some basic intake records of the family, descriptions of their background, heritage, what the family members were like, without names or indications of where they were from. They listed in those documents their heritage as Irish / Scottish / Scandinavian / Native American. In fact, the descriptions of the family members had been very specific that they were Cherokee, that they were about one quarter Cherokee in fact, and they were closely tied to that heritage. That was right there, in the descriptors.

As a little girl, I’d clung to that information. There I was, eleven, having just found out I was genetically not related to my adopted parents. The family and community I had was mine by adoption. And while that means they were indeed my family, I developed that yearning a lot of adopted kids talk about to connect with something from their biological past. I looked at that paper before my mother whisked it away, hid it from me, as she did many things about that adoption. But later, when kids would tease me in school for being adopted (and they did, telling me the reason my parents wouldn’t send me on trips we couldn’t legitimately afford was because I wasn’t their real child), I’d proudly recite what I knew about my lineage. It became my only connection to my past. In a school full of Eastern European descended Jews, I was the Irish/Scottish/Scandinavian/Cherokee girl. I was different.

By the time I was in college, however, the information on that little piece of paper wasn’t a way to be different. It was a lifeline to somewhere out in the rest of the world, beyond the walls of my orthodox upbringing, to a place where there might be other people who were my genetic relatives. Maybe, somewhere out there, there was someone who knew where I came from. And that road led to a community of people indigenous to this continent, not far away in Europe. A group of people who, if you tied together the pieces of information in that long-ago read document, were from Kentucky and lived close to a Cherokee reservation in recent generations. I held onto that information ferociously, as my only link to the somewhere I’d come from and might eventually find again.

Everyone wants to know where they belong. And I know for me, a huge part of feeling unmoored in this great wide world has been because of a lack of knowledge of my biological heritage. To many people, ancestry isn’t important. They are happy to live in the now. But I believe connections to the past help us point proudly to where we’ve come from and say “Come better or worse, this is where I began, and this is where I walk now.” And you root yourself in the stories of that culture where you can, make it a part of your story, your identity.

When people asked what it was like to have Native American ancestry, I’d say, “I don’t know, I don’t live that cultural life, but I’m 1/4 by blood” because that’s what the paper told me.

And the paper. Fucking. Lied.

People criticize these new DNA tests that have become all the rage. It’s been discovered some of the companies might be selling our DNA information. After tonight, I figure I’ve got other things to worry about rather than being concerned someone is going to map my lost little genome.

You see, it turns out, whoever filled out those papers my mother showed me when I was eleven was either tragically misinformed or had a very estranged relationship with the truth. Otherwise, there was one HELL of a mix up with the copy machine that day.

If Ancestry.com is correct, I’m actually not even a little Native American. Not one lick. I’m indeed Irish/Scottish/Welsh by a good mount. I’m also super British (like 54%). There’s some mixed up western Europe in there too. And yes, I am Scandinavian – I’m Finnish! But there isn’t a single lick of Cherokee in there. In fact, somewhere in my ancestry someone apparently dipped their toes into the gene pool in India. I’m more INDIAN than Native American. But nope, not a little Cherokee. Not a bit. Zip.

It took a few minutes for this to settle in on me. I’ve been having a weird week, or at least I’d thought it was weird BEFORE this happened. As I’ve said, the universe just has a perverse sense of humor. Because just when you think you know at least some basic things about yourself, the universe yanks the carpet out from under you once again. And here I’d sent an email to this nice young woman saying I didn’t know anything about my ancestry. But I’d at least believed I had a few pieces of information settled. Turns out that wasn’t the case after all.

Then I thought about the last few months, and some work I’d done in my professional career, and a whole other consideration came crashing down on my shoulders.

See, I’d spent time talking in my career about representation in games and fiction. I’d talked about the importance of avoiding cultural appropriation and identity appropriation. And while I had NEVER represented myself as someone who lived the life of an indigenous person, I had in the past talked about feeling connected to my heritage and the importance of recognizing the confusion over being someone who had ancestry that was from indigenous people of the United States while being disconnected from that heritage and overall also white. I stated again and again that though I had no connection to my biological family, I had grown up (from that age of eleven) acutely aware of the weird place of being someone white as hell who had native ancestry, even a little. I winced at every person who made claims about how much they were an “Indian Princess” and never tried to be THAT girl. Instead, I tried to cultivate a sensitivity to the idea of appropriation, of issues facing indigenous people, all the while balancing it out with the one drilled in thought: the paper might say you’re 1/4 Cherokee, but you are a white girl. That is your privilege. Don’t forget that.

And yet.

Some part of me said, “this is also a part of you.” Some part of me said “those documents tell you who your family is genetically, who they are by blood, who YOU ARE by blood. And that has to mean something. Do you have the right to say you’re happy about your connection to a background? Not happy or proud in the shitty superiority way, but in the speak with joy and happiness about coming from somewhere kind of pride, somewhere vibrant and real?”

And I was happy, even proud (though isn’t that a loaded word these days?) I was happy that little document had given me something to say about where I came from. It made me develop a personal relationship with the historical narratives I came in contact with of native people, of rich cultures and diverse voices and also of ongoing genocide and destruction in the United States that felt a little bit more personal for the connection I felt to my genetics.

Now as I look back at those feelings, I want to laugh at myself and hide. Because of course that narrative of the genocide of native people was always important, and I’d never take away from it. But it was never my narrative. A little paper lied to me. Whoever told that story had appropriated a culture for their own needs, whatever those were at the time. And thanks to that little paper, I’ve been appropriating native identity since I was eleven and didn’t even know it.

The idea makes me sick to my stomach. And ashamed. And more conflicted then ever about what the hell being adopted and unmoored from my genetic ancestry means. It makes me question whether genetic ancestry means anything at all, whether a person in my position is just stuck in the middle, neither the bearer of a long legacy by blood or the bearer of a legacy of another legacy not entirely ever your own. I thought these feelings were complicated BEFORE. Now I’m not sure what the hell to do with them at all.

So I’m dealing with it the only way I know how: by feeling guilty, by being overly intellectual and analytical, and by writing about it.

I’m recontextualizing my feelings on a whole part of my identity I thought I’d known for certain. It’s not as though I have to go out and rescind some grand letters, resign from organizations, hand in some cred card. When it comes to personal relationships with identity, that’s not how shit works. (Or it might if you found this out and were legitimately part of some heritage organization. Thank God that’s not the situation here). But in the meanwhile, this whole thing has brought to the forefront two feelings:

One: someone in my background needs to get kicked seriously in the face for lying on a very important piece of paper.

Two: Feeling connected to your identity is a complex relationship when you’re adopted, and it can lead to trying to find anything, anywhere, to give you a sense of belonging. And in this case, it led me to a lie which I then apparently perpetuated without even knowing. A lie which only further tangles up my feelings on identity as a whole.

I’m not entirely sure how I’ll unfuck that particular Gordian knot. I’m writing this blog post, first of all. And I may have made a number of jokes in the last little while about now being absolutely CERTAIN I’m the whitest white girl I know. Most of them were told in my typical sardonic sense of humor sort of way. But this time they’re laced with a layer of serious self-depreciation sprinkled with a whole lot of embarrassment and shame. Because like it or not, I did appropriate another culture. And maybe that says more about where we ought to hang our hats in regards to appropriation and identity politics in the first place.

There have been long talks about what makes someone ‘count’ when speaking about their particular heritage. I’ve had friends talk to me about not feeling ‘enough’ of something to count as a member of their own genetic background. And I previously thought I’d had a dog in that fight, conflicted about whether or not having a quarter Cherokee blood meant I had a right to feel any connection at ALL to a group of people whose plight I’d never experienced due to being, well, who I am in appearance and life experience. I grew up a New York very white Jewish girl who, I thought, was also a quarter Native American. And I’d had a complicated relationship with that.

And now it’s even MORE complicated knowing I’ve been effectively perpetuating a lie.

There’s going to be more sardonic self-deprecating humor, and embarrassment, for at least a little while. But one thing I’m taking away from this whole debacle is this:

I’d spent my time since I was eleven years old supremely conscious of the plight of indigenous people, not only because it was an important issue and cause on its own, but because I’d felt a personal connection. I’d engaged in conversations about identity politics and complicated relationships with race, culture, and representation overall because in one moment when I was eleven, a single piece of paper set me on that path. I tried (often in my own inept way) to be well-informed, well-spoken, respectful, and helpful, as much as a woman in my privileged position could be without falling into the hole of being a white feminist of the worst sort. A lot of the origins of my interest in these things, even when I was growing up in a very sheltered and very xenophobic community, was based on this knowledge given to me by a tiny piece of paper, telling me I was someone with a background rooted in the history of a marginalized people.

And even if that paper lied to me in the worst way, the years of trying to be conscious of these issues can’t be erased by a single genetic test. I won’t ever, EVER, claim again a familial connection to indigenous people – of course I wouldn’t. But my concern over issues of representation, of equality, of justice for native people? That’s not going to change. And my stumbling, earnest attempts at being a good ally continue as they are, mired in their privilege even more now than before. If anything, this revelation just makes me more aware of the complexity of cultural identity and appropriation, and how conversations need to continue happening about what identity truly means to us in our modern world.

Meanwhile, I’m going to look through my mother’s things, put aside in a box after her death, to try to find this damn piece of paper again. It seems to have disappeared along with many of my mother’s other important papers (she wasn’t very organized). But I am going to try and find it so that perhaps one day soon I can have the joy of crumpling it up, kicking it across the room, yelling at it, and then maybe burning it. Because sometimes you just gotta get out those complicated feelings the old-fashioned way: through an expression of well-justified fury.

Or I might just hang onto it as a reminder of how real and serious appropriation is and the damage it can do in so many different directions. And of the universe’s ongoing and perpetual sense of perverse humor.

A New Home At Meow Wolf

February 7, 2019 by Shoshana, posted in Chronic Illness, Game Design, Personal

I’ve been quieter lately than usual on both social media and here on my website. That’s for a lot of reasons. The first is I was head-down for most of September-November developing and running games, including the blockbuster 1878: Welcome to Salvation (which will have its post mortem post on this blog). However after that, a curious thing happened: I got a job.

As many people might know by now, I was freelancing full time after being laid off from John Wick Presents and 7th Sea. That was a long stretch of me going from check to check and paying for private health insurance to stay alive. Trust me, it was a lean time and a very stressful one. So I started looking for full-time work again. I never expected to get the job that I eventually landed.

After returning from Texas from running 1878, I packed up all my things and moved across the country from New Jersey to Santa Fe, New Mexico to work at one of the coolest places in the world…

cHhT0tOv_400x400 — Photos by: Meow Wolf website

I am now a Santa Fe resident, working as a Narrative Lead with some of the most creative people I’ve ever met in my life at the immersive art installation Meow Wolf. I will admit, it was a difficult move, and I would not have survived it without the help of so many good friends. There are too many to note, but Craig, Nico, Josh, Abigail, Ariella, Ennis, Katie, Allie, Abby, MayaBe, Travis, Sean, Gia, Megan, Alex, my father, and our rockstar Sean Foster were primary to this adventure. I was also scammed by movers, drove five days across the country with Nico, slept for nearly ten days in a scary motel and then on a couch in an empty apartment, ended up getting super sick from the altitude here and battled chronic health issues upon arrival. But here I am, with a new home, far from my old original home, under glorious blue skies in Santa Fe.

Meow Wolf itself is amazing. I get to write and ideate and create all day. And that is the dream of so many artists and writers that I feel so blessed to be here. I want to thank Danielle Harper, Jeff Gomez and Ryan Hart for pushing me to apply for this job when my confidence wasn’t there. I wouldn’t be at this great job without their support. And the support of so many others who nudged me along until I did the thing, posted the thing. (Also Nico for pushing me to finish my writing sample even when I was in the hospital – written with an IV in my arm!).

maxresdefault-16 — I was never much for day-glo paint until I came here. Now it’s all up in my head.

Life-wise, things have stayed a little rocky. Those health issues I mentioned are still in play, which has kept me from doing a lot of things I wanted to do. I thought I’d land right on my feet here, but I’ve been in and out of the hospital constantly since arrival. I can’t tell you all how many times I’ve been writing or online lately with an IV in my arm in a hospital bed (or how much my hospital bills have become – $40,000!). But it also means I’ve had to be very serious about what I do with my spare time… Which is why, for now, I’ve taken a break from writing tabletop RPG content. I want to thank so many people who have contacted me recently with work, but with being so ill and still recovering from the move, I’ve had to take a hiatus. Because sometimes, you need to admit when you have to take care of yourself first.

My move has also made me have to recenter my larp design. I’m now far from the East Coast and far from the people I’ve worked with for so long. That doesn’t mean I’m done with larp design by far (or tabletop for that matter!). But it means I won’t be able to come back to the East Coast for every event… which makes me sad. But it also means maybe designing things on the West Coast…? I’m excited.

So what am I saying? I’m not done doing games just because I’m working here:

491055DB-9C76-451A-B935-2AE1820FAADC — I’m not being egotistical or showing off, I promise. I’m showcasing this gorgeous place.

It just means I’ve got to take it easier and make sure I take care of my health, so I can continue to make creative things both for my day job and for myself. Projects like Arksong, Immortal Flight, Affinity, my writing, and my comic book are still going on, plus some things you’ve never seen or heard of yet. But they’re going to take some time to pull off now as things change. As life often does.

So I’m not done.

And I need to accept that slowing down is the right thing to do, while still telling myself:

Instead I’ll say this: life changes. And I’m going with those changes. And I hope you’ll come with me. Thanks everyone, and thank you to Meow Wolf for this opportunity.

Falling/Burning: Hannah Gadsby, Nanette, and Being A Bipolar Creator

July 12, 2018 by Shoshana, posted in Personal, Speaking Out, Television, Writings

[[Note: trigger warnings for mental illness, bipolar disorder, medication, and some spoilers for Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette.]]

