Back when I originally conceived of my post-work-project vacation, I realized it lined up with the release date of the game “Wanderstop,” a fact that tickled me to no end since Wanderstop is about burnout and I was (and still am) incredibly burned out. I thought it would be incredibly appropo if I played the game about burnout while recovering from my own, but that was before I got into Final Fantasy 14 and developed a bit of an dependence on the escapism it provides (since it has been my sole escape for three solid months as of this post going up). Still, one of my friends was interested in it and I was in a bit of a giddy mood since the game had come out, my project had released, and I was putting my break off for an unknown amount of time, so I decided to stream it for my friend over discord. I booted it up, started playing it, got through the stage-setting stuff at the beginning, and then promptly got my ass handed to me by the game as I played it like I’d play any game and it was absolutely prepared for me to do that in ways I didn’t fully expect. It all but called me out by name as I played it for an hour and a half, to the degree that I closed the game to go to bed that night and have been kind of afraid to open it again. It’s not every day that a game holds up a mirror for you to see a perfect reflection of yourself and I’ve been so mentally and emotionally fragile lately that I didn’t think I could risk it.

I probably could have avoided being caught so off-guard by this if I’d watched any of the streams beforehand, or even watched some of the demos. I’d definitely have been more prepared if I’d played the demo myself, since I’ve stopped short of how far the demo goes. I didn’t want to be spoiled, you see. I wanted to go in with no expectations, to experience the game with unbroken continuity and to not run into artificial barriers imposed by the sensible limits of a pre-release demo, so I avoided even articles and interviews about it. So, instead of having time to process the introduction and seeing myself so directly, kindly, and helpfully called out before playing the game as a whole, I got to experience that with my closest friend on call with me over discord (they were having a very different experience than I was, perhaps because their only introduction to it was a trailer I sent them and not all the talk and stuff I’d seen that maybe made the game I was playing a bit more clear to me than the trailer alone did). I wouldn’t say that I hid my reaction to what was going on, but I did hold it at arm’s length and maybe brush it off a little too brusquely. This isn’t my friend’s fault or anything, but my own inability to be truly emotionally vulnerable around other people without preparation.

So, rather than play through this game, I’ve been thinking about myself, my burnout, and what that glimpse in the mirror showed me. I mean, I didn’t learn anything new about myself. I haven’t had any revelations or sudden changes to the way I think. I just… I read words that I’ve never read or heard before. I saw a message that was inadvertently directed at core parts of myself that I largely keep hidden from other people and my own conscious awareness–not because I’m particularly ashamed of feelin these ways or doing these things but because I’ve always been good at not thinking about things and that’s a pretty strong coping mechanism when you feel like your only viable path toward any kind of future is to carry on. Because that’s the thing. I’m really good at hiding things from other people and myself. I had to be, in order to survive my childhood and early teen years. It was a survival mechanism that saved my life that I’ve been trying to undo for a decade and a half now that it is no loner necessary. A survival mechanism that might come be useful again, given the turning of the world–a fact so unfortunately true that not even my therapist can argue against learning to apply it consciously and judisciouly–and my own part within that turning. All of which means that very few people can read me, very few people can tell when something is wrong without me telling them, and almost no one can do that reliably enough to call me on my bullshit. Even my therapist can’t do that. The only person who was ever able to reliably do that is someone I haven’t spoken to in two years.

So, fifteen minutes into the game (largely due to my own delaying and slow progress), when I read the words “you wonder why someone pushing themselves to exhaustion would collapse” as a statement not of accussation or reproach but an acknowledgement of a lack of self-perception on someone else’s part, it hit me right in my very soul and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since. Especially considering that, less than a week later, I got sick and had my own collapse as my body, finally forced to rest by stomach issues, gave out on me after two and a half months of pushing myself to my limits on an empty tank. I’ve written plenty about how rough last year was for me, how draining it was in a way I have never felt before, to be constantly in pain and physically unable to do things I could handle without so much as a though in years prior. I wrote about recovering from that and starting to feel better this year and then getting swamped by an exhaustion I’m now confident is at least mostly the fault of the medication I’m taking but also a result of burnout from pushing myself so heavily after only a month of being in what should have been a two month recovery period. I haven’t been shy to share this aspect of what I’ve been going through, but I’ve kept a lot of it to myself. Maybe from a mixture of shame, maybe from a mixture of old habits and modern coping mechanism. Maybe because I knew I couldn’t admit it to myself without losing something I’ve clinging to as all of my plans for the last decade of my life have been scattered to the wind by the harsh gale that is reality and living largely unsupported as a lower-middle class person in the modern era.

Regardless of the reasons, I’m still not ready to write about what I found reflected in myself in this game. About the truth I found at the heart of all this thinking after weeks of slowly peeling back layers of excuses and distractions and obstructive non-thought (which is what I call it when I get in my own way of thinking about things by reflexively emptying my mind every time I touch on something I know is going to be difficult for me to handle at a time that I’m already struggling). I don’t even know if that’s actually what’s at the core of all this because it has been exactly three weeks and I spent six months thinking about my gender identity (despite feeling fairly certain about) before I spoke a word of my thoughts to anyone. I don’t know that I ever will since not EVERYTHING that happens to me is blog fodder. Some stuff I keep to myself. All I know is that I have to deal with this before I can play Wanderstop again and that means I have no idea how long it’ll be before I finally get back to it. Especially when I have the convenient time-consuming distraction that is Final Fantasy 14. It’s easy to just do something else, after all, when the thing you’re avoiding is painful and exhausting. This is an important step. Writing my thoughts down somewhere, working through the process and giving name to some pieces of it. But it is just a step and I’m pretty sure I’ve got a lot more to go yet.