on escapism and various other drugs

through a haze of bisexual lighting and cannabis oil vapor, a warm body stares over its blanketed legs at a grey-haired hunk on television, and that warm body is me. the hunk, of course, is Geralt of Rivia, the Butcher of Blaviken or the White Wolf or the guy i’m still not sure if i want to be or fuck. yes, gender euphoria does look a lot like undergoing mutations that make me sterile and emotionless and able to swing a really cool sword around any time a drowner jumps out at me while wandering the marshes of Velen. 

in the dark, i get closer to myself when i lose my body for a bit. a puff on the vape is enough to forget i am a broke and tired mid-twenties grad student who still very much passes as a woman—until the fridge is empty and i have to leave the house, that is. but we’re not outside. we’re in the cocoon of stoner music and purple light bulbs that shrouds my girl-body for the time being. there is no such thing as being perceived when i am the only one in the room and i’ve let go of the idea of perceiving myself. there are no breasts that are too big, no voice too feminine. there is only the game and the light and the hash browns i am about to fry on my studio apartment’s dollhouse stove.

i wasn’t this conscious before, before i broke out of the fog of my past. we’re not there, either, but if i’m not careful, i start thinking about it. there is always something in the pit of my stomach that reminds me how easy it was to burn out the first time around, and it surfaces easily. i panic. but we’re not panicking right now. we’re cooking hash browns. as i reach for the himalayan pink salt grinder that i bought to feel fancy, i notice it’s half empty. wow, i have evolved since last year—i actually use seasoning when i cook now. isn’t that crazy? i still won’t eat enough for dinner not to succumb to my snack cravings later, but there’s something so satisfying about lifting a patch of hash browns with my spatula and turning them over to find them perfectly golden brown.

dinner is always breakfast and dessert is always Gelato or Cherry Pie, the only two strains that satisfy my sweet tooth and dull my carpal tunnel pain. on paper, you could call me a stoner, and i’d bear that title with some weird level of pride. but i only started smoking because i have anxiety that rises higher than i could ever get with weed. it was just the anxiety for a while, until it was pain—the physical kind. i’m used to the emotional kind, but not long after i was discharged from intensive outpatient last summer, the ache started. by labor day, the tension held every single part of my body, no matter how much heat or ice i tried to sate it with. it was only this spring with the help of medication that the throbbing in my back and knuckles decided to give it a rest.

i worry, you know, about how much the past defines who i am today. i worry my body will always be too full of trauma to hold anything else. i worry my gender has become “traumatized” without me even realizing it. but who would want to be a man or a woman after linking so much violence to the idea of both? i’ve been beaten into womanhood by men. where does that leave a person who doesn’t find home in their body anymore? genderless, apparently. but we’re not talking about trauma right now. we’re talking about hash browns.

after dinner, and after ten minutes wandering stoned around Novigrad and i am no longer a warm body; i’m a witcher. and some days, i think my gender truly is “witcher.” there are days i am not as decisive as this—sometimes my gender is only as specific as “void” or “fog.” i simply want to be shapeless and boundless. but in the A24 movie set lighting, where the sum of all four of my skincare products glows fuschia off my face and the room is drenched in the ultraviolet and peach of the expensive candle i put on layaway.

it wasn’t until my head cleared last spring that i realized i am escaping when i do all of this. i am escaping when i growl along to the opening cutscene on the Redanian battlefield, i am escaping when i meander around Skellige and Toussaint on my tv screen, and i am escaping when i watch the arm of a bandit shoot skyward because i’ve sliced it off with my sword. there are probably people who don’t understand me for this, but they also don’t have to live in this body that’s been run so ragged, it doesn’t know which direction it’s going anymore.

can you write memoir about something you can’t really remember in all its detail? i can’t trace every single intricacy of the days that still live in my neck and between my shoulder blades, radiating outward to my numb extremities. i don’t know what i was wearing when i found out that my whatever-he-was hooked up with a beloved local athlete’s daughter at a music festival i didn’t even know was happening that weekend. i don’t know what was said when he told me, or how i reacted. i know that i was used to the way my brain shut off when he spoke for the sole purpose of hurting me, and that this time wasn’t an exception. i know it wasn’t the first time i went back to therapy because of a cishet man, nor would it be the last.

you can count on a psychotherapy office to have the exact same type of fluorescent lighting as a hospital. this isn’t exactly the type of space where you find yourself wanting to be vulnerable, and i insist on mood lighting in my own spaces for this reason. i get any kind of pensive and overhead lights become the light powering a viewmaster of my hour with the trauma specialist at the psych ward. this is all to say that i run with my tangents, far as they go, because i taught myself escape as a coping mechanism at first. you can’t be in the room talking about a football player’s daughter with your therapist if you can dissociate and be literally anywhere else.