These days, I call it burning, but for most of my life, I called it flying.

It’s that feeling when you’re wrapped up in a writing project so hard you look up, and half a day has gone by. You haven’t moved, you haven’t drunk or eaten or talked to anyone. You work and work until your knuckles hurt, and there are words flowing out of you, and you can’t stop until it’s all done. Then you look up, realize what time it is, and fall over because the words are done for the day and you’ve been doing it. You’ve been flying.

That’s what writing when you’re me feels like.

Well, a lot of the time. Some days it’s just normal. I get up, I do my morning routine (take my meds, get some grub, boop the cat, check my email, mess around on Facebook) and then it’s off to the word mines. And on those days, they are indeed the word mines. I check an outline, I write notes, I putter around, I get the words going however I can, tugging that little mining cart up the hill towards those far-off paragraphs and… y’know, this analogy has gotten away from me. I digress.

Those are the hard days at the job because that’s what it is – writing, like making any art, is a job. It’s craft and talent and passion rolled up into one ball. It’s doing a thing you worked hard to learn to do the best you can. You’re capturing those weird little ideas rolling around in your head and making them into words, then lines, then paragraphs, and somehow they’re all supposed to reach out to someone who reads them and make their brains go POOF, I LIKE THIS. No pressure or anything, writer, just take the ephemeral and translate it onto a page. You make it happen as best as you can.

Then, there are the other days. The days when BLEH becomes BANG. The days when something just clicks and comes roaring down the pipe inside my brain and it’s all I can do to get to my computer because it’s ready to go and that’s it. Get out of the way.

I call it burning these days because that’s what it feels like: like there’s an idea inside me burning its way out. But when I was younger, I called it flying. What I really meant was controlled falling. Like there was a tornado going on and I would leap off something and ride right through the middle of it, all the way up, chasing words. Because that’s what it felt like for me, rolling on through the manic energy that comes with being bi-polar.

There’s a lot of folks who equate the manic energy of being bi-polar with the creative spark that drives artists to brilliance. They point to so many great artists in history who lived with mental illness and say, “there it is, that energy, that’s what made them great!”

Except for so many artists, mental illness didn’t make them great. It made them ill. And if they weren’t careful, it made them gone.

Hannah Gadsby’s blockbuster comedy special “Nanette” was billed as exactly that: a comedy. She was meant to get up on stage, make some jokes, and entertain us all on Netflix. Instead, Gadsby delivered what I can only call a commencement speech for comedians, a bait and switch that took the audience from laughter to silence and ultimately to a standing ovation. Gadsby, a queer comedian with a career going back over ten years, started her performance with a fairly standard routine, drawing in the laughs. Then she started explaining how jokes worked, about how they increased tension and then broke it into laughter.

Then, she stopped breaking the tension. And just rose it higher and higher by telling the truth.

She spoke to her audience about a lot of things. Her family, and what it was like coming out to them. About violence, about triggering subjects. She broke from the funny parts of her routine a little over halfway through and talked about quitting comedy because she was tired of making people like herself, a lesbian still fighting with some deep shame issues, into a punchline. I watched in spell-bound silence as Hannah Gadsby deconstructed comedy to its most basic building blocks and rebuilt them into a soapbox, a grand forum where she read the audience a monologue of pain and vulnerability, her farewell to wisecracks and the opening of perhaps a new chapter of honest, open speaking in her life. She was out to speak her truth, and by the end, I was in awe.

It was somewhere in the middle where she told people to fuck off when telling artists to “feel” for their art that I felt the ground open up beneath me a little and I cried.

vangoghmuseum-s0031V1962-3840 — Sunflowers by Vincent van Gogh

She talked about Vincent Van Gogh, the artist who suffered during his life from mental illness, self-medicated, was treated by doctors and struggled to succeed despite his obvious impossible talent due to his sickness. She talked about her knowledge of his life, thanks to her art history degree, and how he only sold one painting his entire life – not because he wasn’t recognized by his community as a genius, but because he struggled to even be part of a community due to his illness.

And I thought of the flying and the hard days at the word mines. I thought about the days when I heard the tornado in my head and couldn’t make the words get to my fingers. I thought about the frustration, the depression, the difficulties talking to people about what it sounded like inside my skull some days when I could barely pay attention because of the rush of words and ideas.

Hannah Gadsby told people artists don’t have to suffer for their art, and I’ll forever thank her for having the guts to stand up and say that to the world. Because I used to believe it was true.

When I was sixteen, I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder type 2.

I came from a family that didn’t really get what being bipolar meant. My parents tried to get it, but when I’d do something irresponsible, it was always because I was ‘bad.’ I tried to explain how it was impossible to keep my whirlwind mind straight sometimes. How it was a battle against depression to get up in the morning and go to class. When I flunked in school, I tried to explain why, when I overcharged my credit card on a manic binge, when I cried for days and couldn’t stop. But those were the bad days. And the good days – those were the days I could take on the world, where no one could stop me, where I was manic off my head. I was out of control.

I went to a therapist when my school suggested it to my parents. The therapist took one look at my behavior and referred me to a psychiatrist, a loud and overbearing man who listened to me talk a mile a minute for fifteen minutes, heard my symptoms, and pulled out a giant prescription pad. I started taking the drugs he gave me but received no explanation about what being bipolar really meant. He never explained what behaviors were unusual, or what could be attributed to the illness, or any coping skills or resources to better understand my situation. He gave me pills and saw me every two weeks. I knew almost nothing about what was going on with me but was even enough to realize I needed more information.

So? I went online.

Because my family didn’t know much about bipolar disorder and my doctor wasn’t telling, I learned a lot from the internet. Those were the wild and wooly early days of the internet, when it was the 90’s and everyone was in AOL chat rooms and the world was a wacky, wacky place. It was on the internet I found a community of roleplayers that eventually led me to the career I have today. It was also where I got a LOT of bad advice about mental illness.

I read a lot of stories about people being overmedicated or given the wrong medication. I heard stories about people being committed by their families if they didn’t hide what was wrong with them. But I especially came across the same story over and over from people who had been medicated. “If you go on the drugs,” they said, “the creative drive goes away. You’ll lose that spark inside you. If you want to be an artist, stay away from medication. It’ll kill your art.”

I didn’t believe it. I was taught doctors were to be trusted. And besides, I knew I needed help. So I took the drugs the doctor gave me and fell into the worst confluence of events you could imagine. Because the medication the doctor gave me DID kill my creativity. It also made me sleep too much, have no emotions whatsoever, destroyed my memory, and made me gain tons of weight. And every time I brought this up to my doctor, his answer was to add another pill to balance out the others or up my dose.

I didn’t realize it until later, but I had a bad doctor. What I did know was at the height of this medicine dance, I’d spend my days sleeping, or staring at a television, and feeling nothing at all. I couldn’t even cry. But maybe worst of all, I struggled to create. I couldn’t find that spark inside me like I used to, that flying feeling that gave me inspiration. In the moments when I could feel something, it was the overwhelming terror of going back into that stupor once again.

This went on from the time I was seventeen, when I was so messed up I dropped out of high school, until I was nearly 19. In between, I struggled to get my GED so I could at least get into college and proceeded to flunk there too due to the medication’s impossible weight on my mind. I went through so many ridiculous emotional issues I can’t describe, but all of it was through a curtain of medication so thick I can barely pull up memories from that time.

The times my emotions would push through was during what I discovered later were hypomanic phases, mood swings so strong they butted through the haze and made me wildly unstable. All the while I struggled to get my life in order, and every time I did, it was under a fog of badly managed medication, or through the adrenaline of mania so strong I could barely function. I didn’t understand I was badly medicated, of course. All I knew was everything was falling to pieces, all the time, and I couldn’t feel a solid, real emotion long enough to care.

So in 2002, in one of those moments of emotional lucidity, I made a decision to stop taking my meds. I suddenly thought: the internet is right, this is a horrible, horrible mistake. I trusted my experience and my terror and I stopped taking my meds.

And well, to quote one of my heroines from the time, Buffy:

What followed were ten years of the roughest, rockiest, unbelievably manic, altogether difficult experiences of my life. I had bouts of going back on medication, but would always stop for one reason or another. I’d make excuses but each time it was the same thing: I convinced myself I didn’t feel right on the medication. That I couldn’t feel that creative spark I so relied on as part of my life. I was afraid of going back to that medically-induced haze I’d been in before. I hid from it and kept riding the tornado, every day. And like any tornado, my instability left chaos and destruction in its wake.

I can’t say I regret those ten years. They taught me a lot. I regret a lot of the horrible decisions I made, the people I hurt, the situations I got into where I got ripped up myself. I have memories I’ll never forget, instances of realizing too late I’d gotten into something because of my mania that led ultimately to disaster.

But I remember the creative highs. The way I could just fly like the wind and produce 12,000 words in a night. How I could map out entire novels, series of books, all the things in the world I thought I could create. I wrote papers, read whole book series, stayed up for days on end, played role-playing games from morning until night, and never, ever saw anything wrong with where I was in life. Because I was living that artists life and I thought, hey, this is me. This is who I am.

I know now the truth: that was the illness talking. The living high on life, throwing caution to the wind, tornado voice? Is the manic voice. And unless tempered with medication and coping mechanisms can lead to disaster.

From 2002 until 2012 I remained largely unmedicated. And those ten years are, in hindsight, an unspoken cautionary tale of someone not flying, but falling without recognizing the drop in altitude. A tale of someone on a corkscrew through rough weather, catching fire all the way down.

I went to grad school in 2012 and thank god for so many reasons that I did. It’s not even my education I laud when I think of those years, but a single day in November 2012. I’d only been in classes for two months and already I was starting to lose it from the stress. The day I broke down with a massive anxiety attack after a critique from a teacher, hiccuping with tears and hyperventilating in a bathroom, I walked across the street to the health clinic and got an appointment with a mental health counselor. There, a very nice man named Bob talked to me about my experiences, about what I knew about bipolar disorder.

Bob told me some truth about where I was at and what I needed. He said he was surprised I’d gotten as far as I did going the way I was. He listened to my fears about going on meds and what had happened in the past. Then he calmly explained how he was going to give me medication and we’d work together to find what worked.

The first day I took medication, I woke up in the morning and the tornado was quieter. Not quiet, but less a twisting funnel of noise and more of a loud echo. I called up someone who was then a friend (who had experience with the medication I’d started taking) and broke down crying. I asked him: is this what normal felt like? I had no idea it would get even better.

Six years later, I’ve never been off my medication a single day. And I’ve graduated from grad school, survived a brain surgery and being diagnosed with two serious chronic illnesses, ending up using a wheelchair, running my own business, becoming a writer, and too many personal ups and downs to count. Each of them I tackled with a surety in myself I never could have before, because I was no longer screaming through a tornado all the time. More importantly, I’ve spent those years creating games and writing work I’ve made with deliberateness and careful consideration. When I create, it was no longer controlled falling, but dedicated flight on a controlled course. Well, most of the time.

I won’t say everything became perfect after I started medication because I won’t let blogging make a liar out of me. Being bipolar is a constant system of checks and balances. These days, I fight against needing my medication adjusted a lot, against depression and anxiety, mania and hypomania. I still end up flying some days, sometimes for days at a time, because as time goes on the body changes and you have to adjust to new needs, new doses, new medication.

Coping mechanisms change, life situations go ways you never expected, mania and depression rear their ugly head. But the day I went on medication was one of the greatest days of my life, because it was the day my creative spark stopped becoming an excuse to keep putting up with an illness that was killing me.

I did some research online (now responsibly!) about artists who were known to have fought with mental illness. Google it some time and it’ll be a stark look into some suffering for art you might not know about. People know about Van Gogh, but what about Beethoven and David Foster Wallace, Georgia O’Keefe and Sylvia Plath, Goya and Cobain, Robin Williams and Amy Winehouse. I did research and discovered artists like Mariah Carrey, Demi Lovato, Catherine Zeta Jones, Vivien Leigh, Russell Brand, Linda Hamilton, and of course Carrie Fischer all have/had bipolar disorder. Their stories, their struggles, are well known.

I read books about people theorizing about the connection between mental illness and creativity and shake my head. I don’t need to know the connection, because if there is one, it doesn’t matter to me. I take my medicine and work my craft at the same time because I don’t need to suffer as an artist. I don’t need the mania to take flight and reach inspiration. I can do that on my own.

5628f1c61400002200c7a8d1 — So speaketh the General, the Princess, Carrie Fischer

Mental illness and the struggle against it is one I’ll tackle for the rest of my life. But to quote Hannah Gadsby: “There is nothing stronger than a broken woman who has rebuilt herself.” The day I started on my journey to getting better by taking medication, by denying the world my suffering and instead gave myself permission to live healthier while making art, was the day I started rebuilding myself into the strongest version of me. Every day, one more brick, with every word I write, I build myself higher.

And so I offer a special thanks to Hannah Gadsby, and her brave “Nanette,” for reminding me of how important that choice was to my life. For reminding me I owe nobody my suffering to make what is precious to me, and that a creator doesn’t need to push aside their own mental health to be hailed as an artist. Thank you, Hannah, for your strength. May you find your inspiration wherever you walk.

Go Away: Imposed Debriefs And Social Pressure

March 4, 2018 by Shoshana, posted in Criticism, Game Design, LARP Discussion and Theory, Not Ready To Make Nice, Personal, Speaking Out

[Note: This article was meant to be included in my submissions for the Knutpunkt 2018 companion books. However, due to being short on time, I ended up only submitting this article about personal games instead. I figured this is a topic I still wanted to explore, and so here we are. Please enjoy.]

I didn’t want to cry after the game.

