Thoughts on Essay 3

     So, this is supposed to be an "eye" essay, which means I need to find something outside that relates to me somehow. In class we brainstormed a list and I have a few things from it that might make a good essay.
One of these is cooking. I'm not exactly a gourmet, but I do like to cook and bake. And maybe I'm just a little bit of a foodie. I read all kinds of cooking magazines and I'm constantly looking through cookbooks at work. I also watch my mother frequently. I have since I was little, and our whole family has looked to her for baked goods. I think that I could do something about that.
     Another topic is more of a travel essay. I've gone to Wildwood every year for about along as I remember. Apparently, I was even there in utero. Over the years, I've racked up all kinds of memories about our vacations there. In the last few years, things have really changed. Many of the 1950s-era motels that were a permanent presence down there have closed, including the one I stayed at for most of my life. In their place, condos are being put up. The typical condo owner doesn't spend in the same way as a one-week vacationer though, and the shift is having some pretty far reaching effects. That's something I would definitely like to write about.
     I also have learned about healthy eating and exercise in the last few years.  I spent the first twenty-odd years of my life overweight and hating myself for it. It took quite a while, but eventually I decided that I needed to do something about it.  I stopped eating fast-food almost completely, and with my increased interest in cooking began making my own meals whenever I can.  Learning to exercise properly has been an ongoing process. So this is also a potential topic, that I have invested time working on already.
     As always, the issue is trying to figure out what each of these topics will actually be about. I could relate the cooking to family history, or some other family related topic. The healthy eating/exercise topic could be a self-esteem idea, or related to ideas about life and aging. I could tie so much to Wildwood: family, aging, growth, money, economics, etc. So the real question is, which of these do I pick?

Gaming and me

            Gaming, especially the role-playing kind, has become one of the rituals of my life.  In high school, it ruled every Friday afternoon from the time school ended until perhaps seven in the evening.  For those four hours each week, we got to pretend to be all kinds of different people.  It was where my closest friendships in high school came from, which is interesting, because we forged those friendships not as ourselves but as a variety of characters. 

            Actually, thinking back on it, my love of playing someone else began earlier.  I gloss over video games too easily here, but they were my first experience in gaming, and they have maintained a place in my life even now.  I may have asked my parents, back when, for the system that had Mario, meaning in my childish, brand-addled way Nintendo, but my desire for Mario ended as soon as I encountered Link at my cousins’ house.  I became enamored of the Legend of Zelda, so much so that when my copy stopped working (even when I blew into both the cartridge and the game unit) I had to have another one.  And despite some disappointment in Legend of Zelda 2: Link’s Awakening, that series has remained one of my favorite of all time. 

            I don’t remember being particularly unsatisfied with my childhood.  I think I played these games, which despite the inability to modify the characters are still role-playing games, out of simple enjoyment.  It was easy to love.  The character has an easily defined quest to complete, usually before some great evil takes over, and a sword and other tools with which to complete that quest.  Along the way are any number of baddies trying to stop him, and he can defeat them with a little deduction and practice. 

            Such easily defined goals had immense appeal to me.  As I got older, and began to interact with my classmates at a more adult level, I began to realize that there were things that were different about the way I viewed things.  I was raised in a religious household, and the restrictive views of my parents and church kept me from many of the things that could have formed the basis for forming friendships.  I had never been allowed to participate in sports activities, for example, because these were usually held on weekends, and I would not have been able to miss church on Sunday mornings.  Or Sunday nights, for that matter.  Or any of the other times that a child should be there, participating in church activities.  Not being able to discuss sports presented a real roadblock to popularity, and so I felt set apart.  There were other reasons as well, that would become even more significant as I got older, but those were not apparent yet.  At least, not to me. 

            These challenges were beyond me at this stage; but, where I lacked skill in the actual world, I was still able to overcome challenges and finish quests in the virtual worlds.  These virtual worlds became even more of a draw for me, and I remember spending hours playing the original Final Fantasy, Dragon Warrior, and Crystalis games for the Nintendo.  Super Nintendo brought me such gems as Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, the Secret of Mana, and Final Fantasy II (IV), which is still one of my all-time favorites.  Games like these got me through some awkward transitional years.  I had questions about sexuality, what mine was, and whether it fit in with both popular opinion and religious belief.  I didn’t like the thought that I might be different, and turned to video games as  a means of avoiding, or at least postponing the questions. 

