tl;dr at the end. Very long. Also like every trigger warning, but if you have psychological triggers to anything I am going to talk about, you should probably not be playing this game in the first place. Also, spoilers, obviously.
I am a little late to the game here and just found this game Friday night while looking for a less destructive way of shutting off my brain for awhile. I basically bought it because I recognized the characters from a local print shop who makes their merch, and the game was described as similar to Oxenfree, which I rather liked, and it was on sale and popped up first.
This game hit entirely too close to home that it may have reopened old wounds (after several nights of nightmares) and made me accept that maybe I need to see a CBT/DBT. It also more or less accurately depicts what I was like at the lowest (or is it second lowest?) point in my life...at 20. Mae is possibly the fictional character who is the most like me of any fictional character I have encountered, and I am in my 4th decade of encountering fictional characters.
About me: currently someone who is pushing middle age who took a long time to come to grips with certain facts about her ability to correctly process information sometimes (mostly because, like Mae, she was given poor help as a teen). Outwardly have been alternately Deb from Empire records, a manic pixie dream girl and presently basically your quirky middle-school art teacher. Hold down a steady job that I am good at. Grew up, or at least spent my formative teen years in an area of the rust belt where conservative uncles did unconscionable things in the name of getting the factory jobs back. Where pierogies are king, a huge industrialist plastered his name and image all over stuff and funded a pretty good library system. I had a largely shitty childhood until I moved to the rust belt. Not Angus-level, but the room was rather larger than a pantry (9x12), and the lack of food was "limited to plain cereal: Wheaties or Cheerios", often for weeks at a time.
Here's my story. It is long.
I have long suffered with a form of some kind of what is probably an undiagnosed disassociation disorder. It manifests itself under circumstances where adrenaline kicks in and everything completely abstracts. Derealization. It has happened all my life, at least as long as I can remember. It also follows my pattern of migraines, which follows my menstrual cycle and intensifies during peaks of hormones, but is always there to a degree. Needless to say it got worse during middle school when I first got my period and reached a head around 20. Basically, I go into a little tunnel, my vision gets fuzzy around the edges and nothing is real. And I feel no pain, whatsoever. Or fear. Because nothing happening is real, and it's only like an hour later that I realize that, no, it was real and then beat myself up for it for the rest of my life. Not exactly shapes, but a definite abstraction. And the overwhelming feeling that the universe has abandoned me. Time changes. My perspective changes and I am watching myself from somewhere outside myself. It fucking sucks.
There's a milder form that happens when I do repetitive tasks (spreadsheets, going through email) or am, say, walking and looking at the ground while walking and the sidewalk's brick. Lines, lines moving will break me for a minute and my consciousness just kinda floats off like I'm in a trance.
My mother, with whom I lived at the time, is not a "take the kids to the doctor" kind of person. I did not go at all from 1986-1998. Furthermore, punishment would be enacted if we talked to the school councilors and she was inconvenienced with a phone call and the need to explain herself). And she also made sure every adult around me thought I was a "drama queen" and just trouble. Real psychological issues, trichotillomania (both hair and eyelashes in really noticeable ways), after she knew I had been sexually abused as a child (I just found this little tidbit out recently, that no, in fact I had not "been dreaming" it as she had always told me). I was told to repress my anger...and keep a journal because she cribbed that little cure from somewhere in her past.
I was prone to acts of destruction, and the first time the cops showed up at our house was when I was 10 or 11 and threatened a kid with a tire iron. And destroyed his bike. I feel like I threatened a lot of kids with a tire iron, or a baseball bat with nails driven through it around this time. I would also intentionally injure myself, a lot, when I became overwhelmed. I would bite my own arm to the point that I would draw blood.
So when I was 13 I beat the crap out of a girl on the bus. It was the first time I completely detached from reality and saw it from outside like I was watching a video. Scratched her face up a lot, hit a bunch of people who were just trying to help. Later that year I also stabbed a guy in the neck with a pencil, because I spent most of that year in a state of being half in or out of reality. I also took a wooden shaker chair and completely obliterated it to splinters hitting my stepdad with it over and over again, picking up more pieces and just kept hitting. Now, unlike Mae, these events were definitely provoked (especially in the case of my stepdad and the dude I stabbed, who even a few years ago admitted he had it coming), but were like a slow burning fuse and what set up my retribution was absolutely disproportionate at the time so of course I came off like an unhinged psycho with people with a lot of plausible deniability and witnesses. It was just like the stopper was off on my ability to tell what was real, and it just stayed off for a year.