but we’re not talking about dissociation. we’re paused on the Witcher map screen because i started thinking too hard about something that still makes me so inexplicably sad, and now i forget where i was going. that probably means it’s time to return to my most reliable way of playing—a quest on foot to explore points of interest. yes, this is how i pad my pockets with crowns to pay for the set of mastercrafted armor i plan to forge, but it’s probably also a way of reckoning with the way it feels to go outside these days.

there’s a certain safety to roaming the countryside with sword and magical shield that too many years of running drunk around Mt. Vernon took away from me. all of this reflecting i’ve done with paid specialists has made me realize maybe i don’t feel as secure on my own as i did when i was nineteen and naïve and thought all men were safe places. there was some kind of cosmic shift that made the idea of posting up at the Mt. Vernon Stable and Saloon blackout drunk after midnight so uniquely terrifying to me. maybe that’s why i play the game on easy sometimes; i say it’s for the story, but is it not also to feel some semblance of power and control over anything?

and what about well before this series of epiphanies, when i first picked up Geralt’s adventure during my last winter break of undergrad? even then, i could have gotten drunk off the feeling of a good dismembering alone. i could do without the violence, always, but nothing got me higher than the feeling of fighting off a bridgeful of Temple Guards and finally finishing off the last one, triumphant. i might never soothe the part of me that is angry at masculinity for forcing me into femininity, but i can at least wipe out a village overrun by bandits and return it to its rightful populace.

the trauma specialist basically told me that my brain had gotten stuck in freeze, and in freeze, it often feels like there is nothing but time to think. that’s probably why i am a chronic overthinker; i spent a good chunk of my life in freeze, and i had a lot of time in there. i know i wasn’t the bona fide devil my partners painted me to be, but that doesn’t mean my brain never got me into trouble when it panicked first and asked questions later. i become obsessed when i get too close to anything. it’s a problem. 

there’s a reason that now, i am more comfortable when i can take down my walls in increments. i’ve come to find that closeness hurts, so i choose distance. distance, from body or brain or person or simply between two points on a digital map, actually works to quell my particular brand of obsession. i have a better relationship with my thoughts when they can marinate in solitude.

this is all to say that while i prefer my walls to stay pretty high with your average person, especially romantically, the concept of baring myself to strangers in my art is somehow incredibly cathartic. it’s about relaying experience, i think; when i see myself in every line on someone else’s page, it’s easier to feel like there is some solidarity in the solitude that is surviving violence. it gets easier to live with the wear and tear to your body and brain when you remember you are perhaps unfortunately far from the only one with this problem, but at least someone is hearing you shout.

the point? in the absolute best way possible, i was unprepared to fall in love with someone who knew me from the perspective of all that i bared on a page. it’s not often you can hand someone a guidebook to your trauma, let alone that they’ve already read it and understood. that much empathy and warmth was so deeply unfamiliar at the time, and vulnerability still scared the shit out of me—it was usually about the time i’d brick myself off, but something was different. and when you learn healthy love after ten years of drinking whatever is put in front of you, it’s hard not to wonder. it’s not so much about why it hasn’t always been this easy as it is about the proportion of it all; how did i have to do all of that to come here? did i have to?

i kept wondering what else i’d never had time to stop and ask myself. it’s how i arrived at the precise axis of indecision where i find myself right now: agender, bisexual. i experience gender as a void (usually), and i make up for it with the greediest sexuality, apparently. but it turns out, radically accepting yourself after a decade of the opposite is a shock to the system. you freeze. you mourn the life you might have had if you’d realized these things sooner, but you still can’t go backwards. i didn’t want to spend so much time steeped in my in grief, but what could i have possibly expected with the amount of it i had stockpiled for myself?

it came out like this, lying in my living room with pink lights and an edible under my tongue. my messages with him bubbled with the kind of love you’re eager and afraid to talk about with each other. i have spent so long in search of this impossibly elusive thing that is right in front of me now, if for no other reason than to know it was possible. not to love, but to be cared for in return and to let it happen, and now i’ve welcomed an honored guest to the table in my fortress. and honestly? this is a litmus test of personal evolution far more significant than a half-empty himalayan pink salt grinder.

i never thought it would be so hard to have sex after everything. i guess i also never realized how infrequently i’d been having sex for myself. that’s probably why, when i realized i actually wanted to, my brain went into lockdown mode: i only knew sex as a form of self-harm. i only understood desire as a means to make someone else happy. i didn’t know how to do any of it for myself, only others. i kept a mask on every single time i took my clothes off for someone else; it was the only way i could stay safe.

i like to think that maybe this is why i finally decided to evolve. something finally mattered enough to me that i realized i could never go back to the guarded hot mess i used to be. but also, i know that a full pot of water can only boil for so long before it bubbles across the stovetop. at a certain point, i was bound to confront these terrifying landscapes within myself that i’d buried under other, perhaps more terrifying experiences, not to mention it’s only recently i’ve learned to be gentle to myself about it all. but we’re not talking about trauma anymore. we’re playing witcher.