We sat around in a circle, everyone still breathing a little heavy from the last few minutes of the game we’d played. We were testing out a new live-action roleplaying game at a convention, a serious subject black box game where we played political prisoners about to be executed and experiencing the last hour of their lives with their comrades. The very end of the game is a harrowing experience (which I won’t ruin for anyone) but I had a very strong emotional reaction. I’d played very tough during the game, but once the last few minutes before the end happened, I turned into a panicked, weepy mess. Then game off was called and I had a lot of feelings to unpack, and I wanted nothing more than to be on my own.

Too bad that wasn’t really an option.

You wouldn’t know it, but I’m a pretty private person sometimes. I can talk forever about topics that interest me, but when it comes to my feelings I am very self-protective. Being vulnerable around people takes time for me, and certainly can’t be turned on and off like a switch. It’s only through the alibi provided by a larp that I feel comfortable enough to open up and show vulnerability in character, exploring deeper emotions in front of others and even feeling comfortable enough to cry in public.

But once the game is over and the alibi is stripped away, I am often not interested in sharing my personal feelings with others. However, the recent trend of mandatory debriefs has provided me with a serious conundrum after a game.

There have been many articles written about the importance of debriefs or de-rolling exercises. In the perfect practice, these post-game sessions allow people to separate from their characters and seek an understanding of their own emotions provoked in game for the purposes of managing bleed. (Quoted from the Nordiclarp Wiki: “Bleed is experienced by a player when her thoughts and feelings are influenced by those of her character, or vice versa.”)

Debriefs manage the closure players allegedly ought to have before returning to their regular lives and begin a process of uncoupling from the intense emotional experiences one can have during a larp. They also serve as a way to reconcile the often deeply personal relationships developed between player characters during the game and allow players to resolve any potential serious feelings (both negative and positive) they’ve had during interactions with others in play.

Debriefs may take the form of a workshop at the end, a roundtable, or even a series of steps begun after the game and spread out over the weeks (or even months) post game. These steps are meant to be put in place to help players not only go back to normal life, but get the most out of the game experience by resolving negative feelings, solidifying positive ones, and offering the best possible emotional resolution for everyone involved.

And on paper, in theory, that all sounds perfectly fine. And when these debriefings are optional, they remain a positive addition to any game design.

The problem becomes when they’re mandatory.

I have been to several games which have instituted mandatory debriefs, or debriefs which have been ‘strongly suggested.’ In the latter, members of the game staff have gone around and pressured people into going to the debriefs if they seemed uninterested in attending. The premise behind their pressure was simple: as a participant in the game, you not only owe yourself the experience of a debrief, but you are responsible for giving others a chance to share their feelings with you as well. If you participated in the game and impacted someone else, you need to give them an equal chance to share with you and hear what you have to say in return. To be part of the community of play you entered into, you must complete the game experience with this sharing to honor the spirit of the social contract you agreed upon when coming to the game.

But what if debriefings and the open emotional sharing in public are not good for you? What if the very idea of such a public airing of feelings is nigh on horrifying to you, or even traumatic?

In other words, what if all you want to say to the mandatory briefing is:

I sat in a debriefing after a game, and my heart was in my throat.

Everyone was going around the circle, speaking about their feelings, and I knew it was almost my turn. I knew I was going to have to talk about the experience, and the moment I did, I’d start to cry. The game was very intense for me and had tapped into some very fundamental, dark and difficult feelings I hadn’t expected to experience. There were elements of past trauma uncovered during the game, deep feelings I needed to process. And as I looked around the circle, I didn’t see a single face I trusted enough to want to unburden to that moment. I needed time. I needed people I trusted. I needed to get out of that room.

But the peer pressure was on. Everyone had been told it was best if we stayed and it wouldn’t be fair to others if you left when everyone was sharing. So I stayed. And the moment they got to me, I did start to cry. I felt instantly ashamed, on the spot, and betrayed by the organizers and myself. I kept my explanation short and sweet. My fingers knotted in my sweater as I tried and failed not to cry. I felt dirty and embarrassed and I wanted to flee.

I wanted to say:

Afterward, while everyone else went to a party and drank and laughed, I sat in a corner and tried to shake the feelings of intense unease at how badly I felt. I’d been peer pressured into sitting in a room and sharing my feelings with people I didn’t trust, all for the sake of being a good player. I felt raw and furious.

A person’s emotional experiences are their own and are myriad in the way they are expressed. Expecting everyone to respond to intense feelings the same way or to homogenize their way of processing their feelings ignores the fundamental issue of the complexity of human emotions. Moreover, forcing people to be involved in debriefings which require speaking about those emotions publicly as a matter of rote, prepared only one way and presented as a must for all players, raises the possibility of inflicting emotional harm on your players.

Moreover, it presents a serious question: just who are the debriefs for anyway?

I’ve seen a lot of reasons people put forward for the importance of debriefing. Emotional safety and the management of uncoupling from alibi for a return to the real world, as mentioned above, is one. Allowing people to air their feelings about one another before they go their separate ways, as I also already mentioned, is another. There’s a third, which is the opportunity for organizers to hear feedback about their game, as well as letting the staff open up emotionally about their experience as well.

But all of these reasons come back to a single underpinning idea, an underlying message of, “this is what I need.” Whether it be the players involved needing to unburden their feelings or the staff members needing to process, the feelings involved in a debriefing are, in many ways, inherently selfish. They reflect an individual’s needs, or the expectation and assumption of what players need, to de-roll their feelings and experiences.

“I need to share how I feel with others.”

“I need the players to do this so I can mitigate liability if they get lost in bleed.”

“I as a staff member need to hear the players’ feedback, or make sure they’re okay for my peace of mind (and liability).”

“I need to air my grievances to the other player and confront them about our interactions, both positive and negative.”

I and I and I. Debriefing is about the consideration of what an individual or a group feels is necessary for others at the end of the game.

But what if what they believe is necessary or what they’d like to see happen is wrong?

What if, by insisting on a mandatory airing of feelings, you’re spoiling the game experience and opening up the player to negative feelings that can create temporary or even lasting distress?

I’d had an incredible weekend. One of the best larps of my life, in fact. I packed up my gear and was ready to head home when someone reminded me of the thing I dreaded the most: the debrief. I tried to beg off, say I had some things to finish before getting into my car. And yet I got the stern look. Other people should have the chance to talk to you. You’ll feel better if you go. It’s part of the game, it’s mandatory.

And all I could think was: No, I don’t want to talk to people. No, I won’t feel better if I go. And it wasn’t part of my game experience. I’d left that behind before putting my character away in my suitcase when I got out of the game. I knew what I planned on doing to debrief my way. I had a car ride home and my friends to talk out my feelings, the people I trusted.

Instead, I ended up at a table, sitting around with others I’d gotten to know over the weekend. And they weren’t bad. I didn’t cry. I didn’t feel vulnerable or awkward. Except when the facilitator came around. Staring at us at the table, making sure we were ‘getting along okay,’ and prying. Prying with their questions, with their ‘guiding’ by leading us towards speaking about our feelings. In the moments before we’d been joking around about war stories from the game and I felt happy, lighter, and safe. The next moment we were being reminded this was not about telling funny stories and joking around, but sharing how we felt.

This was about what others expected we should feel, and not my emotions at all.

I clammed up. I was furious. Because the interference wasn’t about my feelings or even the people around the table. It was about the facilitator’s expectations of what we needed, their job to steer us towards being vulnerable. And again, all I thought looking at the facilitator was the underpinning behind their words: I need you to have these expected emotional experiences now. Otherwise, you’re doing it wrong.

And all I wanted to say was:

It was about them, not me. They wanted us to come out saying we had some kind of emotional catharsis, lead by their expert hand. It was about ‘positive guidance’ towards exploring your feelings, even if the feeling we had might not be positive at all. There was no room for real emotional exploration, I knew, but the measured sharing of polite company. Crying was allowed. Being angry, being negative, would have to be mitigated by ‘I’ statements and rephrasing into words of encouragement and mutual support.

What if that wasn’t what I was feeling? What if my unburdening of feelings involved telling another player their roleplay made me feel awful about myself, or I felt they’d been selfish and treated me or another person like crap during the game? Would that honest emotional response be allowed, or would I have to find some calming I statement to make everyone feel safe?

I didn’t feel safe. I didn’t feel positive, perhaps, not entirely. I didn’t know what I felt because I had complicated feelings, as any person can. But we had our guidance, and it was based on the ‘learned’ experience of our facilitators, most of which I knew were not mental health professionals. They had taken on the responsibility of helping guide people on their emotional journey back from alibi to reality without any professional training and only based on what they perceived as the proper way to handle strong emotions. All packaged and prepared and homogenized to work for a large group of people, rather than the individual.

I know how to run this debrief. I know how to help you handle your bleed.

How? You barely know me. And you probably don’t have the training to know how to handle the complexities of multiple human beings’ mental health. So why should I trust you with mine?

I had intense feelings. I wanted to get them out. But as I looked around the circle, I wondered if there were others who didn’t have intense feelings that were both negative and positive to be dealt with. But someone around the table must have just the opposite. Someone’s feelings might just be ‘meh’ and not be in need of the complex debrief and airing of emotion. But here we were, being watched closely for proper responses. Here we were, being molded and shaped into a single narrow ditch of express your feelings now. And I wondered if we’d all know what we were feeling later at all when we were being pressured into needing an outlet for strong feelings at all.

I wondered what the facilitators’ intentions were and what they were feeling. At the end of the day, they’d go home after the game to their lives, having completed their task of guiding their players towards game’s completion. And I would go home with my feelings, still convoluted and complex and ready for unpacking in a positive form of my own choosing. I’d go home to my Monday morning after game and all the responsibilities therein. Only I’d be adding all the tangled emotions a mandatory debrief added, feelings of forced vulnerability and emotional flaying, being put on the spot and feeling shame and distrust and imposition. Feeling as though my emotions were not respected.

Mandatory debriefs have an undercurrent of inherent selfishness. By requiring people to open up and speak about their in-game experiences, those who are doing the requiring are putting their emotional needs ahead of those whose mental and emotional processes don’t need or even sometimes allow for public unburdening. It says everyone, no matter their own individual mental health and emotional status, is inherently required to set aside their own processes for the sake of being part of a community of play, no matter if it isn’t what they need. This is a selfish action on the part of those doing the requiring, and can even reach the level of victimizing another for the sake of that selfishness.

But for the sake of safety, and managing intense emotions brought to the surface by larp, we put our fear of players having a negative reaction after game ahead of individual needs. For the sake of the many, the few are sacrificed to the altar of peer pressure and concerns of liability.

I sat on the internet a month after a game. My hands shook as I typed.

A month before I’d had a terrible experience in a game. I’d had a very public confrontation with a male player who was larger than me, and who humiliated me in character in front of nearly fifty people. When I lost the confrontation and sat on my knees on the ground in front of him, the player in question mimicked unzipping his pants right above me and urinating on my character.

I sat on my knees on the ground, my body shaking. My good friends rushed to my side in character and carried me off the field. The moment we were out of sight of the group, they checked in on me out of character. I was in a daze. I told them I was just tired. I told them I was okay, that the shake in my hands was just adrenaline. I jabbered, stammered, my eyes far away. I was in shock and didn’t even know it.

I made it through the end of game, but I was out of sorts, jumpy. When game was over, there was no debrief. I left with my friends and went to a diner, where the player of the character in question sat a few tables away with his friends. It took all my courage to get up and head for the table. I joined his conversation and jokingly asked what he thought about what had happened. He responded by defending his character’s actions, saying my character “deserved it.” My hands kept shaking. I tried to joke about it too, then tried to say how screwed up the whole thing was. I tried to talk about it with him. And he blew me off with jokes, unwilling to let me tell him what I needed to say. I walked away from the table and within two weeks wanted to quit the ongoing game.

It took me three months of dreading going to game, of ducking out of events and making excuses, for me to figure out what was going on. It took a friend talking to me on Facebook Messenger about it and pointing out I was having serious negative bleed that I fully accepted how traumatized I was by the in character events. That the very act of this man standing over me when I was vulnerable in character, winded out of character, and on my knees in supplication, triggered awful things for me. That when he unzipped his pants and pretended to urinate on me, humiliated me further, it triggered issues of past sexual assault buried deep in my head. I had bleed and after game, I’d tried to talk to the player in question. And his saying my character “deserved it” only made the shock and trauma of the experience all the worse.

At that moment, I needed a debrief. I needed someplace to take those emotions and unpack them, to uncork the bottle and get those feelings out before they started to fester. But for three months, because of a lack of debriefing, those feelings did fester and nearly ruined the whole game for me. Every time the player in question came near in the subsequent games, my hands started to shake. It took him cornering me again in the game for me to realize I needed to get through the feelings once and for all. A friend of mine had to drive the player away from me as I had an anxiety attack. I was not okay. And I didn’t feel I had an emotional outlet or recourse to help deal with the way I felt.

There are instances when sharing is imperative. When having the resources to unpack serious emotional experiences after game are not only important but essential to a healthy resolution of intense in character events. But what if those same events had occurred and I’d instead been forced immediately to confront this other player in a mandatory setting, rather than in a manner more comfortable and my speed? If at the very end of game we were required to sit across from each other, led by someone who was not a mental health professional? What if in that setting I’d been told I “deserved it” and was forced to speak to this person in front of others, triggered as I was, feeling unsafe and in shock?

I needed a debrief. But I needed options. Not a one-size-fits-all approach.

For debriefs to work as positive experiences for all, it’s my opinion they need to be a toolbox rather than a list of steps, not linear exploration with a single means and an expected end. Instead, having multiple options for unpacking one’s feelings, without a forced time and place expectation takes the weight off the individual to perform emotionally on the spot, but gives them the chance to tailor their needs towards closure with the tools provided.

