Why I Don't Play Video Games

My anxiety and depression are genetic, and come from both of my parents, which essentially means that both me and my sister have dominant alleles for it. I've been recently kind of opening my eyes to just how much this has affected me, in the sense of how much of my day to day life experience which I consider normal is so radically different from what actual "normal" people understand. This has been kind of a source of angst in the time I've been thinking aboot it. What's worse than living in a fucking nightmare? Knowing that there is another way that I'll never be able to experience. And so, being a little more acutely aware of just how abnormal I am and how many things I see has horrific, painful battles are actual simple, innocuous events to everyone else is very painful to comprehend, but at the same time it gives me a kind of perspective that is in some ways useful for me to try and manage it.

    So what I wanted to write about today is the depression side. The anxiety gets the most attention because it is the most painful and directly harmful and destructive, but the depression is crippling in it's own way. Specifically I'm referring to everyone's favorite symptom, lack of enthusiasm in things you used to care aboot. Now in my case, given that it's genetic, the "used to" criteria might sound a little off, but it's really just more relative. It's not like I never care, never have enthusiasm, etc., I'm manic of course, I'm a hyper extrovert that thrives on being around and with other people. I prioritize people above all other things, which I'm... kind of hoping just sounds normal to everyone else who happens to be reading this, but I've met some people to whom this is an alien concept.

    Because I hate myself, because of the trauma, I don't see any value in myself as myself. I've been taught this over and over by people who have treated me as the sum of what use I am to them, and when I outlive that purpose or become more trouble than I'm worth, I'm thrown away. This has given me a kind of corrupted sense of what value even is, and it has a double standard. It works like a kind of currency, I pay people with love, attention, and consideration, and if I do a good enough job, I'll be rewarded for it by being loved back. Giving comes very easy to me and I'm generous to a fault, though, and making other people happy genuinely makes me feel fulfilled, gives me confidence in my own abilities, and centers me. It is not a "sacrifice" for me to go out of my way to help people or love them without any leverage or prior established relationship. To me, that's just the right thing to do, as a baseline. So my attitude towards myself and everyone else is very different, I have everything to prove and everything to lose, and I don't expect anyone to owe me anything. It makes any kind of affection or attention paid to me all the more special because I never really feel like I deserve it, which is kind of a nice side-effect, but I do have an awareness that these attitudes are a symptom of my trauma and that not everyone sees me as a toy box that needs to be thrown out the second it becomes impractical to use.

    And there are things I'm at least mildly proud of aboot myself, but the only time I really ever feel totally confident in myself and my ability is when I'm in "domspace," when I'm loving on someone, and I'm so in-tune with that other person that I can almost feel their heartbeat. It's such a wildly different emotional context from subbing that even though on paper I'm a 50/50 switch, it can alter my behavior and needs to a degree that can push me 100% either way for all practical purposes. So, naturally, giving care and attention to people, and loving them, is the core thing that gets me motivated and makes me feel alive. For a person who has been thrown away and neglected most of their life, mutually loving relationships are like crack to me. There is nothing else in this whole world that can bring me back to life faster than feeling like I have value to another person, not just being told, but feeling it inside me and knowing that it's true.

    So that's awesome. But what aboot everything else, eh? Well... that... kind of does nothing for me. Now don't get me wrong, I'm a bit of a book worm, I actually favor non-fiction because I'm like a weird nerd, I get really passionate about learning and understanding things and "correlating contents" and the like. I love art in every form, I'm a history nerd, and not just the extremely brief period of human history but all of it, especially Earth history, as well as astronomy, I'm a mythology dork obsessed with eschatology, I like monsters, fashion (but of a certain kind!), booze, getting high and doing terrible improv that only the people I'm with will enjoy, and as I'm not the stereotypical shy girl given the chance I will talk your ear off about any one of these things for hours and hours and hours. It's kind of why I'm such a gag snob, makes me feel waaaay more controlled when I have so much to say that I can't anymore.

    But that's learning and reading and such. Action, performance, and engagement in specific activities is very much another thing altogether and takes far more motivation, motivation that I simply almost never have. I often hand-wave this by calling myself lazy, which on a surface level is apt, but it's not really accurate. I know this because when I am engaged, I give 100% of myself to what I'm doing, just like how I do with people. If I can get past that initial hurdle I can become absorbed and fascinated even more so than when I simply read about it. I really am a good "doing domestic chores in heels" housewife, I have a really strong work ethic that has come out both times I managed to get a job, and I have a focus on fine details that drives me to care a lot about wanting things to be done well. But all of that is hidden and buried under my depression. Most of what you'd see on a daily basis, if you could see me, and my wife can back me up on this, is a... let's say "deteriorating" ugly blob monster usually curled up in the bedroom she rarely leaves crying herself to sleep, doing lines of NSAID's, and going through month-long periods of socializing that end in her panicking and trying to run damage control while she can barely function and going back to the aforementioned crying, sleeping, and pills. It's not a pretty picture, because I'm in the shot.

    Something that's always baffled me is the large number of other people with depression I've met. And those people all share this uncanny ability to be able to play video games. I don't know how this is possible. I like video games as much as the next gal, but as fun as they can be... there's no value to them outside of the time sink and experience. It's altogether alien to me that so many people with crippling depression are not just gamers, but obsessive gamers who's whole life revolves around what game they're playing and... what their high score is, I guess. Certainly anyone who experiences everyone's favorite symptom of depression understands that the fundamental issue is viewing distractions as just that, distractions, and not feeling the value of that when you know what you really need is a sense of fulfillment and happiness you can't get from briefly being occupied with a moderately engaging task. If anything, logically the obvious expectation would be for the norm to be movies or tv shows, which require little more of the audience than to sit and stare at a screen. My depression is so bad that even a whole movie often sounds like too much of an investment for me, so I gravitate towards shorter form things like youtube videos, only to end up being frustrated with my recommendations that I'm not getting enough of a stream to fill up a longer amount of time that I could have more easily filled with, you know, a movie. And while that sounds very silly, the crucial difference is the amount of effort invested. It takes no effort to watch a short funny thing on youtube, while narrative films really demand you are tuned in, and on that scale, video games are at the very top of engagement. As someone who.... is depressed, and has a hard time engaging in things... it really seems like the people burying themselves in video games are totally backwards.

