I find myself spending more and more time reflecting on the past. I suspect it’s a result of my burnout and the introspection I’m doing, what with all of my identity issues and the changes I know I need to make but don’t know how to make. I’ve avoided doing much introspection for a long time, so it is probably unsurprising that my mind turns itself back to when I made that choice–the choice to set my mind to other things, typically to the exclusion of the once-constant work of neatly ordering my mind–now that I’m shaking off the rust and trying to flex long-unused muscles.
I haven’t avoided all introspection of course, I would not have come to terms with my gender and sexual identities, as much as I can I suppose, or chosen to finally stop thinking about using a new name and actually try it out. But I’ve avoided doing much that couldn’t be contained in the moment I was in. No looking into the past in order to better understand the present. No looking to the future in order to better make choices today. I told myself that it was because, until something changed, there would be no need for it after I realized I couldn’t really make plans for the future. All I could really do was point myself in a direction and make the best choices possible as they came up.
The arrival of Covid-19 on the international scene made that clear, after all. How could I plan for a future I couldn’t anticipate? But now, six years later, nothing has really changed (my student loans still need paying, I’m isolated in order to stay safe from a disease that could impact my mental faculties in a way that left me conscious of their diminished status, and my job is still the same soul-draining effort–well, maybe a greater soul-draining effort than ever, actually) except for my increased burnout and I can’t keep wandering forward, undirected, hoping that something eventually changes enough that I’ve got some extra room to grow or act or change or anything at all really, because life has conspired to prevent that from happening thus far and it is not looking like that’s going to change either.
Back in 2020, when I was still optimistic about the potential of being furloughed from my job every other week and able to coast on unemployment benefits that had been amped up to allow for people to isolate as the spread of Covid-19 was deemed a pandemic, I sat in my armchair next to the unused fireplace, looking through our rear patio doors at the lingering snow covering the hill and forest behind my home. It was March 20th–four days after I’d shown up to work, determined to again make my case to my boss that he let me permanently work from home, to find everyone moving things out of their offices since the company had made the decision my boss had been resisting even as the death toll started to rise–and I’d just received my copy of Animal Crossing: New Horizons.
Everyone was talking about it. Everyone was buying Switches about it. We were all stuck at home, unable to visit each other, isolated, and struggling to adapt to our suddenly altered world, so we did what we’d been doing our whole lives. We escaped. We left our cluttered, suddenly-so-silent lives and escaped to a small island in the middle of an unspecified ocean that we were going to help noted entreprenuer Tom Nook develop into an escape for the people tired of their lives in cities and so on. We built our little camps, we got into debt to have a nicer house, and we visited each other.
Voice and video helped us all in those days, but none of them hit quite so effectively as visiting each other’s Animal Crossing islands. We created these digital lives as we struggled with the sudden metaphorical cessation of our physical lives (to say nothing of how we struggled with the literal cessation of life that became a part of every day’s routine), but unlike so much of our digital space, we could bring others into it in a way that FELT like we were going somewhere or bringing someone somewhere. We could actually walk around and show them our new home. We could put things on display, we could invent and play games predicated on proximity, we could move between spaces and homes, even as we sat in a lonely chair, phone to ear or headphones overhead, in order to speak with each other. It was the saving grace that we needed in that moment. It was the relief that kept so many of use healthy and sane during those early days.
It was a bright, sparkling connection in a sea of isolation, a glimmer of noise in a world that was silent of the susurrus I’d grown so accustomed to. It became our lives and we shared that space until we could tentatively venture into the world during the warmer months to meet carefully, oh-so-casually, at a distance. Masked, a double armslength apart, and forced to use perspective tricks to take pictures together, we often retreated from those ventures to the comfort and proximity of our digital spaces. Our refuge where we could be together without the looming specter of an illness that threatened us all.