Optional roundtables, optional discussions with staff members at a time and place that is equitable to both parties (because forcing staff into mandatory interactions is equally as unfair to the staff who just went through running a game, their own emotional labor extended and often taxed), and later-date de-rolling with other players are all tools available for inclusion. And should those needs require further and more serious emotional unpacking, one of the tools offered should be the suggestion to seek out more professional mental health resources rather than (often) well-meaning laypeople.

In the end, I’ve had a lot of different experiences with debriefings but as yet I have never had a mandatory debriefing that hasn’t left me feeling uneasy when forced to express emotions. Those which are simply checking in or offering optional chances to speak aloud, or else those used only to offer the toolbox of debriefing choices have provided ample safety for me to choose my own path to closure. But the more popular choice of mandatory debriefs remains a terror for me attending games and, in my opinion, one of the least healthy choices made in the name of creating safety in our larps.

Reconsideration of the techniques used and the personnel employed is paramount, I believe, in truly making sure the needs of players and organizers are tailored to provide actual emotional support in games to come.

Otherwise, I will have to continue my own practice of simply (sometimes) saying:

To Mayim: Women Are Not The Problem

October 15, 2017 by Shoshana, posted in Not Ready To Make Nice, Personal, Sexual Harassment, Speaking Out

I remember the first time I realized as a girl I was the object of a man’s sexual interest. I was ten years old, walking to the bus inside the gates of my all girl’s religious school. Yes, there were gates, tall ones that went two stories high. The bus was pulled up just before the gate, ready to take us home. I remember, as I shouldered my backpack, that I hoped we got home before the rain kicked in because there was a terrible storm brewing. As I was stepping up onto the bus, the wind kicked up hard

As I was stepping up onto the bus, the wind kicked up hard and blew my skirt up over my knee. I nearly dropped my backpack trying to cover my legs, but it was too late. I heard a whistling noise from beyond the gate. Two boys stood just beyond the chain link, high school age and no older. One of them leaned in and made a kissing face at me. He said something in another language and both boys laughed. And I knew, for the first time, they were staring at me. At my legs.

I got on the bus so fast I fell on the top step and ripped open my elbow. Only a few weeks later, my mom had ‘the talk’ with me about being a woman, and what would happen to me soon. I put two and two together that night, after Mom had gone to bed, and realized things for me had changed. I wasn’t exactly different, even though I was about to get hit by puberty like a hormonal freight train. No, this time, something had changed outside of me. Before, I was just a little girl. Now, I was seen.

That was just the first time. That wouldn’t be the last.

In high school, I had a kid in a movie theater line push up against me from behind so I felt his erection through his pants. When I spun around, he looked sheepish and said I shouldn’t wear a skirt if I didn’t want attention. My skirt was ankle-length and black.

In college, I had the friend of a friend, a guy who was one of those “tell it like it is” nerd guys who mansplained everything, grabbed my chest in the school cafeteria from behind using the pretext of a hug. When I instinctively elbowed him in the side of the head (oops), for weeks he mewled that I’d hit him and denied the groping. I heard him say later that he’d never grope “someone like her.” And by that, I knew, he meant fat.

I had a guy in college take advantage of me being drunk in the backseat of his friend’s car. I was on my way home from a party. I was wearing a tank top for the first time in public, my first show of rebellion against religious upbringing. It was black, with a silver Superman S on the front, which I insisted was for Supergirl instead. This guy, who was a friend from school and knew all my friends, stuck his tongue down my throat and his hand down my shirt, and almost forced my hand down his pants. I barely got out of the car without things going further. My two friends, his best friends, sat in the front seat the whole way back to my house to drop me off and did nothing to stop it. The week after this incident, they made a crude joke about how we’d “hooked up” in the backseat, to which the guy in question said, “it’s not like I’d date her.” That party was my twenty-first birthday. To this day, I get nervous wearing tank tops in public.

I was twenty-seven and coming home on a train from work late at night. I was wearing my work clothes: jeans, store t-shirt, big scarf and jacket for the cold. I looked like the Stay-Puff Marshmellow woman. It was late and I fell asleep against the window. When I woke up, a guy had grabbed my hand and pressed it to his crotch. I screamed, pushed him off the seat, and started roaring at him. When the cops on the next stop’s platform came aboard, he started shouting that I came on to him. It took two dudes getting in my way to keep me from murdering the guy, I was so scared. And I’d finally had it.

These aren’t all the instances of sexual harassment, street harassment, and even assault that happened to me. They aren’t even the worst of the lot. Instead, they’re examples to highlight a fallacy in recent arguments in regards to cases of sexual harassment and assault levied against women in Hollywood. Specifically, women in the Harvey Weinstein case. It seems some folks believe that to avoid getting sexually harassed, women in Hollywood should have known that the mousy, ‘less attractive’, less flirty women stay safer and others should learn from that example since we don’t live in a perfect world.

Yeah, I’m looking at you, Mayim Bialik.

mayimbialik_prayer — Former *Blossom* star and *Big Bang Theory* regular Mayim Bialik.

I read Mayim Bialik’s post about how she avoided being harassed in a Hollywood full of predatory men with a sinking in my stomach. Here was an ostensibly brilliant young woman, an accomplished actress with a doctorate in neuroscience, pointing to her background as being a relatively “Plain Jane” in Hollywood as evidence of why she had avoided being sexually harassed and exploited. Moreover, she drew a direct correlation, it seems, between her perception of herself (and perhaps other people’s perceptions of her) as dowdy or less attractive as a reason why she avoided being harassed.

To quote the op-ed:

I still make choices every day as a 41-year-old actress that I think of as self-protecting and wise. I have decided that my sexual self is best reserved for private situations with those I am most intimate with. I dress modestly. I don’t act flirtatiously with men as a policy.

I am entirely aware that these types of choices might feel oppressive to many young feminists. Women should be able to wear whatever they want. They should be able to flirt however they want with whomever they want. Why are we the ones who have to police our behavior?

In a perfect world, women should be free to act however they want. But our world isn’t perfect.

No, Mayim, our world is not perfect. But neither, it seems, is your feminism.

This kind of response to reports of sexual misconduct by people like Harvey Weinstein and other Hollywood execs and, dare I say it, our own walking disaster in the White House, is the perfect example of how NOT to support victimized women. It’s the same bullshit that told women who were targeted in gaming communities to just “stay off the internet” when facing harassment and doxing and stalking by abusers. It’s the same mentality that has for generations pointed the finger at women who are victims of assault and rape and tells them they were “asking for it.” It’s the same old stories of warning passed down from mother to daughter, telling them to cover up, for god’s sakes, lest the predators of the world find you. It doesn’t tell the world to hold men accountable. It tells women it’s on them to hold themselves accountable for whatever triggers might set a man off and make them the target of his unwanted affections.

So I guess when I read Mayim’s response, my first knee-jerk reaction was: was my ten-year-old little skirt, down to my ankles, too flirtatious for those boys outside the school gate? Was my long-skirt in high school? My tank top? My puffy winter coat?

Mayim spends a great deal of the article talking about how she was never that attractive in Hollywood, and how that seemingly protected her perhaps. How she spent her time cultivating her talent, her mind and relied less on her looks. In a modern twist on the puritanical mindset, she encourages young women to focus on things other than just their looks (a noble idea on its own) and downplay their sexuality to protect against predation. As if to say “tone it down, ladies, and pick up some books instead, and men won’t come after you as often.” Like being a nerd or being dowdy will keep the molesters away.

Look, Mayim. If we want to talk about women who aren’t a perfect 10, let’s get one thing straight. I’m a 34-year-old woman who has been overweight her whole life. If we were using the Hollywood scale of beauty, I wouldn’t even be up in the running. And that’s not me knocking myself. The impossible standards of Hollywood beauty are stupid and exactly that: impossible to meet. I know what that means in terms of societal standards for overweight women, no matter how pretty we might actually be in the reality that is the rest of the world. I also know the reality of being heavy in how other people look at women who are overweight. Being fat is the last acceptable bigotry, one shared by nearly every group of people, marginalized or otherwise. To most people, being fat is the final frontier of being acceptably called ugly. So if your rubric worked, Mayim, then I’d be safe from harassment, right?

Well, I gotta tell you, either I’m the unlucky outlier, or your op-ed is privileged crap.

Bullshit, Mayim. Your lesson here is bullshit. I’m an educated woman who is fairly serious, who wears covered up clothing, who is considered fat by the world. And who has dodged groping, cat-calling, harassment, and sexual assault since I was in my high school years. What was it that was enticing about me, Mayim, when I was eleven then? I was in a religious school uniform covering everything from my neck to my wrists and down to my ankles and I was eleven. Be careful to answer that one, lest you run into some VERY awful answers.

Now, I’m not surprised by Bialik’s answers entirely. Many of her responses sound eerily like the conservative excuses I heard growing up in the Jewish community, a community Mayim and I share in common. There, modesty and piety were often pointed-to as the ways to protect against the dangers of abusive men. I’m also not surprised considering Mayim stars on Big Bang Theory, which she points out is the #1 Sitcom in America, and is known in many circles to not only be the most nerd-shaming but also FULL of sexist and misogynistic crap. So when I hear her opining this kind of twisted feminism, it doesn’t surprise me in the least.

Mayim Bialik’s answers are the regurgitated messages of generations of women who have seen the imbalance of power in the patriarchal world and instead of facing it head on and demanding change, have turned their powerlessness into a message of shame for women everywhere. Cover up, don’t be too provocative. Don’t be seen, don’t be heard. Stay under the radar and don’t make waves. Beauty is a curse to women, even while it brings privilege. Don’t shine too brightly or make any sudden moves, and maybe they won’t see you. If they do, you must have done something wrong.

And if something does happen, the message changes to: If they hurt you, it was your fault for catching their eye. They predators are wrong too, of course, but so are the women involved. Because they weren’t careful enough to avoid the hunter’s trap. By this metaphor, we can start blaming Bambi’s mom for getting shot too. After all, she didn’t run fast enough into that thicket before the bullet came.

What’s truly irksome about this article is that Mayim Bialik’s opinion piece couches itself in the empowering language of some feminist ideology, while turning back the clock to pearl-clutching times when modesty was the watchword of “good girls.” The fact is, Mayim, a woman should be able to walk stark naked through a room and not have to worry about being sexually assaulted. But in your world, a woman with a nice figure is the problem instead. And this is the message you’d put in the New York Times, when brave women like Asia Argento and Rose McGowen, and allies like Terry Crews, are coming forward to talk about the sexual assaults they’ve endured in Hollywood. The article comes off as self-aggrandizing, backward, and frankly cowardly.

By comparison, there is a clip going around from a decade back of Courtney Love on the red carpet. The notoriously controversial rocker was asked what advice she could give to young women trying to get into Hollywood. She looked off camera, said “I could get libeled for this, right?” then looks back at the reporter and the camera furtively and says, “If Harvey Weinstein invites you back to his place at the Four Seasons, don’t go.”

Here is a woman who had every reason to be afraid of legal reprisals from a powerful man like Weinstein. Yet instead of giving blanket assertions about modesty protecting women from the predations of molesters, Courtney Love risked legal reprisals to say to the camera what so many had turned a blind eye to for years. She didn’t tell girls to cover up their bodies, don’t flirt, don’t be themselves. She told them to look out for a known bad actor being protected by the powerful. She stepped up and showed bravery.

Meanwhile you, Mayim, made excuses for the world of patriarchy at large.

These days, more and more women are coming forward to disclose their stories of assault and harassment. Casting couch horror stories, interview horror stories, workplace horror stories, childhood horror stories. They tell us that our world is dotted not just with men who can’t seem to keep their hands to themselves, but that our world is still a place where the victims are blamed while the predators are coddled. It’s not their fault, it’s “just how they were raised” or “just the way things were back then” or a dozen other excuses made to distract from the fact that a woman’s worth is still valued lower than man’s reputation. Where men are labeled good members of the community or boys with their whole futures ahead of them, while women are slut-shamed for being the victims of men’s inability to control themselves.

As Mayim writes, it’s not a perfect world. Not by a long shot. But it won’t get better if we keep framing this as a women’s modesty problem and not a question of recognizing a woman’s worth, a woman’s word, a woman’s life, as valuable equal to a man’s. We don’t need more modest clothing, more skulking below the radar. We need more recognition, more equality, and less hemming and hawing over just who is responsible for the dangerous world women walk every day.

Me, I’m not going to sit and question whether I should have worn something other than a tank top on my twenty-first birthday, or whether I should have covered up my legs faster when I was eleven. But I still have problems wearing anything revealing, and I spend my time ready to bare my teeth at any man who dares overstep on me or any other woman I know.

Because I know what Mayim doesn’t seem to recognize, in her privilege: that perhaps she was just lucky, but not all of us were. And no matter what I wear, I’m still a target, as are other women, when a man doesn’t know how to control himself. And unlike Mayim, I know where to point the finger.

Eclipse, From Far Away: Saying Goodbye To My Mother

August 23, 2017 by Shoshana, posted in Personal

I was staring up at the sun in Indianapolis when I got the phone call.

We were outside the Omni Severen Hotel in Indianapolis, wrapping up our trip to GenCon. Three generous bell hops were trying to shove all of our gear back into my truck. I sat in my wheelchair alongside my friends, staring up through a pair of weird-looking 3D-like cardboard glasses and watched the sun disappear in the sky. Then, the phone rang.

“It’s not good,” my dad said, “your mom’s not doing too well. When are you coming home?”

My friends turned to me. They could tell by the look on my face what was going on. They put the glasses away and got to packing up the car even faster.

“I’m on my way, Dad,” I said, “hold on. I’ll be home soon.”

We drove eighteen hours, only stopping really twice for bare essentials. We made it back to New Jersey by 6AM. I slept for two hours, then headed to the hospital. By the time I got there, my mother was dead. She was 68 years old.