    Sometimes though I do manage to boot myself back up and actually play a damn video game. It doesn't hold for a long time, though. I don't have an addictive personality to begin with, I like things that I like and want to do them again, but I am capable of waiting and not doing the same thing all the time forever, but I really just can't sink my teeth into playing a game for very long. When I am able to play with my wife, we often jump between several different games within the span of a couple of hours at most. A few matches of Mortal Kombat, a couple races in Mario Kart, some sort of puzzle game, aaaand at that pointe it becomes very difficult for me to stay motivated. There's no... rush, to it. When I pick up a controller I can acknowledge that it's an activity I'm consenting to and by all objective evaluation seam to enjoy, but it's not the dopamine high that it used to be when I was younger. It doesn't last. I don't really get bored, I just... feel like I'm dying, and no video game can make that feeling go away.

    I have a kind of strange relationship with my childhood which is par for the course with trans people, where I have that same kind of nostalgia that any normal folk would, but also have intensely dysphoric reactions to certain memories. However I'm also not stupid, and in hindsight, looking back, my feelings that were very confusing to me at the time now make a lot more sense given what I know about myself now. And... it's... genetic. The trauma I've experienced over the past decade or so has certainly made me worse, but I recognize all of the same basic symptoms and patterns in my younger self. I used to this thing where, I oscillated very quickly between watching a thing, playing a video game, playing with toys, and writing/drawing things out. I would be engaged in something, then find the medium limiting to the way I wanted to engage with it, and felt that another way would be better. So I'd play the game. Then I felt myself wanting for something tactile that I had more direct control over so I'd go play with my monster dolls or clay. Or maybe I'd get a rush of ideas and my wheels would be running laps in my head and I wanted to write or draw to organize my ideas. I remember very well the feeling of getting motivated to do a thing, but struggling to find the best way to express what it was I wanted to do, everything was limiting in some way. It was, objectively, much easier for me to just do one thing for much longer. I too, used to stay up until the small hours of the morning playing N64 like all the normal kids. But that feeling of frustration with my own thoughts and ideas, feeling like everything was limiting, nothing really worked, I still feel that now. It never went away. And I can't play video games all night anymore, but when I do stop, if my brain is still active, it just wants to pursue whatever it is it's trying to do some other way. So I write. I write... most of the time. Writing is easy for me because it doesn't require any sort of special hurdle to pass, I can start doing it at any time and can write whatever the hell I want in any way I please.

/me gestures broadly at the her daily blog.

    But I lose it. No matter how important a thing is or how driven I am to finish it, I just can't seam to see things through. I've been working on my divine comedy megawad since the fall of 2012, off and on, and my current progress is still limited to the design bible I'm writing to better organize my ideas. I haven't actually touched the levels in years, because I want to make sure that when I do start doom building again, that I know exactly what I want to do before I do it. It's a smart idea for a project as elaborate as what I have planned, but it's also severely limiting and my lack of progress and motivation is a source of a lot of distress for me, and not the fun kind. It's not a focus issue because I'm sharp as a tack, it's not an interest issue because these are some of my most beloved interests and hobbies suffer the same way - hell, it took me four years after getting that 2012 Biollante DVD to actually watch the damn thing and that is literally mankind's greatest work and my single favorite thing in the world - it's just... depression. It's suffocating. I can't rationalize it away, it's just... a fucking mental health disorder that I'm stuck with forever and causes the quality of my life to decrease drastically and I hate it.

    I really want to play Doom Eternal, hell, I want to finish Doom 4, and I still haven't played Agony, and over the past few years a whole genre has emerge of PS1/VHS-styled indie horror games that are fucking cool and slick as hell and I LOVE it and I want to dive into it and experience it all myself. But so much of the time I just feel like I don't know how to be alive and so the world is just kind of passing by around me. I'm a 90's kid and yet it's rare that I ever get those moments of feeling old even in an era where people talk about video stores as ancient history, because for me, time just stands still. I constantly feel like I'm drowning, playing a video game is the absolute least of my concerns.

    I should say, to close this entry out, that I am doing okay for the time being. Obviously I still struggle with all of these things on a daily basis, I never really feel "normal." But there are people in my life who are patient with me, care about how I'm feeling, and just plain want me. Currently I'm being punished by my bowser who has me in a... bit of a forced slavery situation... cuz I guess she got tired of me always getting rescued and wanted to pin me down. It's exhilarating and she keeps outdoing herself with this intense next level stuff, it honestly tires me out from how much she makes my heart flutter. Add to that the support I from the handful of friends that speak to me every day, as well as my wife taking some small but important steps to try and be more supportive and available, and... it's okay. I mean, I'm cursed, I'll always live with these things, there is no cure for this, but I want to make it explicit that this entry is not me saying "things are so bad right now help me," it's just "things are always hard for me in ways that prevent me from having direct control over my own moods." Even know, when I am blissfully happy being Bowsy's slave princess, I'm still actively struggling to motivate myself to do anything other than write this, and hell, it took effort to even start writing at all.

    Minnie's playing a game in the other room though. So I'm gonna cut this of here and drag myself out of bed and make myself go see what she's up to.

93/93

Princess Malyssa🌹