I love games. Board games, role playing games, improv games, anything. I’ll explain the complications in time. For now, understand that I like play. Don’t care if that makes you think of me as a child. I’ll still kick your butt in a game of ping-pong.
Ok, honestly, I won’t. My hand-eye coordination, my basic skills, my alcoholic insistence that I’m actually good, won’t make up for my arrogance. And as it turns out, doesn’t make me any better at table tennis or any other racket-based sport.
In fact, as it turns out, I’m great at losing. Maybe we should reclaim “loser.” It’s not necessary, but it would make me feel better. When I look around, I see other losers. By which I mean people who have lost stuff. Some times. Often times. Too often times. What’s lost is a component critical to the game. It’s usually a relationship.
Hmm.
In terms of games, I don’t mind losing, because my preference is learning and curiosity. God gave me this gift (not really, in my opinion, but it works here). I’ve only embraced it in the last few years, which includes the moments earlier in life when I did and didn’t recognize it. Usually, it gets called humility. Occasionally, fun. Rarely, what simply happens to all of us.
People play games with other people. When the rules are agreed on ahead of time, it results in fun and play and high fives and low bones and being cool with each other. When the rules aren’t agreed upon, you get violence against alliance. You get superficiality. You get codependence. You get what is decidedly not fun.
I’ve often felt it’s a sort of theatrical thing where I’m cast as the villain, but I wasn’t informed of the part I’d play in another person’s fantasy RPG. Certainly unhealthy, not at all life-giving, my instinct is to become that role. Once the game is afoot, I’ll be your Moriarty.
I’ll be your Reichenbach Falls.
I’ll be your terror that creeps in your dreams.
I’ll be your vampire.
I’ll be your need.
I’ll be your urban legend.
I’ll be your endless desire to blame someone else.
I’ll be your UFO abduction story.
I’ll be your zombie.
I’ll be your Black Mountain.
I’ll be your Thanos, your inevitable.
I’ll be your Joker.
I’ll be your hatred.
I’ll be everything inside of you you don’t confront.
I’ll be your Borg.
I’ll be your every thought that reminds you what you think of yourself.
I’ll be your Darth Vader.
I’ll be your cancer.
I’ll be your fear.
But I don’t want to. I’m only a mirror for expectation.
I don’t want to be made a player in a game of someone else’s devising which I didn’t know about until I’m in check. Pawn to B4.
The common game (and I’ve grown to notice it) is social and emotional and behavioral manipulation and control. Never saying what one is feeling directly. Making assumptions instead of questions. Plying someone else, because of one’s own insecurities, to do one’s dirty work.
I have news for you.
My proxy is mine.
You’ll deal with me directly.
One game I particularly hate is when I’m told that I’m intimidating. No, you feel intimidated by me because of your own bullshit. Or maybe because you see in me someone willing to learn to own their own darkness. The worst parts of us can turn into the better parts of us. These repetitions have made me more confident in myself. I was type cast as the intimidator for so long. I went method.
Another game that I do like, but am admittedly and objectively terrible at (I seem to lose nearly every time) is flirting. It’s a good example of a game among players that’s cooperative (or intended to be) rather than competitive (hopefully). The win condition is having fun and getting to know another person. It’s, as all things, not without its pitfalls. Differing styles and comfort, initiating with someone with less interest in you than you have in them, not initiating because you’re bad at it and want to play, and then you just…don’t play at all. Which is the one I’m especially prone to. I think often on the connections and relationships I might have missed due to not playing the flirting game.
Water under the bridge.
You can’t step in the same river twice.
Apropos of nothing, I’m also terrible at the classic video game Pitfall. In fairness, it’s a very hard game.
For anyone who knows board games, you’ll understand what I mean when I say that relationships (whatever flavor they may be) as games contain hidden information and an element of social deduction, and they’re meant to be cooperative. For anyone who knows the board game Pandemic, and has played enough, there often emerges a player who tells others what to do on their turns. They think they’re being cooperative. But they’re playing a solo game and nobody else is enjoying it.
For anyone not familiar with those categories, it means you don’t know everything and there’s always something to find out. It means setting yourself up to help rather than demand. It means the seemingly impossible and ongoing task of letting go, both of yourself and ego, and of those relationships with those who demand you jump into the volcano for them.
It’s mournful.
Anyway, I told you there were complications.
There’s no winning life.
And there shouldn’t be.
The games we play with each other that I like is tug of war, but we’re holding the same end of the rope and pulling against all our hurt and pain. Fortunately, being a mirror helps.
I’ll be your hopes.
I’ll be your Batman.
I’ll be your goodwill towards others.
I’ll be your lightness of being.
I’ll be your realization that you’re better than you thought you were.
I’ll be your spark.
I’ll be your stillness.
I’ll be your Gandalf.
I’ll be your silliness.