It’s a hard thing, when you’re an adult and a parent gets sick. Because you think you’re an adult, up until that moment. You pay taxes, you do your laundry, you do all the things you think you’re supposed to do to prove you’re an adult. You might even be married and have kids of your own (though I do not). But the moment a parent becomes ill, really ill, and you’re facing the possibility that you might lose them forever, things change. And suddenly you’re regressing in weird ways, saying things, thinking about things, from your childhood, remembering all those things that were important but that you didn’t realize were important until much, much later.

On the drive home from Indiana, I put my headphones on and listened to music from years ago. And I remembered the oddest things:

Sitting in the kitchen with my mother, talking politics – railing really – while she patiently listened to me go ballistic over something or another.

Talking about Harry Potter with her and getting her a butterbeer in Harry Potter World in Universal Studios.

Holding up our first kitten, which she didn’t want, and watching her face go from staunch, stubborn NO to “fine, but you’re cleaning up after it.” That cat and my mom had a love/hate relationship since 2001. Now I wonder who’s going to fight over bed space with Kita or who’s going to chase her off the kitchen chairs.

I remember sitting in my grandmother’s kitchen, in her small apartment, with my mother and grandmother, and listening to them complain and gossip and joke. They had such a tight relationship and I remember wanting to be let in on that when I was old enough. I didn’t realize then, but I was part of that bond, the third part of that maiden-mother-crone as old as time (though my grandmother would box my ears to hear me call her a crone). We sat in the kitchen before the Sabbath and made babka cake and listened to Yiddish music on the radio while the breeze came in from a late Brooklyn afternoon.

I remember playing make believe with my mother when I was a girl. I wasn’t very good with other kids, so my mom would play make believe with me for hours. I would pester her until we’d take my toys and tell stories about them. Those stories evolved over the years, getting more intricate, interlaced with adventure themes and plots I picked up from TV. I don’t remember when we stopped, but it was around the time I started writing. My mother helped me learn to tell stories.

But mostly, I remember one of the most important stories of my life. And it’s so innocuous to most people, I’m sure, but it is the day my mom saved my life.

It’s no secret from all the posts I’ve made that I’m bipolar, and I’ve suffered from severe depression since I was twelve years old. My parents suffered with me, in their own way, dealing with a daughter who was radically off the charts emotionally, struggling to find the right medications, the right therapists, struggling to help me through bullying and suicide attempts, and the every day of life. I never made it easy on my folks, and there were bitter fights, stubborn attritions, and long days of defeated sleep where staying alive was all I could manage.

This went on into my twenties. I’d come out of the malaise, then fall back into it, unable to keep up momentum, eaten by things inside my own head until I couldn’t get out of bed. I just about dropped out of high school, but got my GED and went to college. Fought my way through a few years of school, had to leave because it wasn’t working. Opened a business, fell out of that too. And in that time, when everything was falling apart, when the business had failed and I felt lost, I just took to my bed, as they used to call it. I was just about done fighting. Frankly, I wanted to die.

It was early summer, and my mother came home from work to find me still in bed at five PM. We only had one air conditioner working in the apartment, so I was sleeping on a mattress dragged into my parents’ bedroom. I had the blankets up over my head, my back to the room. And my mother came in and kind of blew a gasket. She’d watched me lying there for so long, had tried coaxing and cajoling and supporting. So, down came the tough love.

My mother sat on the edge of her bed and laid down some hard facts. She said I was lucky because I had a situation where I could lie in bed all day and be depressed. She said that adults had to get up and fight, even when they were depressed, to make money, to pay the bills, to put a roof over their heads and food in their mouths. If they had a family, they had to fight doubly hard, because they had others to take care of and couldn’t let them down. Moreover, she told me the most terrifying thing a twenty-something-year-old who’d never been out on their own could hear: I’m not going to be around forever, and what are you going to do then?

I was twenty-two years old, and my mother scared the shit out of me.

She left the room after laying it all out on the line. I was twenty-two and I’d been fairly spoiled. I lived at home so I didn’t have to pay rent. My tuition was taken care of, my meals, my bills. I was able to piss it all away with my depression because I had two parents who loved me. And without them, I’d be dead. I barely knew how to do the bare necessities of life, like laundry, or cooking a meal. I had never been out on my own, never lived anywhere else. I was a child still in all but age. And I needed to grow the hell up. I lay there in the air conditioning, listening to it cycle, and really thought about my life.

By the end of the summer, I’d petitioned to go back into college. I’d been on academic probation when I left because of poor grades and rampant non-attendance. When I sat down to convince my parents to help me go back to school, I promised them I’d be off probation in two semesters. By the end of the second semester, I was up to a 3.5 GPA thanks to some savvy retaking of classes and enrolled in a summer abroad program in London. When I left for England the next year, I wished my parents a good summer, left a fairly standard Orthodox Jewish girl. I came back with dyed bright red hair, two ear piercings, new stompy Doc Martins, and a brand new leather jacket from Camden. I brought them souveniers from Paris I’d bought with money I couldn’t afford and was talking about getting my first tattoo. I was in teenage rebellion in my twenties, and for the first time in my life, I started to feel like I knew I could have a life.

My mother gave me that. And I’m not sure I ever told her. She saved my life that day, with the most innocuous of conversations. All it took was me listening to wisdom born of years fighting depression herself, quietly, when no one was looking, because she was a mother and had others to take care of all her life. That was my mother. The woman who taught me to tell stories. The woman who pushed me out of bed and gave me the strength to stand up and stop feeling sorry for myself.

That was twelve years ago. And now, my mother is gone.

28824_561520521373_7551002_n — My mother and me at my college graduation (BA), Brooklyn College, 2010

I got home from GenCon after that eighteen-hour drive. I was fried. We dropped off everything in my apartment. My friend May promised to be back at 9 AM to grab me and take me to the hospital, even though she’d been in that same eighteen-hour car drag. I tallied up all the things I needed to take to stay in Manhattan. I sent a message to my boss. I slept for two hours.

When I woke up, my roommate Craig was helping me put clothing in a bag when I asked him for my black dress. Because somewhere, deep down, I knew things weren’t going to go well. On the phone, my dad said we had days, maybe a week. But I knew we didn’t have that long at all.

My mother started getting sick at the beginning of the summer. She had breathing problems, fainting, weakness. The doctors couldn’t figure out what was going on. She was hospitalized twice, and the diagnosis always came down the same: she had anxiety, nothing more. They didn’t order more tests. They sent her home, even when her breathing got worse. By the time they thought to test her for more, only when her liver enzymes were terrible, it was far too late. Just before the July 4th weekend, my mom ended up in the hospital again, and within a few days, she was diagnosed with stage 4 pancreatic cancer. She never stabilized enough for the doctors to get a handle on the cancer’s progress, didn’t get a chance to do chemo or radiation or any other treatment. Within six weeks, the cancer spread to her liver, stomach, spine, lungs, and finally her kidneys. Within six weeks, she was dead.

She passed on while I was on my way to the hospital, sipping a cold coffee to stay awake and riding over the GWB, talking about god knows what to keep my mind off the fact that I was suddenly a little girl again, and all I wanted was to hug my mother.

737288_826211812903_1012461496_o — My mother, January 2013

Let me tell you about my mother.

My mother grew up the eldest daughter of two stubborn, tough, unsinkable people, two survivors of the Holocaust who came together to rebuild their lives in America after the devastation they saw. My grandmother Nora had survived Auschwitz to join her surviving relatives in New York, while my grandfather Zev let behind Romania and a previous family who perished by the Nazis. They rebuilt a life together, opening up a sandwich shop in Brooklyn, getting up in the wee hours to make food for the commuter crowds. They also brought up my mother Esther, and my uncle, Mitch.

My mother told me stories about living in those days, how different it was. She grew up going to religious school, working with my grandmother in the mornings and evenings in the store to prepare food and help out with the business. She took on a lot of those responsibilities after my grandfather was diagnosed with cancer. He died late in her teens. She always used to say he would have loved me because he was a take-no-shit kind of guy. I always wish I could have met him.

My mother overcame a hell of a lot. When she was twelve, she broke her hip in a swimming accident and was in traction for over a year. This was in the 1950’s so you can imagine the kind of hell that had to be. The injury never fully healed and when she was newly married in her late twenties to my dad, a car ran her off the road while she was driving. She slammed into a metal fence and reinjured that hip badly. It never truly got better and my mother lived in constant pain all her life, which got worse and worse as arthritis ate the hip socket away. Still, she never took painkillers stronger than over-the-counter and went to work all the way into her early sixties. She cooked food, did laundry, went shopping, went on vacation, went to synagogue, all on a leg screaming at her in pain, on a hip socket being eaten out from under her.

My mother was an Orthodox Jewish woman. She grew up very religious, in a devout family. She was a model of what a mother should be in the eyes of the community: she got married, she brought up a daughter, she kept a good kosher home. My mother was also a rebel in her own way. When she was a teenager, she challenged the religious community authorities by refusing to be told who she could hang out with, what she could do, based on her gender. She wore her hair up in the modern secular style, listened to rock music, loved to watch hunky TV stars, and kept their trading cards in a box to show me when I was older. I didn’t know who Doctor Kildare was, but apparently, he was the Doctor McDreamy of the 60s. She went to see Elvis. She dated military guys and air force guys (sometimes at the same time!) and got contact highs in the back of cars. She smoked cigarettes and remembered the hot summer when the Son of Sam scared half of Brooklyn to death. She wanted to be a neonatal nurse and take care of babies.

Life got in the way. When my grandfather died, my mom had to forgo going to college to help the family keep the house and business. She took a regular ol’ job she didn’t really like, and kept taking those regular ol’ jobs until she got a city job. Good, steady employment, great benefits, ready to work forever until retirement. The kind of steady work so many people look for if you want to settle down, start a family, be a paper pusher. That wasn’t my mother. Not really. But she did it so she could do what people thought was stable, secure. She got married, she settled down. She never became a nurse, but she took care of one kid, me.

She also faced a huge challenge in having children. Back when people were just starting to make strides in fertility treatments, she went to the wall to try and get pregnant. And when it didn’t work out, she challenged the discomfort many Jews in our community and many of her family members had about converting a child into the faith by adopting me. When I was eleven, she took out adoption papers and a journal she wrote during the year it took her to go through the adoption process. “Other people just get their children,” she said, “but we chose you.”

And when I came home, angry at some injustice pointed my way for being a woman in the community – being told I couldn’t hang out with boys because it was immodest, or being told watching TV wasn’t allowed, or being reported to the principal for hanging out with non-Jewish friends on my weekends – my mother told me stories about how she’d stand up the same way when she was a girl. And how my grandfather would tell off the rabbis of the synagogue, telling them he trusted his daughter’s judgment. When the principal of my school called my mother on a nigh regular basis about my behavior, about where I was seen or who I was with, she repeated the same thing: Yes, I know where my daughter was. Yes, I know who she was with. I’m not worried about her reputation. I trust my daughter’s judgment.

My mother and me, peas in a pod. She poured her life into helping me overcome, helping me grow. I was adopted, and yet if you laid two baby pictures of us side by side, we looked exactly alike. I look like a strange match between my parents: my father’s height and stature, my mother’s build, an odd conglomerate which has nothing to do with genetics and just a little bit of providence. Where my mom was small but fierce, I’m the war build, the tall build, the Valkyrie edition.

And I owe it all to her.

457583_828948638283_1600335065_o — My mom and dad, San Diego, CA, January 2013

I made it to the hospital an hour too late. She passed away at 10:23 AM while I was in traffic. When I arrived, I didn’t know where to go, only what the room number was. There was no one around to greet me, so I headed to the curtained off bed area. Only things were way too quiet. There were no machines on, nobody moving around. I was tired, but there was a little voice in my head going off, telling me something was wrong.

A nurse saw me and raced to go get my mother’s nurse. I didn’t realize it then, but they were trying to head me off before I discovered out the truth. The nurse took me by the wheelchair and took me to my father down the hall, in a small room with lots of windows. There was a rabbi there, a chaplain, sitting with my father, who calmly told me we’d both just missed her.

We sat for hours, working out arrangements. A Jewish funeral has to happen immediately, so there was that to plan, and seven days of mourning called the shiva. By the time we got off the phone with people, it was nearly four in the afternoon. We collected my mother’s things and left for Brooklyn. On the way out of the hotel, a flock of kids walked by me, holding ice cream. One of the boys broke away and said, “God bless you miss, you have a great day” and just bounced off. He had to be no more than ten. And that’s about when I started crying.

I got my shit back in order long enough to get in the car. Before long, my dad and I were trading stories about my mother as we navigated Manhattan traffic. And I kept reminding him when he teared up to keep an eye on the road. “Hold it together,” I said, “at least for a little while longer. New York traffic isn’t very forgiving.”

Then I was in a hotel in Brooklyn, with a mural of trees and birds painted on the walls. My dad went back to the house to plan for the shiva. And I was alone.

The mural on the wall. There always seems to be a phoenix at the right moment.

I thought about Indiana and GenCon. I thought about how I’d spoken to my mother before I left. I’d offered to stay home and not go to GenCon at all. I’d canceled everything else, all the larps I’d planned for the summer, so I could be close to home and see her. I still didn’t get out to the hospital enough, but I knew being far away was unacceptable. Still, GenCon is work, and she wouldn’t hear of it. When I saw her last, I brought her Harry Potter books (one of her favorites) and she got to read The Cursed Child before the end.

While at GenCon, I accepted the IGDN Award for Best Setting for the Warbirds anthology. I was the only one of the team at the ceremony, so I went up, flustered, unprepared. I know I babbled quite a bit, but I remember saying distinctly that this award for my part went to my mother and grandmother, for whom I wrote my larp Keeping the Candles Lit. And when I climbed up on the stage at the Ennie Awards to help receive the Silver Ennie for Best Supplement for 7th Sea: Pirate Nations, I kept thinking about my mother and how she taught me how to tell stories. I thought: this is for her.

