Video Games

Maybe ‘procrastination’ is a reoccurring theme in your life.  Or perhaps you are uncomfortably familiar with the symptoms of extreme avoidance from your C-PTSD, like I am.   Now...

Let me share a several YEAR avoidances to something that some might find peculiar at first...and how that avoidance finally shifted.

I was never a gaymer as a kid.  I actually was not a gaymer until my first boyfriend introduced a game to me.  I eventually caught on to it, and I picked up a few online friends and we would play and interact in the game world together as a band of friends.  I eventually was asked to join a guild...which turned out to be a group for irl gays to know who was safe to play with.  What did I did not know was that this guild was elusive to my boyfriend, who apparently ‘had been looking for It for over a year without luck considering all the forum clues’.  He then offered to play my character while I was at work in order to level my character up to his and we could play together easier...or so I thought.

The proxy result of playing my character was the level of growth.  What it turned out he was actually doing was directly chatting and getting personal information of people in this guild...and then deleting all of this in my inbox...but I was getting weird messages and overly-friendly other players outside of my usual four friends...and eventually this boyfriend wanted me to just let him have my character and offered to start a new one over for me, and when I declined, he was hostile about it.  He begrudgingly created his own new character...but then (and to date myself a bit) I was getting unknown and unsaved usernames messaging me on AIM...related to sex, about when they are going to visit, what they wanted to do...and some messages were just ‘cut to the chase’ oriented.

Without going too much into detail...this snowballed more...and to a dangerous, unsafe, and out of control place for me.  The gaslighting in relation to believing someone because they are tangibly in front of you, there is history, and seem to make sense seemed to outweigh all of the weird out of the blue messages...perhaps this was NOT a part of the gayming culture as was told to me.

It made me uncomfortable.

When that relationship ended...my days of playing video games ended.  Well...they just ceased for a period of time.  This changed when my husband, Caleb, came into the picture.

Our first year together, he did introduce me to video games that hooked to the TV.  I was terrible at them...and he switched over systems in part of his interest, but also to see what worked best for both of us.  <3333

Eventually, he got me hooked on a game, Fable III.  I LOVED that game...I loved running the little quests and going off the storyline...dying clothes...using my elemental abilities of ice and water...having but not really using my giant hammer.  I had this little island, where there was a high concentration of LGBTQ+ characters....and Caleb would play with me, and explore the map with me...he took me to see all the ‘easter eggs’ in the game.  We worked to chase down all the ‘extra’ things in the game...and when most of all the game was unlocked, and I was forced to play out the main storyline...he sat by me as I cried because the game ended with the requirement to kill the PC guide.

When we moved from the first place we lived, Caleb found more free time and wanted to use it towards online video games.  Being years removed from my experience with my past boyfriend, I was a little shocked at how I felt tense at the invite to play with him.  I framed the reaction as a ‘me thing’ that was ‘nothing’ that I originally thought I would just work it out and get over it.

Spoiler: I didn’t just get over it.

Instead, I rebranded the tension by having it be ‘Caleb’s alone time’...and I would get caught up in whatever kept my mind busy.  Of course, there were times I wondered if he was a subscriber to the mindset of what online gayming culture was to my prior boyfriend.  I just felt like I had to keep that drama to myself.

There were passive as well as direct asks of my interest to play online games with Caleb...and I wasn’t a ‘no’, but I also wasn’t a ‘jump up and down “yes”’ either.  I always hesitated and a decision was left hanging out there...feeling like a point of contention for both he and I after repeated moments of reexploring this.

Eventually, he found a game he thought I would like (I don’t like violent games, they are incredibly stressful for me)...of which I forget the name of...something with an ‘M’ in the title I believe.  He set it up on my computer...was super adorable in how geeky-excited he was about the process.  It turned out my computer could not handle it in a stable way and I played it for a period to get my feeling of the game (as well as feelings inside of me).  Though it was played on low resolution and no sound...I had some okay fun...there was a metaphor in the game I did not care for.  I was playing with Caleb’s ‘level a million’ character with my 1-10 leveled character.  It reinforced this weird power-dynamic in the game that is sometimes present irl, and looking back, I think that was the disconnect for it with me.

Flash forward another year, and Caleb made a bigger push for me to play with him.  There was something about trusting he knew he would have fun in playing with me, and that I would have fun with a game too.  He ended up buying me a new computer specifically for the game, Finale Fantasy XIV.  I wanted to talk about it, he just wanted to jump into it, and I dealt with the disconnect by avoiding it...hiding in the comfort of not testing the waters on the game.

