All Out of Feels

Well, it’s been about a year since the election. My husband told me that some people are planning Screaming Parties to celebrate the occasion. I have to admit, the idea holds a certain appeal.

Looks like a party to me.
(Photo by Asa Rodger on Unsplash)

The trouble is, I seem to be Out of Feels. I’ve checked all the closets, dusted under every bed, and even cleaned up several Piles of Horror (you know the kind I mean… 6 months ago it was an accessory to a short to-do list but now it’s 15 times bigger and has spiders living in it), but I’m like the Monty Python cheese shop which is uncontaminated by cheese. Screaming without feels seems questionable.

Screaming on the inside but mostly about Cheetos.

I am politics-averse. I make no secret of this. Chalk it up to an INFJ personality, a dislike of raised voices, a deep-rooted skepticism towards mob responses and tribalism, whatever. The deck is stacked against me getting anything personally fulfilling out of political engagement. Generally my only motivation to get involved in the political realm involves feeling intensely negative about something. So what am I to do on those days I can’t muster emotion to drive action, but there’s still stuff to do?

Lately I call these "days that end in -y."

The answer is, I do three things. Two are specific, and one is broad.

Specific Thing #1: Sign up for the Americans of Conscience Checklist created by Awesome Human Jennifer Hofmann.

You can read all about it by following the link. The weekly checklist is composed of straightforward, non-partisan actions you can take to defend your democratic ideals. Hofmann is a superhero for putting it together.

Specific Thing #2: Make it a habit.

I recently had one of those moments where I thought “there really should be an app that does <X>,” only to spend two seconds searching and discover that there IS an app that does X. In fact there are multiple apps that do X. In this case, X = give me an RPG-like framework to track the things I need to do and earn XP for it. My wacky gamer brain LOVES this concept. I’m basically rewarding myself with pretend currency, and I’m eating it up because I am a GIANT NERD.

I’ve cleaned up the mess in the bedroom, organized my desk, cleared a 6-month backlog of shredding, and (of greatest relevance to where this post started) participated in the Plus3 initiative to Get Out The Vote for Virginia, all because of this marvelous little app giving me the power to claim XP for it. If you find the notion appealing or simply intriguing, take a look at Habitica. And let me know if you sign up, there are rewards you can only get by doing “quests” or “boss fights” with a group, and Mama wants more cute digital pets.

I’ve spent some time pulling away from the seemingly-endless cascade of horrible things vomiting forth from the current Presidential administration, and now I need to come back to action. The bad is not stopping, and neither can we – but we don’t have to go forward motivated by fear, stress, horror, and panic. We don’t owe anyone those responses. The appalling indecency and divisiveness of our 45th President isn’t normal and we should never accept it as such, but we can make our responses to these situations habitual. As soon as the Americans of Conscience checklist fires up again, I’ll be coding tasks into Habitica and earning heaps of XP.

It's the zero-calorie version of doing this.

This segues into the General Thing: Lean into the pain.

This is a weird one for me. I used to interpret ideas along these lines as masochism and withdraw from them rapidly and without deep consideration. Maybe it took parenthood for it to click – there’s nothing like taking care of an infant to beat the snot out of one’s formerly unshakable standards for How Life Should Be.

Just washing bodily fluids out of all the cloth things in the house again. Whatevs.

The point is, all the negative and painful feelings are bound to come up for as long as the United States of America is processing this infection. The pain is a neon sign that shows us where we need to pay attention. The pain is a call to arms for the white blood cells. It’s just a variation on the same pain as yesterday. It didn’t stop us yesterday, it can’t stop us today, and it won’t stop us tomorrow.

Reboots

My husband Tim and I are avid gamers. For at least the last ten years we have taken turns running one-on-one games for each other, and in that time we have built up quite a wealth of settings. Many of them are located in the same plane of reality, others stretch into different 'verses which may or may not be connected.

We went into a sort of gaming paralysis between November and February, in part because inventing perils paled as a pastime next to perceived precariousness in reality. What jogged us out of it was the idea of reboots.

We are each taking a beloved character in a well-developed world and rebooting the story. In the case of the tale I am GMing, I'm changing the interstellar settlement backstory of my first gaming world and seeing what that does to the fabric of the first story I ever told for Tim. In the case of the story he is running for me, he is retelling the story of one of my most high-powered characters (a full-blown telekinetic) with what seems to be a time travel styled twist.

In both of our stories, the reboot is built into the world. We're not actually taking back anything that happened before. The new version of my world exists in a spin-off 'verse, so it's not actually the exact same place, just a close resemblance. Tim's character, for in-world justified reasons, has the same name and the same soul as before. In Tim's world the reboot is part of the plot: some enemy of the interstellar Federation changed something (I don't know what exactly, we haven't gotten that far), and now the Federation has never met one of their craziest and most powerful allies in the nigh-perpetual war against demonkind. But some people in the world have a periodic gut feeling that "this is not the life I was supposed to live," or "it's not supposed to be this way." (I think Tim has currently won the prize for therapeutic gaming).

Anyone have experiences with rebooting old worlds and characters? Was it fun?

What's up with the cover art?

Sometime in the last calendar year I decided to take the list of 98 roleplaying characters I portrayed between 2002 and 2016 (feel free to re-read that until the implications regarding my mentality really sink in), and think about how I would describe the evolution of those characters over the course of the story that was told. In the course of this mental exercise I identified nine personality styles or archetypes (I use the word loosely) to describe the various phases of character development, which I see as naturally fitting into three groups:

Group 1: Defined by conflict

1. Mercenary - Fights (or steals, or whatever else) for personal enrichment
2. Warrior - Fights with and/or under the command of others; follows rules of engagement
3. Champion - Fights for a cause

Group 2: Defined by a relationship to harm

1. Survivor - Endures harm
2. Guardian - Prevents harm
3. Healer - Undoes harm

Group 3: Defined by how they see their "place" in the world

1. I Just Work Here - Accepts their place, tries to live a normal life
2. Explorer - Questions their place, inquisitive regarding the world around them
3. Leader - Defines their place, reshapes the world around them

The three tiers in each group are characterized by the level of influence the character has or tries to have on the events or worlds in which they find themselves. Tier one takes the world as it is; tier two thinks the world could be different; tier three thinks the world should be different.

You may notice that off on the left there's a lonely bubble labeled "Mercenary" that doesn't connect to anything else. I have tried on more than one occasion to play a character with a mercenary mindset. However, these characters never grow, develop, or change in any notable way, no matter how long the story runs. I believe that is because the mercenary mentality does not make sense to me, and I don't have an intuitive grasp of how a person evolves from - or to - that style of being. Or, maybe what I do understand of it frightens me, so I try to steer clear.