When I got off the stage and back to my hotel room, I took a picture of both awards together and sent her a text. I said: I won these at GenCon this weekend, and they’re both for you. I wouldn’t be here if not for you. I love you and will speak to you soon.

That was on Friday night. I don’t know if my mother ever saw the texts. By then she was already so ill, she might not have seen her phone. I never got a message back. But I can hope she saw them. My mother never gamed a day in her life but she bought all the games I wrote and told everyone who would listen about what I did, even if she didn’t get it entirely. “My daughter writes games,” she’d tell people, “she’s a game designer.” I could hear the pride in her voice, and I remembered the years where I’d lay in bed, unable to get up, and the conversation that saved my life.

I am who I am because of my mother.

And today, I’m going to her funeral.

In about an hour, the taxi will come. It will take me to my dad’s house – because that’s what it is now, not my house or my mother’s but my dad’s house – and we’ll get in a black stretch. We’ll go to a funeral home, the same one where we said goodbye to my grandmother. I’ll see relatives I haven’t seen in a very long time. I’ll try to say the right things. And we’ll go to the graveyard and we’ll say goodbye to my mother.

I woke up early this morning, and I could have sworn I heard her voice. I found a picture on Facebook from our vacation to San Diego, all those years ago. She was out in the sun by the waterfront and we were shopping, and she was complaining about how I didn’t need another stuffed animal. Later that day we went out on a boat on the water, and she had to lead me by the hands along the dock because I’m petrified of the ocean. She patiently coaxed me, like a skittish horse, not letting me look at the water on either side. She walked backward, despite the pain in her leg, until I got on the boat. Then she handed me a beer to help calm down and we enjoyed a day out in the harbor, rocking on the sea.

My mother and I didn’t always get along. And racing back from GenCon, I swore to myself I’d tell her how sorry I was for everything I’d ever done wrong, all the horrid things I said when I was young and angry, and when I was older and bitter, and all the times I was just a damn fool. We fought bitterly all our lives, and I didn’t tell her it was because she and I were so alike, so very much alike it makes me embarrassed. And I promised myself I’d apologize for every little thing I’d done because all of it didn’t matter anymore.

I’d tell her that a long time ago, she looked at me when I was being an asshole about something, and sarcastically said, “I’m going to give you the best blessing and curse I can. I hope you have five kids just like you.” And I remember my grandmother joking that it was funny because she’d said the same thing to my mother, all those years ago.

If I’d had the chance, I’d tell her now I wish I’d only have one daughter so she could be like me. Because it would mean I could pass down to her all the parts of me that came from her. Because someone had to carry on all those stories, and all that backbone, and all that rebellious strength she gave me. I didn’t want it to end with me because my mother’s legacy deserves to live on. I didn’t want a kid who was just like me. I wanted one who was just like her.

I never got to say all those things because I didn’t make it to the hospital on time. But maybe today, at the graveside, I’ll get the chance. And maybe that will be okay too.

737467_826211658213_1878768619_o — Mom and Dad, San Diego CA, January 2013

Being A Creative With Chronic Illness

July 29, 2017 by Shoshana, posted in Body Positivity, Chronic Illness, Personal

It’s a Friday night in Jersey City, and I should be at a larp.

Instead, I’m in a hospital bed in the local emergency room with an IV in my arm. My roommate Craig is sitting with his iPad nearby. We’re joking over the latest antics from the White House and the recent defeat of the SkinnyRepeal. “I get to live another year,” I joke. But it’s no joke for me. I massage my arm and try to ignore it’s stinging. The nurse came in and tried to get blood a little while ago, but my veins are so shallow from dehydration they couldn’t find a good one to tap. It took six tries before they could get the blood they needed. I’ll have bruises in the morning.

“I’m just glad I finished all my work before today,” I say. The nurse comes in to wheel me to get an ultrasound of my stomach, but I’m pretty sure I know what they’ll find. Nothing. Because what’s happening is all part of the glorious roulette wheel of fibromyalgia symptoms plus a great big dose of dehydration.

I hadn’t eaten in twenty four hours, was unable to even keep down water. By the time we made it to the hospital, I was seeing spots and couldn’t stand well to transfer from my wheelchair. And the muscles spasming up and down my back, neck, and shoulders had locked up into a single, solid knot.

And all I could think about was: I could be at a larp right now. Or I should be writing.

Welcome to the life of a chronic illness creative.

I was diagnosed with fibromyalgia when I was twenty six, but I’d been experiencing symptoms for years. I’d have muscle pain, lock ups, generalized fatigue we couldn’t figure out, and brain fog that would knock out my concentration. I’d sleep for way longer than I should and had pain up and down my back, shoulders, arms, and legs. Doctors checked me for just about everything. I’d been hit by a car in 2005 so most doctors figured it was just after-effects of the accident. It wasn’t until I saw a particularly canny pain management doctor that I got the right diagnosis.

People with fibromyalgia often have trigger points of pain where the fascia and the muscles meet (or at least that’s what I was told). My pain management doctor walked over, poked four of those spots, and watched me nearly leap out of my skin.

“Ding ding,” he said, “we have a winner.”

422015_10150608455063860_1068042740_n — Kicking ass at Dystopia Rising: New Jersey

Within days, I was in treatment. I was getting medical massage, got acupuncture, was trying out the latest fibromyalgia medication, and getting pain medication to become functional again. And I did. For a little while. I went back to school, went back to work. I graduated, kept working eight hours on my feet at Apple, kept LARPing. I would run through the woods on my weekends, ignoring the muscles that hurt so bad I could barely see sometimes. Sure, I’d fall over sometimes and throw up from the pain. Sure, I’d get muscle-tension so bad it triggered headaches so violent I would be in bed for two days. I had doctor notes for work. I exercised. I took care of myself.

But fibromyalgia can only be treated, not cured. And as time went on, it got worse.

Let me tell you what it’s like to try and write while having fibromyalgia.

Imagine you got in a fight. A knock-down, drag out fight with someone. Doesn’t matter who won in the end, but you came out the other side. You’re not badly hurt, but every muscle is hurting from the strain. You feel bruised in places so bad it burns. And the rush of adrenaline is wearing off, so the awful exhaustion is kicking in, so thick you want to sleep for a month. And inside your head is that foggy feeling that says you need a very long, very restful nap, just to make all the pain go away.

That’s fibromyalgia on a medium day.

On a bad day, you lost the fight, and there are places on your body that are screaming.

(If you’ve never been in a fight, substitute running up and down a really steep hill with heavy bags of groceries and a giant backpack like ten times in the heat. I think it about equates.)

Imagine then asking your body to sit in one place, at a computer, and be creative.

Or worse (for me), run a larp. For those who aren’t familiar, running a larp is half being a ringmaster and performer, half logistics manager for an improv immersive theater performance, half writer-on-the-go, and half team manager. Now try doing it while your muscles are screaming at you to just sit down, shut up, go to sleep, just stop, just stop, just STOP.

Sometimes, you just have to stop. Sometimes, you can push on. But one thing is for sure. Over time, it gets harder and harder to push. And you’re always so damn tired.

My health got worse, over time. I developed Cushing’s Disease, a disease of the endocrine system that spawns hormone-producing tumors in your pituitary and adrenal glands. I had a pituitary adenoma (that’s a tumor) we had to remove as soon as it was found. We named it Larry, and Larry was a sonofabitch. Larry screwed up my endocrine system so badly that three and a half years later, I’m still recovering. My body in fact may never recover fully, and I’ll need to take hormone replacements for the rest of my life.

Cushing’s Disease also makes you gain weight. Point of fact, it’s one of the ways they find out you HAVE the damn thing. Now I’d never been a small girl, but gaining 180 lbs in nine months is unreal. Falling asleep nearly face down at my desk, struggling with blinding migraines, all of it led them to Larry. I had a brain surgery that laid me out for over six months. I was tired all the time. I could barely get out of bed.

I continued as a freelance writer. I graduated NYU. I wrote a book. I looked for work. I ran LARPs. Because life wasn’t waiting for me to get better, and I needed to work. Because I’m a writer and a larp designer and my mind won’t slow down because my body does.

I got a wheelchair to get around. I said goodbye to larping in the woods for a while.

It takes time to adapt to failing health. Your mind wants to tell you that you’ll recover soon, that you’ll go back to the way things were before. You’ll remember the glory days, the days when you could run, when you could fight, when you could walk across Manhattan with friends all night, talking about absolutely nothing, for hours on end. You remember hiking up a mountain, or backpacking through a country. You remember waking up in the morning without pain.

Your mind is a great denial machine, to help you stay mentally healthy. It shields you from the enormity of what you’ve lost. But one day, while you’re planning this grand trip you just know you can do because hell yes you can, you twist some way when you’re sitting down, and your back explodes in pain. And then you remember your limits. And you remember those days of doing things easily, of racing through the woods in a larp or even getting up a damn flight of stairs with ease, and know they might be over forever.

Well, the ease part is over. Whether or not you go and do it anyway, though, that’s up to you.

I got rolled into the MRI room. The technician had to do a lot of imaging, so we got to chatting. She asked me a lot of questions about my medical situation. I had to give her the full run-down, which is a long list of medications, medical issues, and treatments. When I was done, she stared at me.

“You’ve got all that memorized, huh?”

I shrugged. “I’ve got practice.” When you’ve got chronic health issues, you’ve got to learn what’s up with you, so you can talk to doctors as an educated patient. I came prepared for speaking to my doctor with all my medications memorized or in my bag, the full run-down of what’s been going on, and the doctors to contact if more information was needed. Par for the course.

We chatted for a while longer. She asked what I did. When I told her I was a game designer, she gave me the same response plenty of people do. “Man, my __________ (insert relative here) would love you! It must be a great job!”

And I always say the same thing, “It’s a hard one, but I love it.” Because I do. Every day, I get up and I know I’m working in the creative field I love. I get to write words and people read them and enjoy them. I help bring books to development that will give people joy. I run larps and see people get excited, and get immersed, and come out loving what they’ve experienced, the stories they lived through if only for a little while.

I think about my deadlines as I’m lying in the MRI room. I’m thinking about the larp I’m writing, the books I’m developing, the projects I have planned. I think about my novel and the few chapters left to the end, dragging on and on because I’ve just been so stressed and exhausted.

I am exhausted. I’m always exhausted. And I’m always, always mad. I’m furious at my body for giving out on me in the prime of my life, of how it fights me for the littlest things these days like going up a flight of stairs or reaching for something in a store aisle. How I wake up in pain that robs me of a good night’s sleep. How I have to take medication just to get through the day, especially painkillers so often demonized by others for their addictive properties.

I’ve been on those painkillers for six years under a doctor’s care, and never deviated from treatment, never taken more than I was supposed to. But I’ve still had people in my creative field try to slander my name by calling me a junkie. I think about life without pain management, about the screaming muscle pain and the blinding migraines and the fatigue from just fighting the pain. A junkie, huh?

And people wonder why I’m always so pissed off. I do a lot of meditation, a lot of spiritual exploration. People tell me I should do yoga, as if yoga will cure things. People suggest a lot of things. “Have you just tried not thinking about it?” is my favorite. Or, “I heard if you just go vegetarian/paleo/Atkins/low carb/stand on your head, you’ll feel better.” Or the old favorite, “You’re always sick all the time.”

Yes. Yes, I am.

I practice a lot of that anger management meditation to deal with dumb-ass questions, concern trolling, unsolicited medical advice, inaccessible venues for my wheelchair, and unapologetic discrimination against disabilities. I need a lot of patience. There’s a lot of bullshit people deal with when they’ve got chronic disabilities, especially some that are invisible. You need a lot of patience explaining your needs to people around you in everyday life. At airports, conventions, at the corner store. Some people make it easier. Others make your head just plain hurt.

I practice a lot of deep breathing and remember that old saying: oh lord forgive them, they know not what they do. And even if they do, anger is only some bricks in my already overflowing backpack. I do my best most days. Most days.

But I can’t do that best alone. The days of being able to just bear up and do things by myself have sadly vanished. And because of that, I have to rely a lot on the kindness and support of others around me. It’s not a natural state for me, to ask for help. Anyone who knew me in my twenties would know I was always taking on too much without delegating, without even letting others know when I was in trouble. It’s an ongoing challenge. Once I got sick, however, that went out the door. Some days, getting food can be a challenge, or wheeling down to the corner coffee shop, or out for pizza.

I have good people in my life. Amazing people. Brilliant people. We travel together to conventions, to concerts, to days out. And some days, that includes pushing my wheelchair, snagging me food, making sure I sleep, I eat, I drink. I push too hard and fall over, and they’re there to make sure I don’t fall. Without them, I wouldn’t be able to survive, let alone be creative.

I remember every day they give me strength. I remember to thank them as often as I can. I am afraid I’ll wear out my welcome with them. I’m afraid they’ll get tired of the sick friend, who makes it hard to get places, who has a wheelchair. I get concerned I’m asking too much when I ask for help. I am afraid I’ll lose them.

I have lost friends. Friends who didn’t get it. Friends who called asking for help ‘being selfish.’ Friends who just drifted away because I couldn’t come out as often, couldn’t be there. It was painful. It hurt. But people drift out of our lives. And I learned to be more thankful, to let people know how much I appreciate things more, both in my everyday life and at work. People throw around the word blessed on Instagram and Twitter in hashtags, but that’s what I know I am. I’m blessed. And it fuels me to keep moving every damn day.

The MRI tech finished up what she was doing and got me ready for transport.

“You know,” she said, “you’re doing better than a lot of people with half of your issues. A lot of folks would have just given up by now.”

I blinked at her. “And done what?” I asked. “What’s my alternative?”

She started laughing. “See, that’s why you’re making it.”