            In high school, I joined the Science Fiction & Fantasy Club, which was really a euphemism for the role-playing game club.  The school wouldn’t allow a club with that exact premise though, so it had to be hidden under the semi-educational guise of a club for readers of those genres.  This was perfectly acceptable to the club members, for whom playing characters became second nature.  This was the first real gaming ritual I had, and I loved it.  I had enough friends to get by, and could ignore the taunts of other classmates, secure enough that I had a place.  And for four hours a week, I could be almost anything.  My first character was an elven cleric, who could heal, and who wielded a halberd even though the rules prevented it because we were all still learning the game.  I think he blew up after drinking an unlabeled potion.  Hey, I was still new to role-playing, and I didn’t know any better. 

            It was easier to recover from mistakes in role-playing.  If something fatal happened, a new character was some dice rolling and chart consulting away.  If I wasn’t doing as well in the real world, I decided that I didn’t care.  I had something else to turn to. 

            The real problem began when I got out of high school.  The people with whom I had been playing went off to college, and I stayed local, and then started working.  Somewhere along the way I stopped playing games.  I stopped role-playing because I couldn’t find a group of people to play with, and I stopped playing video games because I was working and trying to save money for school.  I don’t want to give the impression that I was alone and lonesome; I had friends, and had an entirely too active social life.  But it was a life that I absorbed from the friends I was hanging around with at the time.  I went clubbing frequently, and as one of my best friends loved movies, I saw almost every movie that came out in theaters. 

            It took a long time for me to realize that I wasn’t happy.  I am somewhat ashamed to say I took it out on my friends in ways I didn’t even realize were unhappiness.  Looking back at this time, I realize that I didn’t really have anything in common with this particular group of people.  I didn’t listen to the same music they did.  They weren’t big readers like I was.  I had some common ground with video games, but only with a few of them, and none at all really with my “best” friend.  I wonder now if I was myself at all with them.  I think this is also when I started having outbursts and mood swings, which turned out to be signs of a larger problem than I realized at first.  My relationships grew strained, and then, out of convenience and mutual desire, ended.  

            There came a period when I wasn’t really hanging out with anyone.  By merest chance, this period of exile ended at work one day when a coworker noticed me reading through a role-playing game manual that had come in.  I hadn’t played anything in years, and in the time I had been away the game had changed greatly.  I don’t even remember why I was reading this particular manual.  I think it was simply to have something to read on a break.  My coworker noticed and asked me if I played, and I replied that I had in high school.  From then on, she tried on numerous occasions to get me to come over to her gaming group.  For whatever reason, I resisted, until a particular event made it too convenient to ignore.

            In many ways, I owe my current group of friends to J.K. Rowling.  I was managing a bookstore, and the release of the fifth book meant that I had to work all weekend, instead of having Sundays off as I normally would.  Sundays were when this particular gaming group met to play, and as I was going to be in the area anyway, I said I would come by and meet everyone.  And I did.  And I kept coming, and still have almost every Sunday since. 

            This group of people was a revelation in many ways.  They were adults, raised largely in an urban area, and as capable of navigating their actual environment as they were the imagined environments we shared.  They weren’t socially inept or introverted; they didn’t stay holed up in their rooms unless they wanted to be.  They accepted me not just because of my interest in playing, but because that is the kind of people they are, and we’ve grown together over the last seven or so years.    

I have a new gaming ritual now, in the Sunday night sessions that began long before I even met this group of friends.  Interestingly enough, we aim for four hours at a time, which must be a magic number for role-playing games.  Perhaps the various games I’ve played are practice sessions where I try out different methods of interacting with people.  Perhaps I was just waiting for the right group of people to come along.  I certainly feel more comfortable in this group of friends than in almost any other group of people I’ve known before. 

More than simply being myself, I think my friendship with these people has helped me to define myself, to become myself  Over the last few years, I’ve developed some concrete goals about what I want to do with my life.  I’ve taken trips to places I would not have gone before, in real and imagined worlds.  It seems strange, looking back at years of playing games that I should find myself most fully realized through the act of pretending to be someone else. 

Musings on Essay 2

I'm still having trouble coming up with a topic for the second draft.  There are various stories that I could write about, but I keep coming back to the problem that plagued the first essay: how do I make the essay about something?  I'm not afraid to analyze the situations I've found myself in, but somehow I can't focus anything on a particular topic. 

For example, I have been thinking about the differences between friendships I've had in the past and the current group of friends I have now, and why this group has been better for me, and perhaps how I've been better for them.  Hopefully, at least, I've been as good to them as they are to me.  And I have no shortage of anecdotes from hanging out with these groups of people for years.  The issue is, what would such an essay be about?  The power of friendship?  To do what?  And that seems to be awfully cliched; however, it keeps coming to the forefront of my thinking about this essay, in a way that makes me feel like it wants to be written about. 