I was shipped off to my dad's house in the rust belt, where everyone, including the local cops who seemed to know way too much about me from day one, decided to watch me as if I were some kind of deviant and not a small, extremely ill-socialized and immature abused child with a probable mental illness, if not also adding a heaping helping of multiple sources of just straight up PTSD on top of that.
My dad lives in a small rust belt city that reached its peak right before the Great Depression and never recovered. It floods a lot, or at least used to, used to get 3-4 foot blizzards on the reg, but hadn't in a long time, has a glass factory that was the primary employer until it went belly up in the 80s, surrounded by coal mines and steel mills that were slowly dying. Downtown, like most downtowns in these kind of cities, has a few staples that just seem to be around forever. The place you get taken to for birthdays. The one grocery store still holding on to as much of the charm of the midcentury as it can muster. The shopping plaza at the highway full of anti-union chains that is slowly sucking the lifeblood of downtown away. Most importantly there's a kind of death cult mentality that everything is ruined unless there are coal, glass or steel jobs, and a lot of folks would do anything to bring that back (how that will happen when the mill's empty and has no equipment and the mine everyone complains about the most simply ran out of coal is anyone's guess). But they will do anything, including deregulating pollution measures that are responsible for lowering the local populations' instances of cancer. If you knowingly add more stuff to your environment that is proven to cause a massively elevated cancer in your area for the sake of "traditional values", sorry, you're a friggin' death cult. I am sure this is kinda true of all of these sorts of towns at this point. Especially in the Western PA/Eastern Ohio/Upper Panhandle of WV area of the world. Where the groundwater and springs are slowly being poisoned by witches. And by witches I mean hydrofracking.
There was a brief interlude of moving back to my mother's house because I kept freaking out and being paranoid and lashing out, and I needed to be near my brother, but that ended up basically with me being almost arrested and send packing (in the middle of the night on a Greyhound no less) right on back to the rust belt. Things were stolen from malls out of boredom and the feeling of it being a "video game", and things were lit on fire. Scars were made. I threw brass knuckles at someone's head and destroyed a lot of pool furniture in the middle of the night.
I was also shot at several times? Neither here nor there.
Small, round, not particularly feminine, immature as hell, looking way younger than her age, hating "cute boys", outwardly aggressive, a petty criminal in extremely stupid ways (including beating the crap out of each other with fluorescent tube lights and breaking & entering), pretty damn queer, friends with the only gay guys in town, into heavy stuff like the band Sleep, terrible at an instrument, from a family that didn't go to college, caring way more about disenfranchised people than the people around me. These all accurately describe me as I was finishing up high school and heading into college (add a shaved head, dog collars and a pair of JNCOs and you have a more complete picture, because, late 90s). A local college because despite being smart (top 10 in my class) I just could not get my shit together. I do not know how or why any of my friends put up with me most of the time.
Now, the normal (for me at least) everyday derealization was not the only reason I could not get my shit together at this period in time, because it got amped up to 11. I met a guy who I started dating who was pretty terrible and tried to kill me (I mean this absolutely literally, 20 years later I still have very clear bone fractures from this incident)...and THEN I went off to college (only to escape him). So we're at full blown complete fuckery at this point. Nothing is real and I do not know how I got through the first few semesters at college. I scared off my roommate somehow so I had the place to myself and did not go home for 2 years, preferring to couch surf.
When I finally did "go home" intending to drop out, I foolishly went back to my mother's house, where I had still kept up with most of my friends there, and proceeded to help light a car on fire and do all kinds of destructive things. Spent a lot of time naked in public, because I felt like I was in some kind of indestructible pocket universe where other people were just not really there.
So basically decades of this cycle, the outward destructiveness turning into inward self-loathing and paralysis more and more with every passing month, year, decade. More than 37 years of actively recalling feeling like this left me really exhausted, filled with intense nightmares constantly that leave me rather unrested.
I recently moved "home" to the rust belt after a decade living on the coast. While I returned very frequently, once or twice a year, I definitely felt like I was changing and everyone else was staying the same (sort of a reverse of Bea and Mae's dynamic). I left home very early and pretty much stayed in that position of being on-again-off-again estranged from my family, and often reality. Last fall everything kind of broke inside me, in regards to my old friends, my family, and where I fit in with all of that.
