oh deer
A week and a half ago I went out with an acquaintance to see her friend Daniel. At one point he was upset about something—I can't remember what specifically—and I finally said to him, "You'd be amazed how many rules people make for themselves arbitrarily, and then proceed to break." He stared at me, obviously unable to digest the idea. I smirked at him because, yeah, I know: Then why make the rule in the first place? I get it, Daniel.
I think a lot about my Alan Wake 2 thermos. It's one of the most precious physical objects I own. It's also the only piece of "swag" I've ever taken or accepted for a game I was covering.
I couldn't believe they were giving thermoses away at a press event; I'd been obsessing over them. I wanted a thermos so bad. I watched other attendees walking up to casually grab thermoses from a long table.
In Alan Wake 2, these thermoses represent a save point, a safe haven. In real life the thermoses are made by a Finnish lightbulb manufacturer. They are beautiful, made of glass, with a metal exterior and a coat of enamel, and a bright white plastic cap. They are shaped like bullets.
I'd stood there for several stupid minutes, awkwardly staring at the swag table, while other journalists, reviewers, YouTubers, and influencers walked off with thermoses without a care in the world. I imagined myself stepping out into the cool night air, without a thermos, to wait for an Uber—pious and duty-bound, my heart heavy but my conscience weightless—and I knew I'd never stop resenting myself over it, at least until I'd searched for Finnish thermoses on eBay. Then I contemplated how much a round-trip Uber across Los Angeles costs.
I bitterly thought to myself "where has my scrupulous avoidance of videogame swag ever gotten me" and "who would it hurt" and "I've been out of the industry for 7 years; everything is probably so much more lax, now that Twitch streamers are the thing." Finally I thought to myself, "Jenn, who cares."
Above all, if I didn't take a thermos, who would it help? It would've been a totally meaningless gesture, a weird, invisible performance of virtue for my benefit and self-aggrandizement alone: an underwater fart. This idea caused me more pain than either taking or not taking a free $30 thermos.
Maybe I could make the decision later. Maybe I could take the thermos now and just give it away later.
So I grabbed a thermos and, ashamed, tried to bury it deep in my tote bag, but the box stuck most of the way out anyway—making it clear, if anyone were watching, that I'd finally failed a desultory purity test. But no one was watching, because no one cared.
The hardest thing, probably, is detaching oneself from wanting the appearance of righteousness. (Which offers no safety, anyway: if someone cares enough to find fault with your behavior, they will do it, and they will do so compellingly.)
If I had succeeded, by the age of 31, at emotionally detaching from the appearance of righteousness, maybe GamerGate would have hurt me less. It felt like an attack on my integrity, the one thing I'd always valued most in myself. But perhaps I lacked innermost certainty of it? Perhaps it shouldn't've rattled my foundation the way it had—or at least, I might've had the boundaried self-concept to go "oh well" and "it's really not about me, is it" and to press forward anyway.
This is an oversimplification; I was scared shitless of being perceived at all, which was kind of the point of the whole exercise, wasn't it? Instead of realizing wow, striving to be beyond others' reproach is an empty, fruitless endeavor, I retreated from view and... kept right on striving for moral perfection. This behavior is, to say the least, extremely hard to be around.
I grew up steeped in evangelical Christian purity culture, which resulted in a lot of shame, in scrupulosity OCD, in habitual self-flagellation, but also no small degree of unearned self-righteousness—sanctimoniousness—because I spent a long time churching harder and more faithfully and more devotedly than all these fakes around me. And still never good enough, or else why would I be burdened by ugly human feelings like envy and bitterness, resentment and wanting? Church harder! Church it out of you!
My adoptive mother used to repeat "Is it a want or a need?" to me as a kid, me as a teen, me as an adult, about goddamn everything. "And if one were to internalize such a statement," I recently suggested to my therapist, "one might feel obligated to limit themselves to the barest minimum needed to survive."
"Or even," my therapist said slowly, "feel shame about ever wanting anything."
To enter your 40s and still have absolutely no clue what you want from life is... well, tragic, on an individual and interpersonal level. It's like, "great, you did it, you survived; now what?" Oops! I guess I'd never planned that far.
I really thought I knew myself—certainly better than most know themselves, not that it's a competition or anything—but it's starting to feel like maybe my self-concept is a phantasmagoria, a magic lantern projecting an image onto a wall. (Presumably for an audience!) So who is holding the lantern? Who did these grotesque paper cuttings? Who is standing, backlit, outside of Plato's cave?
My adoptive dad used to tell a joke: "What's the white part around birdshit? That's shit, too." He told it hundreds of times, always giggling too hard to say the punchline without coughing, and I laughed every time. Who is Alan Wake's evil twin? That's Alan Wake, too. When we accuse, slander, and torture ourselves, we are doing the Devil's handiwork for him.
My best friend of 35 years recently characterized me, in a text message, as "good to the bone." Am I? "Good to the bone"? I don't think I've ever really believed that, and I doubt it's true, because I am not a flat paper doll. In December my husband said to me, "Know how I know you're resilient? You've never broken bad." Hadn't I? I have this thermos. It was free, but it feels stolen. I love this thermos.
So I've decided to be unrepentant. The exception to the rule proves, not only the sanctity of the rule, but especially the preciousness of the thermos. Look! Look how significant and important it is! Look how much it means to me! And it's beautiful, and it keeps my coffee hot. I will never take that for granted.