When life makes demands of you, it is unlikely that pitching a fit is every going to work out. There can be some relief in the expression of the emotions involved, but screaming about the injustice of it all isn’t going to lower your rent, repair broken friendships, change stubborn minds, or bring an end to violence and persecution. Action and change will, sometimes, if you are lucky, well-directed, or part of an undeniable movement. I cannot rail against the bitterness in my soul to bring people back into my life. I also can’t reach out and put in the effort to repair things between us because I made the choices I did for a reason and that reason still stands. I can’t act to pay off my student loans more than I already am. I can’t afford to leave my job, take a stand in it, or do anything but carry on working as much as possible so I can one day leave for something less personally destructive.
With all that being true, with the best possible path picked out for me–something I’ve checked with my therapist about many times over the years and each time had my reasoning and standing choices validated once more–what is the point of thinking about it? Why should I put effort into thinking it all through again and again when I know that nothing has materially changed? Why should I force myself to, once again, confront the painful disparity of where I thought I’d be by the time I was thirty with where I am now as I am entering the back half of thirty-four? Why can’t I just stay the course when I know that no amount of individual, personal change or determination is going to help me get through this? What is the point in planning for a future I might never reach, no matter how much of my present I sacrified for it?
All of these are questions I’ve ignored. Life routinely reminded me just how much could change without my input, at a moment’s notice, and it felt (and still feels) like making concrete plans for the future is a waste of my time and energy. As a result, I’ve grown less curious. I’ve stopped paying attention to upcoming events since it’s not like getting around to stuff a few days or couple weeks later is going to change my experience. Why rush? Why spend the effort to anticipate things that are ultimately going to mean nothing to me in the face of the path I’ve put myself on and the effort it takes to maintain? And so I’ve stopped marking down video game release dates. I’ve stopped pre-ordering books. I don’t even check what movies are coming out anymore. What is the point of finding these things ahead of time when I can just as well enjoy them whenever I finally discover them after their release?
Developing my Animal Crossing island was the work of 2020. I would eventually rework it a couple years later, taking the base island design and altering it to suit my preferences and design sensibilities, but that first year was all about developing the island, finding my favorite residents, and turning the empty world into something lived-in. I spent the year playing it in between other games. Even when I moved, bought a PS4, and played a whole bunch of Play Station games I’d wanted but never had the console to play, I still returned to Animal Crossing. I’d lose entire weeks into Stardew Valley and yet Animal Crossing was the throughline I returned to. Even as I struggled to find the rest I wanted due to worsening relationships with my roommates, the need to move, and being the only one in that household who cared enough to take precautions, I kept going back to my island.
It was my final escape, so to speak. The one that never failed me. That never lost my interested or got so boring that I would rather start the game over again than carry on. It was the place that I fully felt like I could explore myself, express myself, and hold space even when I moved into my own apartment. I could change my avatar’s presentation however I wanted since there was no male or female choice, just clothing, hair, and facial features on the same round little body. I could bring people into a place I controlled, I could be lavish with my money and my gifts since hard work and studious effort actually paid off in the game, and I could just exist in a world that was meant to be appreciated and enjoyed without needing to ignore the deafening silence that used to be the hum of distant tires, the susurrus of neighbors just out of sight, and the steady hum of active life that mingled with the peculiar silence that always followed the occasional sad whoop of sirens that didn’t need to scream to clear the roads that were now constantly empty.
It was my home. It reflected me. Which means, in my own cleverness and desire to reflect my thoughts onto every surface that could take them, I spent an hour coming up with a clever name for my island back on that first day, on March 20th, that would continue to represent a world I had invested so much of my time and my self and my emotions into that I would never be able to change. To be fair, the game warned me. It cautioned me that the only way to change the name would be to delete it all and start over. But I was clever. I needed a little tongue-in-cheek joke to make, so I named it Tearniquan. It was a funny little thing–a private jest that most never noticed unless I explained it was an anagram–meant only to amuse myself as I so often did with my own cleverness. I named my island Quarantine and that was maybe the first decision I made in this period of fluctuation that ignored what the future might hold for me.
