Blinking Out

I have a phone game. It’s a run-of-the-mill run a farm type of game. Your character is an elderly person living with regret, they want a chance to return to the simple life. In the game, a magical butterfly-winged fairy appears to turn back the hands of time and allow for you to make changes to the choices you’ve made. She returns you to your grandfather’s land, where you must now cultivate produce, livestock, and more from a derelict farm.

Though I am not really a renewed young woman seeking to reattach her roots, I find the action of helping this video game character cathartic. She wakes up every day at 6am on the dot. A milk fairy leaves her a bottle of milk on her porch every morning. My character, a black woman with a smart brown jacket and a matching cap, goes through the routine of planting and picking crops, then shipping them by truck, ship, and eventually by air travel. As she makes these shipments, more options to better her farm appear. I make my own juice, temper my own metal, create cloth, honey, and tea on-site.

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Outside of the game, I struggle with meeting deadlines and procrastinating. Something happens to me where I begin to fear the ending of a project, it’s irrational but it comes anyway. That paper I was twenty sentences from finishing? Cast to the wayside! That DIY book on brooch-making out the window! The fear is so palpable I don’t even listen to phone messages. A crippling fear of the unknown and what it holds grips me. When the mailbox is full, that’s when I finally feel enough pressure to listen, each clicked message a mini panic attack.

This performance anxiety has gripped me since I was a child. For seven years I was an only child and afterward, the oldest of five children. When I was younger, it was determined that I was gifted. I was expected to perform at a certain level all the time. There was no room for error and anything lower than a B was not acceptable. I’d always been the one to play by the rules. I did what I was told, performed as necessary and did little thinking outside of academic pleasures. I kept my head down, didn’t do parties and read enough books to fill several libraries. It seemed that through my academic years my only real value to others was knowledge. I wasn’t one of the pretty ones, wasn’t particularly brave. Being somewhat athletic, intelligent and behaving in an easy-going(aka passive-aggressive) manner was what I was known for. As an adult, I know this crippled my ability to perform later on. When I failed at being smart in school, when I failed to appear cool in front of friends, when I failed to please my parents I felt something akin to fear, like I would slide into nothingness.

I would isolate. I still do.

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In the farm game, time leaps forward ten minutes every minute. One has to choose several manageable goals and go after them. Being decisive leads to profit, happy animals, and glowing neighbors. Some days, I designate to harvesting trees, collecting wood for rebuilding facilities on the property. Other days I designate wholly to mining and refining ore. The fairy’s milk replenishes energy as I use the pickax to make trackable progress through the mine. I even give my character needed self-care days. She goes fishing on Saturdays, then cooks a couple of meals for the week ahead.

Goals in the game are at your pace. You can take as many days as you need to solve a problem. Relationships can be managed over any length of time, no friend is upset that you don’t have the mental capacity to talk with them at the moment. People wait on you in the game, the seasons change but the people are always patient. When major events come up for the town, there’s no pressure to attend and the event is held all day so if you change your mind about going, there’s plenty of time.

Being disabled I think about what it would be like if the world actually waited up for me, if I could actually move at my own pace. My disease reacts to levels of stress, the more harried my environment, the more my condition physically manifests. Weight loss, insomnia, body pain, headaches, chills and fevers they’ve all happened when stressed out over work or school. I would do well at first but the more pressure to complete my deadlines or stay later hours at work, the harder it became to show up for tasks. I’ve dropped out of three colleges this way, lost scholarships because I was physically incapable of keeping up.

Losing these opportunities crushed me, made me feel inferior. I knew with my intelligence level what I was being asked to do was doable. I knew given enough time, I could perform at the level everyone was asking. On top of everything else, I’m a perfectionist. In the farm game, my need to have everything in its proper place is not a hindrance. In the real world, there is no perfect, everything is messy. Teachers forget I’m disabled or pretend they don’t understand my capabilities. People at work think I can “manage well enough" as is or they simply don't have the means to accommodate me. Though the work I’ve completed thus far is exceptional, it is nowhere near complete, so a failure they tell me and no amount of doctor notes can add more time to a semester.

My phone game accepts my pacing, accepts my anxieties, and appreciates my attention to detail. My phone farm lets me and my character rest as needed. I can save my progress at any time. If I don’t like what I’ve done, I can end the program and pick up from a time where everything made sense. My farm lets me express myself without getting hurt. It lets me give freely. When I make these comparisons between the compassion shown me virtually and the lack of empathy in the real world, it hurts. It shows me that there are people out there who want this kind of love from the real world. There are people out there who would manufacture a safe world for people like myself, they just aren’t able.

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When I get sick, I want to be able to push pause for just a moment. I want empathy and not inconvenienced looks from the world around me. Anxiety is inherent in so many people like myself living with disabilities. For now the real world is the world we live in and people with disabilities have had to learn to squeeze themselves into it. Having to force myself both mentally and physically into a one-size-fits-all box, makes me want to blink out. I hoard whatever cash I have, buy only sensible food, clean everything around me and hunker down away from the world. Anything I can’t control I push to the wayside. It’s my version of a real-life pause button. Right now, with the coronavirus present, the world is pressing pause. We see nature recover, artists having time to work, even musicians putting out free music. It shouldn’t take a pandemic for us to understand how necessary it is for us to give people time. Our society needs to learn to treat people with empathy, to understand that we created clocks to make time, not steal it. What this life-altering event has shown me is that we can afford to press pause, that by moving at our own pace we are more comfortable and produce better work.

(Musicians Yoko Kanno and the Seatbelts during quarantine, click just above to play video.)(Kanno & The Seatbelts, 2020)

Even with social distancing, people are finding new ways to care about others. Suddenly we make time for elderly shopping, suddenly immunocompromised people come first, suddenly life-saving services are offered at cost or free. In my phone game, my character is surrounded by a caring community. Some NPCs (non-playable characters) like my character more than others but we all take care of one another. The NPCs check on my character, offering words of encouragement or tools to make the farm-work easier. They say ‘ I hope this helps' and ‘I had a little extra and thought you might like this’, and so I find myself giving gifts in return.

This should be how humanity really treats each other. Artificial intelligence is capable of community thinking, so are the designers of the game. This game isn’t the only tool that shows compassion and sharing, it’s hammered into us as children. At what point is it no longer cool to be kind? At what point does sharing and taking time away become negligent behavior? We need to get back to that place. We need to return to kindness. Humanity needs to be more than just a game on a phone. Humanity needs the chance to be more humane.

Reference

Kanno, Y. (Director). (2020, April 24). TANK! Virtual Session 2020 [Video file]. Retrieved November 22, 2020, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2VsgkIE-RHg&feature=youtu.be