I'm a gamer, I've been playing make believe since I was in high school, but I've never actually rolled a D&D character.
My first game was Vampire: the Masquerade. As a wanna-be goth 16 year old, it was so much cooler to pine artistically than to throw down with a sword and plate armor, so World of Darkness became my thing. I've been playing ever since. Later, in grad school, I managed an analog game store for three years. Now I run/play on alternate weeks at my home, with a group of gamers/writers who are fascinated by collaborative story telling. Currently, we're all pretending to be angsty teen superheroes.
Changeling: the Lost is the game of my heart, even before I really understood my own story, as the transition out of, and transformation through abuse that is the heart of its narrative resonate with me. That probably should have been some kind of foreshadowing.
Street cred established, here's the deal.
I'm 36. I'm a woman. I'm "creative" or "artistic" or whatever euphemism we're currently using for highly emotional, reactive, and not always great at sorting out what's good for me. I pay my bills on time, have my own place, generally keep up on dishes and laundry, take vitamins, and invest for retirement. Since I went to college, I've been in two long term relationships, married once, no kids, three cats. Generally, it looks like I'm pretty good at being a mature adult.Except...not so much.
My parents did their best. I was...sensitive...even as a kid, so I imagine I can't have been easy to raise. I was told I pretty much cried non-stop until I could talk, which I proceeded to do in full paragraphs. Apparently, self-expression has always been kind of important to me.
But, their best wasn't amazing? There are things I'm realizing now, many, many years later, that were actually very not ok. It took 36 years to even start to imagine that they might not have been ok, and I'm not handling the world-view shakeup well. But realizing that there were many basic needs that were not met is helping me to comprehend things that came later, with other people I've loved.
Because I don't have a good track history with relationships.
My first relationship/marriage was great. Mostly. Sort of? We started dating the summer out of our freshman year of college, and were together till I was 31. My ex-husband is a truly remarkable, wonderful man, but I'm realizing now, after being divorced for 4 years and a bit, there were some things that were...less than great. Things I'd just dismissed as the cost of being in a relationship. There's that.
The other relationship, the one that ended about 8 months ago was...not great. In fact, it was basically everything that Lifetime movies and after school specials warn you about. Everything I was supposed to be too smart, too perceptive to fall for.
But that's not how things work.
I'm out now, but looking back, the relationship was 3 years of lessons in why I am not good enough, why I will never be good enough, and all the ways I need to change to be worthy of being loved, and learning how to love in return. It was 3 years that left me with clinically diagnosed PTSD, and a whole lot more trust issues than I thought I had.
I'm healing. But it's taking time. And gaming is helping. So is writing.
(So is a remarkable man who I have, against all odds, fallen in love with, but we'll talk about that later.)
I'm going to use this space to write about healing + gaming, and how being imaginary other people for a while is helping me to figure out who Real Me is. How the language, conventions, and rules of role playing games are helping me to conceptualize and make sense of what happened, why it happened, and where I go from here.
Just so you know, there will be frank discussion of abuse--physical, mental, emotional, sexual, and verbal. There will be discussion of sexual consent, exploitation, and what you probably could call rape. There might be talk of self harm and suicidal ideation. I'm not going to gloss it over. I will be as gentle as I can, and try to make sure to lead in with a content warning.
There's also going to be explicit discussion of game mechanics. So, be ready.
It's just...over this past half a year, I've found that it's easier to understand myself when I can relate it to a schema that speaks to me, and role playing, with its variety of systems, rules, and work arounds is a way I can make sense of things.
I'm doing better. A lot better than I was even a few months ago. My dark times are fewer, and of shorter duration. But they happen. Often, they happen totally unexpectedly, and for reasons I can't pinpoint. I have panic attacks, and flashbacks, and it's totally awesome.
But despite isolation by myself and people who used my loneliness as a weapon, I've managed to put together a Motley of people who give a damn, and who haven't been driven away. I've surrounded myself with caring, articulate individuals who are ok that I'm a little broken, but putting myself back together.
So. Here goes.
Roll initiative.
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