Quarantine. Tearniquan. I remember texting a friend I no longer speak to as we set up our islands that I’d come up with a silly little joke. I remember smirking about it whenever someone realized what I’d done. It was clever. I was clever. Why not name it after the dominant part of my life? Why not make the metaphor into something more literal by naming the digital space I’d occupy for years to come after the thing that made it so incredibly important to me in the first place?
A day largely unexamine stretched into weeks and months and has become a life of unanticipation. I do not look forward to things. I think of them, sometimes. I make what plans I can. But I do not think of them with anticipation in my heart. There are exceptions, of course. I haven’t become unfeeling stone as a result of this internal silencing. I haven’t lost my capacity for joy or love or excitement. But I do not look to them in days to come. I open myself to them as they arrive and cherish them while they are present, but I do not look back for them again when they’ve gone or forward to when they might return. What is the point of making plans that, oh so often, were dashed by the circumstances of life and the people in it?
But this cannot hold. I can’t keep this up. I do not know how much longer I can live in these conditions and I know my present well enough to know that no amount of wild effort will change anything. Only luck of the sort I can’t help but feel bitter about others experiencing: lotteries, inheritences, things that can only be found by the right person at the exact right moment. Only things beyond my control or ability to influence as anything other than the way one tiny grain of sand in a dune influences the coast.
All that is left to me is the thing I’ve avoid for so long. All I have left to me is my mind. All I can do is sharpen my vision, hone my attention, and look for every tiny thing I could turn to my advantage if only I was prepared for it. All I can do is find the strength to carry on by reinforcing myself through lessons from the past so that I might better act whenever the future and all its potential arrives. I must dust out the cobwebs, waken those unused skills, and return to the constant tuning and maintenance I once kept up like it was a religious obversation key to the health of my soul. Which, to be plain, it might have been, considering how heart-sick and soul-weary I’ve grown since I stopped tending the garden of my mind (though, to be entirely fair to myself, have you SEEN the world this past decade??).
I can’t ignore the past any longer. I can’t ingore my self any longer. I can’t ignore the demands of the future any more. I have to find the time, find the energy, find the willpower, to return to my interiority.
These days, almost six years into my quarantine, the joke is old. Tearniquan tastes stale and bitter in my mouth. It tumbles through my mind like a boulder hellbent on becoming an avalanche. My stomach roils at the thought of booting up the game and being forced to face the conflict between a place I built a digital heart to live inside and the pain of having this clever little joke, sharpened into a steak by the intervening years and my continue isolation, plunged into it. Could I get rid of this place I once loved so dearly? That hosted get-togethers with people I no longer speak to? That was the first place I felt like I could look anyway I wanted and that had become the staging for all my best memories of those dark years?
Can I stand to be poked and prodded by the name that mocks me now? Tearniquan? Quarantine. Do I have the fortitude required to stand up to the brunt of this blow to my very soul every time I see the name pop up on screen and am forced to think about what this place means to me even as it is named such?
Because that space empty now. It is dusty, long-left unattended save for the ghost that is my avatar. Like myself, it is the only one still in Tearniquan. Everyone else has gone. They’ve left their islands, their homes, for the wider world. Only I remain behind. Only I chose to stay apart and safe, in quarantine, despite the mounting evidence that Covid-19 can permanently shorten your life, reduce your mental capacity, and even change your personality. I mean, why would they stay isolated? They have lives to live, places to go, experiences to have, and work to do.
They don’t come around, anymore. To Tearniquan or to me in quarantine. It was my choice, after all, to isolate. None of them are obligated to join me. I cannot require them to follow the protocols I wish they would, to mask up and avoid unnessary exposure, in order for me to feel entirely comfortable with leaving my quarantine behind. I still live in it. I carry it with me, even, when I go out. I inconvenience myself in order to stay safe as I watch the world beyond me refuse to do anything of the sort even when it is convenient. Only I am still stuck in this place of safety, looking for the signs of someone come to visit despite knowing that no one will. Looking for someone who cares enough to share in the effort. And, just like my island, empty now for years save for my avatar, I cannot shake the feelings of empty sadness that pervade it.