Lately feeling like we're basically going back to the 1980s in callousness and every time I turn around I have flashbacks to my childhood. Lower and lower. I can barely leave the house these days. Work is terrible and stressful, home is stressful and instead of listening to what I have to say, I just get platitudes of "everyone feels like that, you're not special or anything", a weird phrase that has been uttered by people who supposedly love me, for more than 4 decades. People who don't even know each other using each others' words when they are mildly inconvenienced by me.
I do not think I am special. I think I am fucked up and need help and can't articulate what is happening, what has been happening, to me for my entire life. But if I talk about it, even for a second I am shot down with some simplistic response that shows they don't really know me at all.
I get the platitudes (usually interrupting me when I try to explain) of "you should see a doctor", which I have tried and also didn't help. I tried several therapists and it felt like I was talking to..well...shapes. Abstractions who just gave me the same kind of advice that (it should be noted that I can't take many types of SSRIs, they make me continually suicidal) any 201 psychological textbook would. Nothing helpful. Actively made me worse. I do not trust the small-town Dr. Hanks of the world.
I got blackout drunk recently (on a laughably small amount of alcohol) and woke up and apparently I had been trying to use the suicide hotline chat feature? But fell asleep while I was waiting for it to connect, which is a whole new level of special. Who does that? Me.
So it's getting worse and more and more the feeling that nothing is real and there are no consequences are rearing their ugly head in the beginnings of what may be an existential or midlife crisis...or perimenopause, take your pick. It is howlingly lonely in my disconnected little pocket universe when it kicks in. The last 6 months have been almost pure apathy and despair on top of all of this. I've tried to destroy my life on several different occasions just so it will be easier to stop living it. If you alienate everyone around you, it would make it easier. If you have an exit strategy for for as if you're going to find a new job at any minute, it will make it easier. If you just kinda start telling everyone basically to fuck off and play bad cop at work it might get easier (this one actually backfired on me, it got me promoted, weirdly). If you think of selling all of your possessions and pre-cashing out your 401-k so nobody will have to deal with any financial considerations, it will be easier. Easier if I could also find the motivation to do any of those things instead of laying on my floor avoiding everything.
All I know is that is sucks, so the other night when I was basically crying for hours for no really rational reason, buy a new game to take my mind off of it. Say "fuck you" to the real world and my crushing responsibilities (which are not even that crushing, but I am definitely depressed for the moment). It was on sale. I'd seen the Merch on Commonwealth. It was favorably compared to Oxenfree, and it had a cat. Good enough.
Going through the story though, what Mae was going through was so insanely familiar, It basically broke me for a few days after almost the first round (Bea-focused, I couldn't even finish it because it was hitting so hard after Mae explains "the shapes") because it dredged up long tamped down memories and feelings. I could barely even get out of bed. My nightmares became that of the dreams in the game coupled with my own personal fears. Video games do not usually have this effect on me. A full 100% completion of Breath of the Wild, including all the DLC and the damn Korok seeds did not give me a single Zelda dream. So two days of that and then I finally finished the game out of some bizzare form of self-torture.
And somehow I felt better. I felt finally UNDERSTOOD, buy a bunch of fictional characters and a creative team I had never met in my life in a way that I could never articulate properly. I replayed it again last night with Gregg as the focus and felt even better.
I looked up the hot takes of what everyone thought was wrong with Mae, and looked up how things like that are treated presently. Seems legit and worth a try. Cognitive behavioral therapy, or more likely Dialectical behavioral therapy. We'll see after a consultation what might be best to figure out WTF is wrong with me and make it stop. I just started filling out the paperwork for insurance.
It will inevitably come with some kind of journaling, because it always does, but this time I'll put a NITW sticker on the front of it to remind myself of this moment, right here, where I finally felt hopeful again.
At least a fictional cat girl understands.
And at least some of you understand.
At The End Of Everything, Hold On To Anything indeed.
Tl;dr I dissociate. Nobody understands it, and it was treated badly as a kid/teen/young adult so I stopped trying, and this week I hit a low point, this game pulled me back from the brink because it is extremely similar to my life experience.
Submitted March 27, 2019 at 07:50AM by MaeInRealLife https://ift.tt/2U1ItfA
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