It was actually another six months until it we revisited it, this past June.  He brought it up in a time of conflict as an example of trying to connect with me in a creative and fantasy world, which I did not really see that pov until this conversation.  Turns out it was enough to get me to try out the game...and I, in turn, asked him to create a new character to build up with me together.  So we started playing...and while he was more skilled at the controls and had an overall familiarity with Final Fantasy XIV, we were a team in an imaginative land.

It was not for one lazy weekend day where we stayed in bed and played all day, where we shared goals on what we wanted to do.  I like to explore the maps, and to test the limits...in how that looks is my level 10 character walking around the perimeters of level 40+ areas.

I have had some major ‘shifts’ in beneficial coupleship ways in the last year.  Working alongside the patience of Caleb...it sometimes feels like I am not getting to where I want to be...where I want us to be because I am not there.

BUT.

That weekend, we were in a part of the game we had NO business being in.  We wandered FAR into it, with an unlocked respawn site far away.  It was a situation where the further we went in, the longer it would take to get back to the same place...and we were SO close to unlocking the next respawn site ahead.  On this little exploration, one of us (probably me) tripped off one of the characters who attacks lower-level characters.  We had no ability to actually take on a level three times our own, so the strategy was to not get hit as we outran it in the margins of the structures in the game on the way to unlock the game.  Of course, Caleb was more skilled at navigating his character in this manner...and I watched as he ran ahead of me...but I not only kept up, but I was able to outrun the attacking character and meet up with Caleb where we intended!!!

I felt so proud- like an equal team who was in the game to be in the game for us.  We shared a kiss irl to celebrate...but the adrenaline from the game was very real in that moment.  I was so smiley and I could feel Caleb radiate with I told ya so energy.  I also felt like he was proud of me in some ways just by keeping up.

This is where I felt a ‘click’...like...the bullshit of what I associated with prior video game literally felt like a weight moved at that moment.  It was like...I was lighter and wasn’t afraid of the lightness to go away.

Since we met my goal for the day, we moved on to his...which were daily tasks as well as picking up a few side quests for leveling our characters.  It was in this moment that my shift began to take new shape...and the parallels in the game were NOT scary or overwhelming or even negative in a way that exploited my insecurities and anxieties in life.  I saw myself as a character who heals others, and maybe that is a fantasy way I see myself as one who so desperately wishes there was a magick healer who could save me irl.

We would do quests were Caleb would do both jobs of healing and fighting...but as that weekend progressed, I think my irl confidence began to influence my gameplay.  I actually became RELIABLE in healing and protecting my husband inside the game.  I was able to anticipate his character moves, and we communicating strategy irl before doing things...it was like a mode of communicating that was a beneficial type of code (and not the shame-spiraling code language of anxiety that felt like such a burden).  We were creatively working as closer equals...closer in a way that gave me renewed perspective and hope for irl...the ability to be an equal and not a lesser person crippled in his eyes by my mental health, expecting the same mistakes over and over, and the very real feeling of being hindered and limited in experiencing life by my mental health.

This fictional fantasy game...

...in a weird way

...made me feel real and with value

In unlocking aspects of the game, I was unlocking walls I had up to my husband with an inner battle of ‘trusting him until having a reason not to trust him’ trust moving towards ‘oh, I don’t need to stress about not trusting him, I can just trust him since there has never been a reason not to.

This game had real-life consequences...and they were NOT devastation...they were actually aspects that pulled me closer to Caleb...the video game itself was an ‘easter egg’.  I’m probably using that term wrong.  I will have to ask him if my thought makes sense.  I think of it as a reoccurring thing or nod of something within something else.  So the video game was a nod to purging my coupleship hinderance to past trust violations...does that make sense?  I suppose this idea is just for me.

Anyway, I look forward to more video gaming in the Final Fantasy XIV world together...it’s amazing how one day, one moment, can just be the one thing to make all things better.

Who would have thought that a thing that broke a part of me would also be the thing to fix me AND bring such beneficial excitement and promise to the one best very sexy geeky man I love???

It may have taken a long time...

But...

I am genuinely excited to have arrived here together...

Final[Fantasy XIV]ly.

This made me laugh thinking this is me in the video game world at times:

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