In the Locker

Something funny happens when you get shoved into a locker.  The physical part of it isn’t so bad.  There is an odd sense of shock that reverberates around you as the metal crashes together.  It’s as if you only hear the aftershock of the door slamming closed – the event itself is simply too abrupt for your mind to process.  Then you’re left there in the dark, trying to peer out of the slats at the people outside, hearing them talk about you, or somehow even worse, not notice and simply continue on with their lives – connecting with each other in a way that you just can’t understand.  Every language becomes foreign when it echoes through the locker walls, and all you can do is try and figure out how you got there.

A few weeks ago, a close friend of mine, Adam, took his own life.  I’d been his GM for going on five years, and we’d known each other for seven.  We met through a vampire Larp that we both played in, and got to know each other well when his ex-wife started dragging him to karaoke regularly.  We were the kind of friends that would joke about someone with True Faith actually blessing the rains down in Africa to destroy vampires.  We’d argue about Vampire a lot – he loved to play weird concepts, and I’m always a stickler for the “normal”.  I got him high for the first time, and he sat in a corner and gave an impressive soliloquy about the merits of 4.0 vs. 3.5 and Pathfinder, because 4.0 helped him get past his analysis paralysis.  He was diagnosed with lupus a few years before I met him, and he struggled with chronic pain everyday.  Eventually that and other personality traits got the better of him, and one night while all of his friends were out at the Larp, he hanged himself.  But, this article isn’t about him.

I really don’t have the words to describe what happened after that.  In the Larp community we were part of, Adam was a Big Personality.  Everyone knew him.  Hell, if you plotted the game on one of those high school health class AIDS charts, we’d all slept with him. It was a god damned bomb going off in the middle of everyone, with every stupid television trope about death on full display.  Except this time it was for real.  People baked each other things, visited each other.  Memorials were had, official and unofficial.  People groped for language and didn’t find it.  Some people got angry, some people got sad.  Some people wondered why they didn’t seem to care as much as others.

I found myself in an odd position.  A friend laid out a good metaphor for a tragedy of this type.  It’s like a great bullseye is painted onto a community, and after it happens you really find out which little painted ring you were in with the situation.  I discovered that this time around, I was right near the middle.  Not the bullseye, but the ring right around that.  People kept saying to me, “I had no idea you were so close.”  Neither did I, until he was gone and I was sitting in the dark in my bathrobe two weeks later.

I’ve struggled with symptoms of depression my whole life, but not like this.  This was like being filled with sand.  I felt heavy, like I couldn’t move except with great effort, and there was the fear that once I did I would overbalance and everything would come spilling out.  I spent a great deal of time staring at my monitor and wondering what I should do, how I should go about picking up the pieces.  I tried to go back to work, and had to leave because I thought I would either start screaming or crying.  I was in a very dark place.  But, this article isn’t about me, either.

To my great surprise, a lot of people made a great deal of effort to take care of me.  People tried to keep me engaged and talking.  I was invited to places again and again.  People I hadn’t spoke to in months popped out of the woodwork and restored ties.  In the scope of life, I tend to be a community builder – I keep in touch, I initiate activities, I tend to control the ebb and flow of my relationships.  This is clearly not an “all the time” thing, I’m not friends with a bunch of huge jerks, I just tend to be a community oriented person who is good at sending the occasional text.  People reaching out to me was quite a shock, and it truly helped me out of a very difficult period.  In a few weeks the sand drained out of me all at once, and I was able to be (partially) normal again.

And that brings me to what this article is actually about – the community and normality.  What we experienced when Adam died was, to us, anything but ordinary.  It was the initial terror of a child’s skinned knee – the world will forever be broken.  The Larp community reacted to it with grace and kindness, coming together in unexpected ways to try and weave a social web tight enough that this will never happen again.  But in the grand scheme of the world, what we went through is as old and ordinary as humanity itself.  A community suffered a loss and came together to grieve.  I don’t feel like the ordinary nature of that detracts from what happened at all – not from the memory of Adam and not from what each member of the community has given.

In geek/nerd/gamer culture, we often tend to see ourselves as Other.  We don’t belong to the mainstream, we don’t fit in.  Sometimes we feel that makes us special, sometimes we feel that makes us freaks, but we always feel that it makes us different.  One of Adam’s pet peeves was being embarrassed to talk about nerdy things in public.  He didn’t feel that we had anything to be ashamed of, and he was right.  It was tough for me to write that I play in a Larp in this article, because even among people who read a site called Dorkadia larping is embarrassing.  Larpers are a sub-group within a sub- group, and that’s a little messed up.  The worst part is that we often enforce this same sort of thinking on ourselves.

There is an old, extremely loaded phrase that expresses this type of alienation well, but dont freak out when I use it.  Separate but equal.  I am of course not comparing being a nerd to the civil rights struggle.  But it IS useful to apply the thinking of race, gender, and sexual equality to ANY sub-culture that has established an identity.  And that thinking has taught us this:  there is no such thing as separation.  There are only people, being people.  And that is beautiful.

The way my community reacted to tragedy was exactly the same way all communities react, whether they are centered on books, sports, math, knitting, race, gender, sexuality, religion, or anything else.  Tragedy strips away the illusion of difference between people, and leaves us with very little to be embarrassed about, and I think that’s something that would make Adam happy.

So this article, like all of my others, is for you, anyone who would read a site called Dorkadia.  Don’t be embarrassed about what you love.  Be a basketball player that loves to knit.  Be a Gamemaster that tailgates at football games.  Be whatever you want, because we’re all just people, even if that sometimes gets us shoved into a locker.  Because a funny thing happens when you get shoved into a locker.  You discover that it’s bigger on the inside.  And inside is the whole world.