It was a gradual thing. I never really decided to cease introspection. I just realized that I’d stopped one day and that the reason I’d given myself, that it did not serve me to put in the effort, was undeniably true. I think that it took until 2021 to really be true, though, and was cemented in that first month of the year by the easily anticipated bit of treason then-President Trump spurred on that went unpunished. Why look to a future full of only the dire consquences brought on by the failures of those in power? Why spend my energy on a future that was only ever going to keep getting worse?
Just like my island. First we stopped having weekly visits. Then some of the group dropped out entirely, stopped playing at all. Then it become something for special occasions: in-game events or some means of representing the self amongst our friends or family over the holidays. Then long stretches of silence and isolation as I carried on as best as I could by myself. And, much like my introspection, even that began to fade. Every couple days. In bursts of a few days a week. Maybe five days out of a month. Then a year of silence and inattention followed by a brief burst of energy and interaction that quickly burned itself out.
Now I am here, three years later. Shocked into attention by the arrival of a major update to this old game and the sudden return to it by people from all corners of my life. Shocked into awareness by the irrevocable truth that I do not know how much longer I can keep this up. Finding myself a mess that will take real effort to clean up with no guarrantees that this will stave off the inevitable, even, much less result in any kind of positive output. And so, as my mind wakes and I restart the long-silenced machine of personal evaluation and consideration, I think of the island I left behind all those years. Tearniquan. Quarantine. A dagger in my heart that I’m not sure I can bear to dislodge because of how much it meant to me once. That it still means to me. All the carefully arranged flowers. The villagers who were more affectionate with me than my biological family ever were. The success in life and personal economics that I’ve always wanted but been denied in this primary world of ours by constantly rising costs. The home I made myself. All the accouterments of a life I’d built for myself that I could preserve forever or chose to destroy.
Why does this matter so much to me? I have a new digital community, one that cares about me, uses the name I prefer, and that will remain digital as long as it exists because we’re so far apart that there’s no other choice. I am making friends again, expanding my horizons, finally doing the things I mean to do in 2020 before isolation prevented me from making more friends and developing new and better relationships. And yet I built my life on that island. The thing is crumbling and something I dare not lean on at any point, but it holds a version of my heart from back before the years turned worse than ever. I’m not sure I can bear to lose it when I’ve already lost so much else that was a part of my life back then.
I had hoped that this little essay, bouncing back and forth between two mirrored topics, would help me figure something out. No such luck. I am just as mired in the mess as I ever was. Maybe even more so, now that I’ve given words to the once formless thoughts and feelings that plagued me. But I’ve never been one to seek answers as my goal. I’ve always taken what I can get when they show up, but my real pursuit is questions and maybe now, with all of this laid out for me to read and consider, I’ll be able to find some useful ones. Threads to pull at. The first steps in undoing any tangle is always finding something to pull on, after all. Maybe that will be enough. Maybe it will be enough to have considered it all and, once I finally get some sleep, my mind will start the work required to undo all this awful mess.
All good questions. All good things to consider. Maybe I should delete my island. Start over. There’s a lot to be said for starting fresh when the opportunity provides itself. I can’t always cling to the past if I want to move into the future. The loss of things cherished makes room for new things to arrive, ones with fewer barbs perhaps. Maybe I can leave it there, encased in glass and ready for me to visit when I feel the need, while I move on elsewhere. Maybe all I need to do to excise the dagger it has stabbed into my very soul is go in and explore it. After all, most poeple remove daggers by pulling them out rather than hoping they magically vanish on their own or that you grow used to it being there.
I might as well try. The one thing all this thought has made clear to me is that no amount of actually going to visit my island is going to be worse than how deep I’ve driven this metaphorical knife by obsessing about it for weeks as my mind has kept flinching away from any heavier version of this introspection. Better to see if there’s the option to heal–to process these feelings–rather than ignore them while they slowly fester. Better. Or at least not worse.