The question is, what is writing about friendship actually writing about?  Acceptance?  Connection?  Communication?  Respect?  All-of-the-above?  It could be about my ability to accept the limitations of my friends, and how they have accepted my limitations.  It could be about how one group of friends expanded my horizons while another group seemed to limit them.  It could be about maturity, or the maturing process, and "when I was a child..." and all that.  Or an older child.  Hell, there are things about which I still think like a child. 

I think I need to do some more free writing on the topic of connection and communication.  As I was writing that last paragraph, those words jumped out at me from somewhere.  I think there might be a focus hiding in there somewhere. 

Playing Games Against Myself?

I was sitting in my car one night after blowing up at a friend’s apartment that I really began to wonder if something might actually be wrong with me.  We had been playing a game, Pictionary, and I had gotten frustrated with my teammate’s inability to figure out what I thought was a relatively simple drawing.  Having played this game numerous times before, I was familiar with this kind of frustration, as would be almost anyone who has ever played that game; but this time, instead of the feeling rising and ebbing, it kept rising, and I actually became angry.  I said something regrettable, the situation became uncomfortable, and I left.  It was a great way to ruin what had been a relatively quiet, fun evening. 

            In the car, I sat for a while, as the anger finally faded and was replaced with an immediate and all-consuming guilt.  I might have cried; I don’t remember exactly.  I remember texting my friend to apologize.  I texted because I couldn’t bear the thought of actually speaking to anyone at that moment.  I’m sure I would have cried if I had spoken out loud.  I didn’t want to speak to anyone because of the question that might have come up, the question, “Why?”  It was a question that I was and was not trying to think about, one that I was not able or willing to answer. 

            The problem with this situation was that it didn’t stop happening.  It was not a regular occurrence.  I could not schedule it.  But it happened on occasion, and the situation would repeat.  Or sometimes I was able to hide the way I felt, to bottle it up until I was able to get away from my friends on some other excuse.  I’ve never bothered to ask if they believed those excuses, mainly because I don’t want to go back.  I have a feeling they knew something was up.  Even when I managed not to blow up in everyone’s face or hearing, the cycle was the same.  The anger would rise and fade and an enormous guilt would come to take its place. 

            I should say, at this point, that I have always been a relatively private person.  I listen far more than I speak, and don’t have long heart-felt conversations with any kind of regularity.  There are certainly people who would be willing to listen, or who would have to given how frequently I had listened to them, and yet I didn’t discuss this with anyone.  Obviously, my friends knew something was up.  Every so often one of them would bring it up, and always I would have to answer, “I don’t know.”  I don’t know why I got so angry at that game.  We were all having fun.  I don’t know why I got angry when we all decided to go out to the restaurant.  Someone was just being obnoxious; I could have ignored him.  I don’t know why I got so angry when you decided to take your family out to a restaurant I wanted to go to again.  It was a family outing, and – technically – I’m not your family.  I can understand that.  It makes perfect sense.  In each of these situations, the anger came, and in more I can’t remember clearly.  And as night follows day, always after came the guilt.    

            It took a long time before I finally got called out on this behavior.  My best friend was angry with me now, because in one of my terse moments I had slighted his girlfriend.  I think I ignored a greeting.  And even though she didn’t make an issue of it, he felt he should.  We had a difficult conversation.  I cried, in front of my friend.  It was not easy.  I told him how I felt, how I didn’t know why I had these outbursts.  I told him that I hated to feel alone.  I’m not sure how that was relevant to the entire conversation.  It became significant afterwards.  He calmed himself down, calmed me down.  We hugged at the end.  And for a time, it helped.  I tried to be better after that. 

            The problem was, I couldn’t tell why it kept happening.  For a time, I thought games were the trigger, so I avoided playing games with my friends.  Games with clear winners and losers anyway.  We played games frequently in those days, so not engaging meant that I was sitting on the sidelines regularly.  I thought that was better than the chance of getting angry and losing my friends.  The thought of that was heartbreaking.  I wonder how I never seriously considered suicide during this period of my life.  I think in some way I thought I deserved the suffering.  It would have served as the karmic repayment of the suffering I was inflicting on my friends. 

            It’s strange now, to think about all of this.  I don’t know why it never occurred to me that I should talk to someone.  My health insurance at work would certainly have covered some measure of therapy.  It would have been the better thing to do.  And yet none of my friends suggested it either, despite having to deal with my frequent periods of rage. 