As the attendant pushed my gurney out, I shrugged and said, “Nah, I’m just stubborn. They’re going to have to wheel me out of this life feet first.”

1930586_515222977023_7242_n — My first Star Wars larp in college.

When I was sixteen, I was diagnosed with bi-polar disorder. A very brusque, uncommunicative doctor in Brooklyn sat me down and explained why I was so depressed and then utterly manic, why I was having trouble with suicidal ideations. He said the only way to get things under control was medication. He didn’t explain much about my illness, only that I was going to have it my whole life. That was eighteen years ago, and I spent most of my twenties struggling to come to grips with my mental health. I can only be glad I got it (fairly) under control before my health kicked out.

I get up every morning, and I take my medication. I feel no shame in talking about taking medication for anything that’s going on with me, be it chronic health or mental illness. These are everyday parts of my life, my reality. And I find no shame in seeking treatment for what is wrong, for what needs correcting so I can live a healthy, safe life. I take my mental health as seriously as my fibromyalgia or my Cushing’s Disease, maybe more. Depression, to be blunt, can kill you as fast as a mismanaged endocrine system. Maybe even faster.

The MRI tech reminded me of something I’d promised myself when I started the latest course of anti-depressants and mood stabilizers. I was just starting grad school and I’d been on and off medication for too long. I took my first dose of a new medication and within hours I was feeling better. I called a friend and asked him if this is what normal felt like, when the windstorm of mania in my head had calmed down and I could think straight for perhaps the first time in a long while. And I promised myself that day I’d take all that energy I used to use to hold onto being stable, a fight I sometimes only won by my fingernails, and I’d turn that to working and gaining my goals. To succeeding at my dreams, and never, ever give up.

They’ll have to wheel me out of this life feet first.

I keep that motto in mind every day.

Me at the Women’s March on Washington D.C. in 2017

And some days, it just doesn’t work.

I woke up today and I’m fairly sure I’ll be asleep for a good chunk of the morning. I’m back from the hospital, and I was right. The doctors found a nasty case of severe dehydration (my medication makes me dehydrate pretty fast), some gastric issues, and a whole lot of fibro symptoms that masquerade as something more serious. (Ever get rolling chest, arm, and neck pains that squeeze the breath out of you? If those symptoms sound like a heart attack, ding ding ding. Now play the home game, “Am I dying or is it fibro?”) I lie down, thanking everything that looks out for itinerant writers that the ACA provides me with the insurance I need. I drink a ton of water. My body is still sore from the muscle spasms. I’m loopy from medication.

I have to work today.

I don’t have to. But my brain is itching to write. I wake up at 8AM and put hands to keyboard and write this post, not because I want to bitch about my health (although a little exposition to get out the feelings never hurt) but because I need to write. I need to. It’s a part of me as much as anything else, and so much more true to me than the pain from the chronic ailments. Because writing was here before I was sick and will go on through it all.

I don’t have to write today, then. But I will. Hell or high water, I will.

I’ve met a lot of people in the gaming and writing world dealing with any number of medical issues, any combination of chronic illnesses. I’ve seen people I know get knocked down by serious illnesses and terrifying diagnoses, or else stand with family and friends when they’ve had the same. Being sick or being a caregiver saps the hell out of your energy. It rips away from you the daily stockpile of spoons you have to spend (and if you’re not familiar with Spoon Theory, check it out here to understand more) and instead leaves you at a deficit that can wreck agendas, plans, even careers.

For everyone out there facing this, I see you. I see you struggling to get up in the morning to finish that game book on time, or to attend a convention no matter how much energy it will take. I see you fellow wheelchair buddies fight to get into accessible venues, or those with chronic issues seeking accommodations at events so you can participate. From creating quiet rooms for those with overstimulation to people advocating for longer breaks between events at conventions for proper self-care, and to every game dev and editor who recognize chronic health issues and are understanding, I thank you.

I see you and what you do. I thank you for making sure the games world makes room for creatives who are chugging along, trying to make it work. Who aren’t willing to give up the muse, even when sometimes the body is trying to give up the ghost.

Today, I’ll take it gentle on myself. I’ll try to give myself a wee break. I’ll curse a little at my muscles, still ripping me up with tension. I’ll pull out my edits and get back to work.

And I’ll take this day head on, until they take me out feet first. Because I know no other way.

The Future Is Not Yours

November 2, 2016 by Shoshana, posted in Criticism, Not Ready To Make Nice, Personal, Politics, Speaking Out

I wrote this post a few months back, then didn’t push the publish button. I suppose I’d run afoul of one too many articles this political season that made me mad or upset and I didn’t want to add to the noise. But in light of the escalation of the events at the Dakota Pipeline and the election now less than a week away, I think it’s worth revisiting. So when you read this, know a) it’s a post about politics again, so you’re forewarned, and b) the news articles and events mentioned at the beginning are from a month or so back. From there, enjoy.

I woke up this morning restless. It’s been a problem lately for me, an inability to sleep that’s had me feeling tired all day and irritable. I’ve stayed away from reading the news, which only seems to be making it worse. Only this morning, I woke up and turned on a video by Keith Olbermann cataloguing the myriad offenses by Donald J. Trump since his rise to the candidacy for president. If there’s anything to get irritable about, it’s Trump. But the video helped lock into perspective a lot of things that have been plaguing me for the last few months.

I’m a writer. Connecting points to make a cohesive narrative is what I do for a living. So when I look at today’s media reports, I often look for a coherent narrative to give me a view on the world. It’s what we all do for context of our lives. So I looked at my items in my feed the last few days and try to contextualize.

Item: Donald J. Trump leads one of the most bigoted campaigns in history to staggering approval from right wing Republicans. His candidacy brings out those who previously hid prejudiced ideas, uniting them under his banner in their rush to blame every ‘other’ group they can for their plight in life. All while ignoring the dangerous, uniformed, erratic, terrifying behavior of the man they support for the highest seat in the land.

Item: A pipeline is being created through Native American territory in the Dakotas, drawing protestors from across the world attempting to save sacred ground holding the bones of native ancestors. While many stand with the protestors, the media at large has remained silent on the unfolding issues, including the mauling of protestors by dogs.

Item: Recent Hugo awards winner N.K. Jemisin faces racist responses after winning for her novel, The Fifth Season. Hers is only one story in a continuing narrative of barely veiled hatred aimed at progressive storytelling in the science fiction and fantasy genres, led by conservative factions that wish to return to a time when fiction was less diverse in subject material and in creators.

Item: Stories trickle in from various media outlets about “alleged” rapists like Brock Turner receiving absurdly lenient sentences after being convicted in a court of law. Comparable crimes being perpetuated by people of color get more aggressive punishments, while white male defendants are often let off with nothing more than a slap on the wrist. The most recent unfolding case involves a man having sex on video with a toddler. While people outcry these deplorable cases, politicians still make statements about rape victims “just keeping their knees together.”

Item: A game organization issues a statement about not including potentially triggering content about sexual assault and rape in their game’s plots. This practice, while already standard in many organization’s policies (including my own), draws fire for constituting censorship and sparks bitter, often vicious debates, across the internet and convention spaces. The conversations become so embattled as to require admonishing posts asking people to remember that the person on the other side of the keyboard is a human being and not an invisible punching bag. This hallmarks a disturbing trend of harassment of creators for content that steps over the line from critique and conversation to bullying, exemplified by recent harassment by fans of a Steven Universe creator for supposed “queer baiting” in the show.

Item: A football star chooses to protest the rampant murder of black people by police by taking a knee during the National Anthem before a game. The incident draws a maelstrom of controversy wherein pundits and media alike try to paint the protest as unpatriotic, as an affront to our military and veterans, as worthy of sanction. They refuse to engage with the heart of the protest, namely the rampant trend of police brutality and violence against minorities across the country.

Item: Articles abound calling millennials lazy and directionless, citing their habits as killing everything from the housing market to our country’s competitive job market. Meanwhile, studies show most millennials face absurd financial burdens from student loans in an economy flooded with workers from a previous generation that has not retired. The narrative remains the same: the young are weak and directionless and ruining the world. The dialogue across generational lines goes on.

I could keep giving examples from the news. Yet here’s one from everyday life.

I was waiting on line for a prescription and chatting with my roommate. I point out how absurd it is that Hillary Clinton is being criticized for developing pneumonia while still going out on the campaign trail. I indicate how sexist the arguments against her have gotten, and how her behavior is indicative of so many women forced to work through their illnesses to survive in a male-dominated world. A man on line turns to agree with me and bemoans the chance of Trump getting into office. Yet when my roommate walks away, the man steps closer to add that Trump does have one thing correct: immigrants are stealing all our jobs, he says. When I protest that our country is made of immigrants, the man indicates his family come from immigrants too. But that “these Russians and Syrians” are the ones he means. Not every immigrant is bad. Just those.

And I’m left staring at him, as I often stare at my computer screen or at someone who tells me yet another example of unbridled prejudice running rampant in our society. From rape culture to the profiling of people of color as criminals, the blaming of millennials for society’s ills to the desecration of native people’s holy lands, to the hatred aimed at both Israelis and Palestinians from various sides, the list of things I simply boggle at is overwhelming. Because I often wonder… didn’t people grow up knowing this shit is WRONG?

I watched a lot of TV and movies as a kid, and read a lot of books. For that reason, I grew up with a lot of those media tropes we all know and love: Be a good person. Share. Love your neighbor. Stand up for what you believe in. Be yourself. Love others. Stand up to bullies. Eat healthy food. Friendship is magic. You know, all the good stuff. And what’s more, I believed it because these messages created a framework that backed up what I believed about the world: that being a good person, not just a ‘nice’ person but a person striving to do good, is what a person is supposed to do. Not only that, looking at the heroes of both fiction and the real world, they all are remembered for striving for better goals. Advancement of the world, it seems, has come from aiming for ideas like acceptance, fairness, equality, peace, courage, and empowerment.

And then I grew up and realized maybe some folks didn’t get the same programs when they were kids. Maybe they looked around and said “this is malarky” and looked for someone to blame, to other, over their problems. Maybe they rejected the narratives of tolerance for something else, a darker look at the world where the dog eat dog mentality is the only way to survive. Their narrative is so different to me it boggles the imagination. The future they envision is not mine.

I watched a lot of Star Trek growing up. And for all its flaws (and there are many), Star Trek presented a view of the future where people of all kinds existed side by side. Where people strive for a higher goal. Star Wars presented us with a narrative of people fighting for freedom against tyranny in a galaxy far, far away. Lord of the Rings showed a band of people unlike one another gathering to fight against a terrifying despot. X-Men battle not only despots but bigots willing to murder those unlike them. Harry Potter fights the wizarding form of white supremacy along with Voldemort. Katniss Everdeen fights a regime that represses the poor for the enjoyment of the rich.

The list goes on but the fiction of my life has carried the thru-line of people fighting for a future that involved equality, freedom, peace, and acceptance.

So it boggles me when I look at the world, at people, who can imagine a world where these are not the watchwords for their future. Where their peace and security comes at the expense of the hope of others.

Theirs is not my future.

“But Shoshana,” you may say, “these fictions aren’t real! They’re just stories, and things are easier in stories! Being the kind of good guy you’re talking about is hard and in a complex world-”

Not to paraphrase Kanye, but I’m gonna stop you there for a second. First off, isn’t part of the reason we create narratives like these to inspire us? To bring us to new heights and give us examples of better things, better times, heroes that point us to the better parts of our nature and say, “See, this is possible!” We aren’t going to be Gandalf in this world and hopefully we’re never going to be tossed into a child fighting ring on national television like Katniss, but we have choices in our lives we need to make and narratives like those I mentioned help can help us aspire to do better, be better, even in the face of hardships.

Also, and I’m going to say this with all due respect: who said choices to be good were meant to be easy? Or binary? Sure, in the books it’s simple. The bad guys wear dark colored hats and everyone knows Sauron is the bad guy while we root for the scrappy little Hobbits. Everyone knows making the right choices in life is harder. But just because it’s harder doesn’t mean we shouldn’t aim for it, aspire to it. Fight for it.

There’s a concept I’ve heard before: being on the wrong side of history. It presupposes, and rightly so, that history is written by the victors in any conflict and though context will remain part of a more complex narrative, events are remembered through the lens of the dominant viewpoint that survives. Anyone studying history realizes that historical time periods are washed in the context of who survived to take dominance during that time. So I often wonder, when we look back, what this decade and our current time will reflect. And I realize it entirely depends on whose ideals take root going forward.

Whose future will survive?

I grew up on Star Wars, on super heroes, on Harry Potter. I grew up the child of a thousand stories about how the world can be made a better place if we all come together in peace. The world outside is a far more complicated place than those stories, with nuance and difficulties so complex as to be nearly Gordian in their knotting. The impulse to throw up your hands and state that the ideals of our fictions cannot be applied to the muddled, gargantuan issues of our realities is strong. Yet history shows evidence of time periods where regression led the dominant narrative, and saw the backslide of civilizations and societies. Is that the story we want people to see when they look back at this time period? Is that the future we want to build?

I’m just a writer. I don’t make world policy, or social policy, or any policy at all. What I do is tell stories. I make games for people to live in through role-play, and spin fiction for people to enjoy. And I know in my own way, I have a limited impact on what the future will look like. But I think about how I can perpetuate the ideals I hold so dear. So I pledge to try and be conscientious in my creation. I will continue to strive to create fiction that reflects the kind of world I hope to see. I will push aside concerns about being labeled ‘progressive’ or ‘liberal’ or (heaven forfend) a ‘social justice warrior’ and instead recognize that everyone has an agenda in creating, and mine is to continue forward the ideas that drove me to believe in a better world when I was little.

I will acknowledge that we are all fallible. And we always have more to learn, and ways to improve, even if we think of ourselves as on the side of progressiveness and equality. I will recognize that one can make a choice that is progressive one day and then make a decision the next that harms another, even unintentionally. I pledge to try and learn from my mistakes, to listen to those around me, and to acknowledge and make amends when I’m in error or do harm.

