Reminiscing.

The big roleplaying convention that I like to go to in Canberra is hoping to run this year, and while I doubt I’ll be well enough for it, it’s had me thinking. Not in a ruminating way; more a reminiscing way.

My older brother got me into roleplaying when I was thirteen. Prior to that, I’d always been the kid who played pretend. My favourite games were pretending to be other people. Not necessarily exciting other people; just having conversations as them. One of the things a friend and I used to do was play Tekken Tournament and have conversations as the characters as we played. So when my brother took me to this convention and there were rules for playing pretend with other people and you could do it as an adult, I ate it up and never looked back.

I know a lot of women have bad experiences in TTRPG and I don’t want to discount or dismiss that. I know I’m incredibly lucky that my bad experiences were few and far between and, on the whole, pretty mild. They tended more towards organised play DMs trying to pressure me into signing up to organised play groups because “the rest of the team won’t get their XP for this session otherwise”. I had a few bad incidents based on being a girl, and one uncomfortable sexual incident in-game that I don’t think was motivated by me being female but was still not good (that DM had boundary issues, but I never felt threatened or sexualised by them; they just didn’t realise that not everyone was okay with what they were okay with in games) but things were relatively tame.

I’m sure a big part of that was that my roleplaying circle for the first, oh, fifteen years pf my experience was made up in large part of people who knew me as my brother’s kid sister. He was an active and popular part of the scene at the time, and I know a lot of his friends were protective of me. The circle of roleplayers that I moved in had a much lower than common rate of iffy players, going by what I’ve read of other experiences, and I’m very lucky in that. And, of course, now that I pick and choose the circles I move in, I try not to associate with people I don’t like or trust any more than I absolutely have to, so my roleplaying friends are basically decent people.

I owe my brother so much. We weren’t really close prior to his death – I don’t know how the rest of the family felt, but I had a hard time getting close to him, through no fault of his. I have a hard time getting close to anyone whose opinion I care about. But we got on all right, and I liked and respected him, and I was always thankful that he took me to that first convention, because it changed my life. It probably saved my life.

Fair warning: I am about to talk about sexual harassment and suicide.

When I was sixteen, my depression kicked in hard and I did not cope well with it. I didn’t talk to many people about it. I’d sometimes be awake in the middle of the night and hear my father in the kitchen and go talk to him for an hour or two – not about depression, just about stuff, but I think he knew, at least a bit, that I wasn’t okay. He tried to help, but it’s hard to help someone who doesn’t know what they need or how to explain what’s wrong.

When I was seventeen, after disastrous social life bullshit made me ask my parents if I could switch from my first high school to the closer Jesuit-run senior high school under the pretence that the train plus bus ride to the former was too tiring for me (true, but not the real reason) I found that nope, I was still fat and unpopular and struggling with my health, and then when I finally found a friend group that invited me to karaoke at the local RSL, the thirty-year-old guy who gave us rides home tried to stick his tongue down my throat and didn’t want to let me out of the car until I explained why I wasn’t okay with that. Nothing more than that happened because he was an idiot who didn’t actually lock the doors, but it was still bad enough that on top.of everything else I had going on, I didn’t handle it.

I have diabetes. I figured hey, at least nobody would know I’d taken too much insulin on purpose, especially since I’d been having so much trouble with my diabetes for pretty much my entire adolescence.

Half an hour after I took an entire pen of insulin the dog came into my room, and I remembered that I had a convention coming up where I’d promised to run a freeform, a sequel to the freeform I’d run the year before, and I didn’t want to upset my dog or disappoint people who’d said they were looking forward to playing my game again.

(If anyone remembers the game played at UNSW in the room with no lights? That was that game. There’s a reason there were so many fucked-up characters in that game.)

Luckily, you can fix insulin overdose easily enough. I was suck as hell for a few days and drank so much orange juice that I got nauseated, but I don’t think anyone knew anything had happened. I certainly never told anyone until much later.

For longer than I like to admit, “running a game in a few months” became my reason to not do something rash. I liked the sense that I was giving other people a fun experience. That’s remained true today, even with the depression treated much more effectively; I get more out of doing things for people than I do out of doing things myself or for myself. I like making people happy. It’s my love language. It was also my survival language for a long time, and roleplaying gave me an easy, safe, constructive outlet.

My friends these days are all people I met through roleplaying. I met the Collector through those early conventions, and I met the Engineer through her. My closest friends are people I met running games in Sydney. I have a small but wonderful circle of wonderful, supportive people whose presence and personalities mean I am always baffled by Internet stories that have me going “get better friends!” and I owe it, at the core, to my brother taking me to that first Necronomicon back in 1998.

He used to post little snippets of conversation with Horus. I’m not sure if they were dreams or ways of getting his thoughts out or just imaginings, but I always liked them. Horns seemed like a friendly housemate. After he died, the Collector bought me a little Horus statue to keep at my computer, and it’s comforting.

I want to get a tattoo. Both my brother and my father had tattoos – Dad because he was in the Navy, my brother because… honestly, I don’t know if he had reasons beyond he just wanted to. You don’t need a reason beyond that. But I want to get one. I want to get a little line art design of two fogures waiting at a bus stop. One is Horus; the other is a fat mermaid, because my favourite of Dad’s tattoos was his mermaid. And they’re waiting at the bus stop because that’s my recurrent dream since Dad and my brother both passed. I’ll be waiting at a bus stop with one orboth or neither of them, and a bus is coming. We don’t know if it’s my bus or not, but if it is, they’ll be there with me.

Maybe that’s depressing. I don’t know. I don’t think it is. Dad was always there for me, as much as he could be and as much as I let him. My brother shaped so much of who I became. And as trite as it sounds, they were both wonderful male role models. I’ve never had time for toxic masculinity because right from the start I had examples of men being creative, emotional, supportive, involved in the home and in so-called feminine pursuits – Dad did a lot of the cooking at home and taught me how to sew – so anyone trying to be all “men don’t do this or that” had to go against my experience of my father or brother doing just that.

(Not to say that my mother and sisters and twin brother didn’t have strong and positive impacts as well, mind you! But I’ve been thinking about roleplaying which led to thinking about J which led to thinking about Dad, since they’ve both passed.)

So yeah. Some heavy thoughts there, but mostly good ones. And I want to get a tattoo.