            This might relate to the way I view modern psychiatry.  It seems that, anymore, drugs are the answer for our lives.  Somewhere out there is a prescription for everything that ails us.  But that doesn’t make sense to me.  Evolutionarily speaking, we are changing our lives too quickly for our bodies to keep up.  That seems to be the flip side of the coin of progress, the real problem with the growth of the internet and the birth of social media networking.  I was resistant to the idea of drugs.  Drugs were for the weak of body and mind, and I was not willing to consider myself weak-minded.  It was perhaps slightly broken, but with a little work it would come out just as strong as it had been growing up. 

            Instead I preferred to think of myself as being childish.  I had never played sports as a child.  My mother did not like that sports for children are held on weekends.  I might have had to miss church for that, and missing church was not acceptable for any reason short of severe bodily illness growing up.  As such, I never really learned sportsmanship or gained the competitive spirit that those activities instill.  That missing part of my nature was what I blamed these outburst on, and it was particularly convenient that these outburst were largely triggered by games.  Largely, but not entirely.

            Now I think I have a different cause.  While they are a social activity, games divide us.  We split into teams, as in Pictionary, or everyone plays for themselves, as in Monopoly or Super Smash Brothers or whatever the rest were.  This division is, I believe, what caused my outbursts.  Rather it is what triggered them. 

            The cause is still unknown to me.  Over time, I have learned to control myself, and to a large extent I no longer feel triggered to anger by many of the same things that once would have.  What I believe is that I had, or still have, borderline personality disorder.  I can’t remember where the idea first hit me.  Having worked in a bookstore for my adult life, it is likely that I came across a book one day and saw the description.  Borderline personality disorder is a mental disease comprising any several of a long list of traits.  I read the list and felt that I might have been reading an account of my outbursts: unstable relationships, unstable self-image, chronic emptiness, periods of baseless anger, and fears of abandonment.  I was hearing the conversation I had with my friend all over again.  I bought the book and read it, and finally felt like there was someone who understood. 

            It sounds disturbing, even to me, to say that I was relieved to find that I thought I had a mental disorder.  Essentially, I was glad that I was, in essence, crazy.  I wasn’t really glad.  I was still struggling with it at that point, but now I had some ideas, a path along which I could discipline my mind and finally fight what was happening. 

            I did take a break from my friends.  For three months I had no contact with any of them.  It was a rough three months, and many times during them I wondered if they would ever want to speak to me again.  I felt it was essential for my continued well-being to take this step.  Between this distance and the research I was doing into how to control myself, I was able to return after some time and interact normally.  At times I still struggle with a difficult emotion.  I have thrown things (not at anyone, and nothing very breakable) and hit things (like walls, again no people), but I have managed not to have an outburst like the ones I nearly ruined my friendships with for several years now.  In some ways, it’s like a game I play with myself, my mind against my mind.  Now that I know the rules, I win more often than not.

A Gaming Life?

I hate this.  I have lost so many first drafts of blog posts that it’s ridiculous.  Almost every one of them actually, has been a quick rewrite of what I had initially written because something made me lose the post.  I’m getting really tired of this.  So anyway, here’s another one.

I have no idea what to write about.  It’s that simple.  I’ve been trying to come up with some kind of realization about life that I could hang anecdotes on, and nothing is coming.  Why?  I must have realized a great many things at this point in my life; why can’t I think of even one that would make a good essay? 

As far as brainstorming goes, there are a few areas of interest that might be interesting to draw from.  I have always been a big fan of games – video, role playing, etc.  I’ve been a gamer on some level for almost my entire life.  Most of my current friends are people I’ve met via that hobby.  That doesn’t sound interesting enough to write about though.  Not by itself.  I want to write something about the ritual it has become though.  Every Sunday night we get together to play, and we have for years now.  This has actually been a ritual for many more years than I’ve been friends with these people; I only met them all about six years ago.  It feels like longer than that though.  That’s the power of friendship I guess.  I think it might be interesting to draw a parallel to my childhood Sunday ritual of going to church every Sunday morning. 

The problem is that I can’t seem to figure out what the point of such an essay would be.  Structurally, I could piece it together.  The essay by Lopez that we had to read for this class would actually be a useful framework.  An opening anecdote, a section that details something relevant about life, perhaps a middle anecdotal section reflecting the transitional period where I had no Sunday ritual and how that affected my life, followed by something about this new group of friends and the impact that has had on my life and closing with a final anecdotal section.  It sounds good in theory, except that I don’t know what it should be about.  I need to do some more brainstorming.  Hopefully, this counts toward the assignment.  This is going to be harder than I thought. 

Edit:  I actually just posted this, and after a few moments an idea appeared, about the ritual I was given versus the ritual I chose.  That might be something worth writing about, how I value ritual based on whether it was my choice to engage in the ritual or not.  I'll have to mine that idea a bit further, but I'm hoping it bears fruition.