I am fallible, but I pledge to try.

Nobody can tell me what my narrative will be after I’m gone, when it has become the future and my actions now are the past. As a favorite musical of mine laments, you don’t get to choose “who lives, who dies, who tells your story.” But I know that in a world seemingly at tug-of-war over acceptance, peace, and equality, I want to create towards a better, more equal tomorrow.

So I can say to those who perpetuate intolerance and bigotry and hate and fear: The future isn’t yours. The fate of this country, this world, belongs to all of us, together. And that is the exact opposite of your beliefs. The future isn’t yours, because your selfish ideas don’t believe in a future that includes others, and that selfishness is the opposite of what is good and true. I know it because even conservative views say so: be charitable, be welcoming, treat others as you’d like to be treated, love thy neighbor, etc. Except when those beliefs become tinged, tainted, corrupted, by intolerance do they become conditional and become the things we must fight against. When they become, “Love thy neighbor, except if thy neighbor isn’t like you.” Except.

That future of exceptions isn’t mine. It doesn’t belong to so many out there who stand as the exceptions to conservative, myopic rules. And since we have as much right to the world as anyone else (sorry, we do!), then your future doesn’t get to overrule ours. Your future isn’t ours and cannot hold sway for us to exist. Because you can’t wish people out of existence and your hatred cannot drive our world. Good people won’t let it happen. We can’t. And those views will only put you on the wrong side of history and resign you to a life in conflict.

And hey, I know even the most bigoted, intolerant person isn’t some mustache twirling villain. They’re people with concerns and fears and the earnest right to life, liberty, and all that… as long as that pursuit of happiness doesn’t try to snuff out that happiness for others. Once you step over that line, then we got some problems. I don’t have to be tolerant of intolerance as an ideal, because by its very nature, intolerance does not afford the same allowance to others. I don’t need to accept bigotry as an ideology because it doesn’t respect my right to exist. And that is where I draw the line and say to the bigots, the intolerant: think about how things go in the stories with the best happy endings and wonder, where did the bigots end up? Do you want to be Harry Potter, or a Death Eater? Folks might think evil is a little cool in stories, but in reality, it means harming others by your choices, your actions, your beliefs. Do you choose to bring harm into this world, or strive for a higher standard for yourself and others? You get to choose.

To quote Hamilton once more: “History has its eyes on you.” On us. On what we build as our legacy, especially right now.

And if you need any evidence that such fights can be won, look at the struggles progression has won over the years. Happy endings to battles aren’t like they are in the movies, because the struggle for a better world doesn’t end. It’s just little wins, stacking up into a better tomorrow.

This is our eye of the hurricane. We stand in it every day. And the question is left to all of us, in our own lives, in our individual arenas: what will you help make the future?

End note: We’re six days to what might be the biggest elections in our nation’s recent history. And history has its eyes on all of us now. Go out and vote, and consider what you’d like our future to look like. It really is in each of our hands.

How LARP Taught Me I Am A Bit Of An Asshole

September 26, 2015 by Shoshana, posted in LARP Discussion and Theory, Personal

The Great Hall was packed with people from one wall to another. Everyone was gathered around the long tables where we took our meals, under the banners of the Houses that made up the Czocha School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. We waited in our robes as the teachers gathered, then called up all the first years to stand in front of the student body to be Sorted. I went up with my fellows, an uncertain grin fixed nervously in place.

We first year students had spent the better part of time since our arrival trying to impress the older students in the various Houses, so they’d give recommendations to recruit us into the House we wanted. I had angled myself towards House Molin, the quiet, serious, studious House, whose symbol the Golem was taken from my own real-life Jewish background. I even made friends with a couple of Libussa, a house that seemed high energy, creative and friendly. I went before the whole school and thought, much like Harry Potter: Just not Faust. Don’t put me into Faust.

Names got read off. My friend Josh, playing Clorian Lockhart, got sorted into Libussa, where my friend Abigail was already playing an upperclassman. A new friend got sorted into Molin, and when he went over I was sure I’d be following. Then came my turn.

“Durentius!”

I stood for a moment, struck dumb. Durentius? I hadn’t really even considered Durentius. I had met two girls who were cool from their House, but I hadn’t interacted with anyone else. I looked towards the other tables as Durentius cheered and I hesitantly went over to their side while the rest of the Sorting went on. A weird look was stuck on my face, I was sure, as I tried to keep my expression from conveying my disappointment. It would be insulting to my new House to look disappointed. I had to give them a chance, didn’t I? But I was failing. My expression was frozen, there were tears in my eyes, and when we went off to our initiation, I dragged my feet. I didn’t understand it. Why didn’t the other Houses wanted me?

I could explain the rest of the evening in detail: the awesome initiation ritual, the great opportunity to get to know new people who were part of House Durentius. Over the next twenty-four hours, I would come to love the House as fiercely as I identified with any Harry Potter house. I came to appreciate my fellow Roosters, even if I felt a little out of place. That was sort of normal for me. I had never been to a regular high school growing up, one with co-ed classrooms and social occasions like balls, or even the ubiquitous experience of asking someone out on a date. I felt painfully awkward, shy, and nervous, and I translated that well into my character, so much that the experience of playing Katarina Iguanis at College of Wizardry was a great exploration of first few days of a terribly neurotic, socially unprepared young woman’s time at college.

It was also a perfect lesson for how I, as a player and maybe as a person, was kind of an asshole.

One of the greatest parts about going into a new live action roleplaying game for me is creating a character. I take a lot of time to craft the inner workings of a character, connecting their personality to the experiences and events that have shaped their lives. I work with the established fiction provided by the game staff and the setting, as well as connect with other players when I can to make backstory connections so we might come into play knowing one another in character. When I step into the game, I might tweak things in terms of backstory or personality if I encounter a particular trait that isn’t working. But for the most part, I come in with a largely developed idea of how my character existed previous to the events of the game.

I also ask myself a single question while creating a character: what does this character express from my own personality? This question is an important one, even though it might sound a little precious. A friend of mine once called me a method LARPer early on when I started up in the hobby, and it’s absolutely true. I use real life experiences and feelings to connect to my characters in an effort to give a better roleplaying performance. In the process, the experience of playing these characters often gives me a chance to explore those very same feelings, reflected back at me in the events of a LARP, in the consequences a character faces. Sometimes, what is reflected back can give me a startling glimpse at my own personality, my privilege, and my life.

And like with the example above, it’s not always a pretty sight.

Going back to my first night at Czocha. I had spent the whole day immersed in the life of Katarina Iguanis, a first year witch at a new school, with all the terrors that first day at a boarding school might bring. She had exams to study for (which I actually had to study for before going to bed), rumors of Death Eaters and monsters on the grounds (there were and it was terrifying), a future career to decide on, and a dance to secure a date for, all while trying to make new friends and navigate a giant, confusing castle. So, typical for a Harry Potter game. But when I went back to my room, I lay awake in the dark after chatting with my roommate Clorian about the exciting day. I felt myself slipping out of character as I thought about what had gone on. I put down Katarina’s mindset and instead inspected the day’s events with the eye of Shoshana, the LARPer. And what I saw about my own behavior gave me a twist of my stomach.

The fact that I’d been disappointed to get into Durentius bothered me. The emotions it raised in me had been intense. Why hadn’t House Molin wanted me? Had I come off as too needy, not smart enough? Was I annoying when I came to talk to them? Or maybe too cocky when I sat down at their table? And what about Libussa, was I too serious or nervous? Was I, as so many kids have worried in their lifetimes, just not cool enough?

These were all pretty typical responses for a student facing disappointment, but the feelings that arose from the Sorting had resonated with me as a player as much as me the character. I had felt disappointed, but more than that, slighted. I felt a roaring sense of anger that I couldn’t have the experience I wanted, because I had been put in a House I hadn’t chosen, nor really considered. I’d seen one or two Durentius running around and wrote them off as frat boys, behavior that I often find irritating in my real life, and so I stayed away from the whole House. This was not the experience I wanted from my LARP. I’d flown from the United States, across an ocean, to Poland to be a part of this once in a lifetime opportunity game. I certainly didn’t want to spend it in a House that felt uncomfortable to me, where I felt out of place. Wasn’t I certainly entitled to the experience I wanted out of such a pricey unique game?
As I lay in the dark, I felt those same feelings rise back up and I got a chance to examine them for what they were: really, really shitty.

It sometimes takes a reflection of yourself, held up in front of you, to smack you in the face about the person you are and what you believe. In the experience of being Sorted into House Durentius, I was forced to face down as a person my own feelings about being rejected, about how I judged people, and the expectations I had about what I should and shouldn’t ‘get’ out of life. I was struck first by the fact that I have always believed that we shouldn’t judge the worth of people as good or bad, but only identify actions that may be harmful. I always believed that gave me the chance to be fairer to people, to not judge too harshly.

Instead I was faced with the fact that I had pretty much written off the Durentius members as not worth my time or consideration because of their boisterous nature. I wrote off in fact the entire group after only seeing one or two of their members! And I also realized, and this was the part that stuck me, that I had snubbed them because I thought their mascot wasn’t as cool as the others. Who wants to stand up and sing a song about a rooster, rather than a lion, a dragon, a golem or a phoenix? This one aesthetic choice had led me to turn away from people who could be new friends, all because I didn’t like their symbol.

Because this is the mighty, mighty fighting rooster. I should respect. — I had forgotten my respect for the mighty rooster. This is the face of a mighty mascot. MIGHTY.

What struck me next was my sense of entitlement. My anger at not getting my way, not getting what I wanted, had been staggering to me. First, I’d presupposed that the people making the decisions had known what I wanted, like they could read my mind. And furthermore, I had just blatantly assumed that I should get what I wanted, automatically. I had come all this way, after all, I was owed something. That was what my feelings were saying, even when my higher brain was screaming what I know for a fact: that in this life, we are owed nothing by anyone.

I had forgotten the rule of being grateful, grateful for what I had been given. I was at a Harry Potter LARP in Poland, experiencing something few LARPers were able to do. I’d traveled there thanks to a generous graduation gift from my parents, and had recovered enough from a brain surgery earlier in the year so I could even be there. I was at the game with three of my good friends from the United States, who had embarked on this epic adventure with me at my cajoling. And we were roleplaying with some of the most awesome Nordic LARPers I knew, making new friends from across several countries. I was in such a privileged position, so lucky to be where I was, and yet I was unsatisfied because I had been rejected from the in character houses I wanted. More so, I had been kind of shitty about it to the other players in my new House, stand-offish and dismissive, when they’d tried to be kind and welcoming.

I was, essentially, being an asshole.

I wanted to be all of this:

Harry-Potter-Deathly-Hallows-movie-image — Because who doesn’t want to be more like Hermoine ‘I’m Really The Protagonist Here’ Granger?

When really I had turned into a hell of a lot of this:

Except without perving on boys in the Prefect's bathroom. Because ew. — Except without perving on boys in the Prefect’s bathroom. Because ew.

It took me some time to untangle all my feelings and realize where they came from. I lay in the dark, knowing I should sleep because I had exams the next day, but I wanted to get these feeling sorted. I’d gotten a good look at myself reflected in a mirror, darkly (or maybe a mirror, LARPly) and I didn’t exactly like what I saw. I was intent on trying to address the issues before continuing play the next day.

I can’t in good conscience say that it worked. College of Wizardry was a very intense LARP, full of a lot of character bleed and personal revelation. By the end of the event, I’d cried over being rejected for a date for the ball, had a near anxiety attack over the peer pressure about having to have a date in the first place, shouted down fellow students about dark magic coming to destroy us all, and felt the terror of hiding in the woods from Death Eaters out to resurrect an ancient evil.

By the end of the game I had been through an emotional rollercoaster. But thanks to that night of lying in the dark, considering how I’d acted, I spent the rest of the game thereafter letting down my guard to the rest of House Durentius and trying not to be such a shitty new friend. I embraced my fellow roosters in my own socially awkward Katarina Iguanis way, and out of character came to love the House, enough to order a patch of the crest to stick on my bag back home a year after the game. That patch is there to remind me of the lessons I learned playing Katarina Iguanis, lessons that went far deeper than herbology or defense against the dark arts. I’d gotten a good look at myself as a person thanks to that LARP, and I was committed to changing what I saw, for the better.

A year later, I still carry those lessons with me. As I do the lessons of playing every single character I have in the past, and every one I do now. Through LARPing I’ve learned what it felt like to betray a lover, to watch a friend commit suicide, to rig political elections, and to commit murder in righteous fury. With each of these in character experiences, separated from the ‘real me’ by a wall of alibi provided by the game, I have also been given a glimpse into my own feelings and myself. And the look hasn’t always been pretty. But I think that’s one of the reasons I keep going back to LARPing. I’m a big believer that life in all its darkest places, in all the messy and unreasonable and negative spaces, can also be a source of learning. You can’t make an omelet without cracking a few eggs, and maybe (if it’s me who’s cooking) throwing some egg all over the counter and dropping the bowl a few times. Life and learning can be messy. But doing so in a game, where there are barriers between you and your character, where there is the alibi of saying “this is not entirely me who did this” can also give you the perspective to step back and say: “wait a minute, how much of that really was me?” And it’s that lesson that, to me, is an invaluable tool for growth as a person, as well as in character.

LARP can show you, through your characters actions, that out of character you might be a little bit of an asshole. But maybe, it can also show you a path to explore that inner asshole, and reflect on whether that’s where you want to be.

In my case, I embraced my inner Rooster. I sang the song, I loved my House, and I learned that spot judgements about people suck. And I learned a great theme song. I shouted “Valor! Diligence!” at that game and aspired to maybe having those qualities in my life a little more, if only when looking into myself.