Outside, someone is playing the trumpet. It’s sunny, cars are frequenting by, and children are wrestling in the grass. I’m in a loose bathrobe, staring at the people on the other side of the bay window of my apartment, counting to thirty only loudly enough to confirm I haven’t trailed too far off into other thoughts. Steam and a note of smokiness twists from the spout of a bright yellow teapot on the counter, contrasting the worn white and blue tiled counter in my kitchen crowded with earth-colored spices. Shocking Yellow, I believe is the more specific term, if the car dealership I got my first and only car at shops at the same paint factory as the tea shop. I’ve come to miss that car, or driving, being able to just pick up and go somewhere when I wanted, to wear whatever dangerous shoe fit the occasion, to just visit whatever friend is too lazy to leave their house. When I finish counting, adding on a few extra seconds in case I went too fast, I pour my tea and go to sit in my room, prepared to do something productive and intellectual. Take notes while reading the academic canon of game design, play out tarot cards like a modular table top game, write an article. Instead, I feel like I’m pouring hot liquid into a hollowed out shell, who might reach for her new 3DS, but most likely just sit and stare out her window.
This is my unglamourous road to recovery. Instead of event planning, or going on dates, or creating something, I sit in my room and drink tea. I will try to convince myself to cook, but will most likely order thai from a mediocre delivery place that doesn’t have a minimum. I wish I could say I’ve learned something profound, that in my own way, I am advancing the craft and critique of play while I play hermit. It’s not the case.
I feel like I survived something, where, at least, years-long adrenaline have subsided enough for me to feel pain endured for a while. From before games, when I struggled to live, when I struggled for safety. I have something mundane that I’ve be scraping for my entire adult life, some form income that takes care of my necessities that doesn’t completely sap me of my energy. It took me leaving social media, the circus it is, to realize I had something, that I could, for a little, just stop, and not feel guilty over drinking tea.
But I do. I’ve found that, as much people on social media are quick to recognize victimhood, and construct a narrative for them, there is little support, and possibly understanding, on how to help someone not be one anymore. Instead of guiding people through a healing process to surmount victimhood, they disappear the moment you don’t hold that position in the right way. It’s like, people empower you to be a righteous victim, instead of empowering you to be yourself again. At times, this feels like people aren’t interested in you once you lose your status of being a victim, and emphasize your pain to keep you in cultural consciousness.
Finding out who is and isn’t a victim is a preoccupation of those only concerned with justice, not the social or restorative parts. It’s ultimately determining rightness and reparation equal to the offense; but what if there is no real way to weigh and dole out justice that will actually make any feel good? With this method, victims are essentialized, since the search for truth is for one that cannot contain many perspectives, only the one of judgment. I find that justice is not what I need as someone deeply wounded, rather, for others to enable me to recover. Cutting down someone else isn’t going bring back time lost to pain. What we need is healing and prevention, taking care of the wounded and making sure things like that can’t happen again.
Systems that wield justice without a clear path to recovery for everyone involved, to mend back community that can and will turn on itself, are violent, no matter how well-intentioned. That conversations stop at identifying the offender and aggrieved demonstrate the reactive rather than proactive nature of the common manifestation of social justice in contemporary mediums. Reaching for the status quo, even when the nominal is fucked up. In the end, there is only enough attention for a certain amount of victims of certain degrees of victimhood. Those that don’t fight to keep the attention are forgotten, sometimes despised.
As I heat up more water for tea, it is night time, and I haven’t done much else. I think about what could help me, get me back to work, to living again. It usually takes a day for me to just decide, you know, I’m just going to get my shit together. I’m just going to write this piece, I’m just going to call that friend, I’m just going to finally check my email. And that’s the advice I often get from other sources, that ultimately, you have to just do what you need to do. Yet, so much goes into ‘just’ doing something when you’re burnt out from pain. There’s learning healthy habits again, there’s the mystical process of having energy to do basic tasks of taking care of myself. My culture’s lack of care for mental health haunts me. Instead, it tells me to just get over it. A self-determinism that at first seems empowering, but instead heaps onto you all the garbage society doesn’t want to handle itself.
I admit, this is just me venting. Writing to get money, slowly but surely trying to piece my life back together. It’s, well, embarrassing. I feel infantilized and surveilled, quarantined yet lost in the desert. This is an exhale, this is me trying to survive. I wish I had a solution, some moral of the story, a tried and true method to restorative practices for the people we find victims of violent systems. Yet my mind already grows tired, and it is difficult for me to concentrate. If anything, I just want others to not feel alone and hopeless, and to further push awareness, even if I can only do it a little at a time for now.
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