2x06. how to love something that hurts you (summer finals)

two if by c.
Sep 8, 2018 · 9 min read

01.

Actually, I don’t know. No one ever knows. How many times have you fallen for something that eventually starts to hurt? What a tragedy, that we may be doomed to repeat this over and over again. Isn’t love so miraculous, that it can cover a multitude of sins, when you are learning everything that is new? We are always fighting our last battle. So this time I fell in love with something smaller, more intimate, more scrappy, that swept me up in wins and losses and made me feel like each victory mattered, that I mattered.

from LoL Esports Flickr

And yeah, I knew what I was getting into. I know that no love is an island, that the world shapes even our oases, that we cannot carve out pieces of our lives and hope to hide away from the ugliness and unfairness of the rest of the world in those pieces. I take responsibility; I knew, and fell for it anyway. It is on me, that I fall for the same kind of teams over and over again, the ones that are inconsistent, that seem to promise greatness and weakness in the same breath.

Does that sound familiar?

Maybe no love ever doesn’t hurt.

from Riot Games’ “Diversity and Inclusion” page

02.

At first, don’t recognize it. Assume that it is in the background, in the water, in the air you breathe, because it always is. There is a metaphor here that you are ignoring. How hot must the water get and how poisonous must the air be before you acknowledge that it is hurting you? Sometimes survival is a game of inches. Slice open the soft pad of your pinkie one morning against the edge of a piece of paper, and fail to see the irony.

Drink lots of red wine. Rant in private. Make veiled references, but don’t say anything explicit out loud. Admire friends with what seems to be inexhaustible patience and fury say what you can’t in public. Read Jenny Holzer, a lot of Jenny Holzer. “SAVOR KINDNESS BECAUSE CRUELTY IS ALWAYS POSSIBLE LATER. IT’S HARD TO KNOW IF YOU’RE CRAZY IF YOU FEEL YOU’RE IN DANGER ALL THE TIME NOW. MEN DON’T PROTECT YOU ANYMORE.” She cannot help you, but she has been here before.

from LoL Esports Flickr

Threaten to leave. You can always leave. Nothing is holding you here. To love is not your job — survival is. It is a luxury to be so invested. If the right hand offends, cut it off. If it hurts to love, stop.

Let that knife hover in the air for a week, two weeks, a month. In the end, never bring it down.

Then wake up one morning and realize you can no longer keep ignoring it. It is like waking up with sudden neck pain, or a muscle cramp that makes you bolt up, sweating and in pain, in the middle of the night. Grab your body, mute with anger and betrayal. Hold it in place, as if that would isolate the pain and keep it from spreading.

from “Inside The Culture Of Sexism At Riot Games,” by Cecilia D’Anastasio

03.

Pain is a warning that’s something wrong.

Pain is a warning that we can always be wrong.

from “Sexism,” by Katie deSousa

04.

What I am reminded of at this moment was the first time I really discovered poetry, when I heard this reading of Allen Ginsberg’s “America” set to Tom Waits. For days afterwards I found myself repeating its opening line, “America, I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing.” Like the chorus of a song, “America, I feel sentimental about the Wobblies” (what, I wondered, were the Wobblies?). What year was it? How old was I? Before I learned about and learned to roll my eyes at Allen Ginsberg, before I knew anything real about poetry, I thought of that line, “After all, it is you and I who are perfect, not the next world.”

from LoL Esports Flickr

There is no next world. There is no “perfect.” Love is not a series of forges that burns away impurity until you are left at the end with a pure and uncomplicated object, a thing that will never hurt you. It is more a series of forest fires, waiting each time to burn us down to the ground.

“Perhaps,” as Ada Limon wrote in “The Leash,” “we are always hurtling our body towards the thing that will obliterate us, begging for love.”

05.

I am talking about esports, of course. I am talking about Riot Games. I am talking about how difficult it is as a woman to live without pain in this world. Sometimes it feels as if my body has betrayed me — would this hurt me less, if I were a man? Most days it feels like my heart betrayed me — why do I fasten my heart on every falling thing?

But this is my life — I have chosen to make esports a part of it. This is my body — I do not have another (male) one. This is my heart — I cannot change how much I love the friends I have met, the players whose stories I’ve learned, the producers and editors and writers and other fans and makeup artists and casters and analysts who have brought me so much joy. This is the world I live in — there is no next one. My options are clear: I learn to bear it or I leave it behind.

06.

Sometimes, wake up at 3AM to experience joy that you did not think was possible.

Photo by Inven Juneau

Draw up a list in your mind of the things that have made you happy. How quickly Smeb and Ucal reached for Score when he starts to cry, apologizing to his past KT teammates who departed the organization, winless. Every time you see Doublelift and Olleh celebrate a win, knowing how hard their partnering has been. Kicking and screaming across the surface of a hotel room in Hong Kong as you watched Misfits take SKT to five games at worlds. How hard you worked to get a fan message through to Madlife, the entire time he was here in NACS, and how kind his Korean fans were to you when you gave up trying to get an answer from Gold Coin United. Sitting next to Emily Rand, who tucked her feet under her in the Battle Theater seat, talking about anime. Your friend who told you that she believed your writing about GoldenGlue was the reason Cloud9 won.

Score finally won a title after playing seven years of professional League of Legends in Korea. I’m sure he didn’t suffer for all seven of those years, but the last few years must have been harrowing, especially when they rebuilt KT in 2017 around him and still failed to win a title or go to worlds. Could he have made it to today if he did not come from a place of suffering?

Do suffering and love come from the same places in our hearts?

from “My Breakup with Riot Games”, by Zoe Curnoe

07.

At some point I must come to terms with the fact that I associate living with the act of bearing pain, and that is both idiosyncratic and a product of how I have lived.

Capture from KSV vs ROX, Spring Week 9 Day 4

I am an immigrant — my parents taught me that no one would give me anything and anything I earned would only be a fraction of what I could have achieved if I were a natural-born citizen. I would not have the connections. I would never know what it’s like to have community roots going back generations, of feeling truly at home in my country. If I wanted to succeed, I needed to suffer.

I am Chinese — my elementary school experiences taught me that I would always be viewed as the other. I would always lack the appropriate cultural references. I would never look, by default, “American.” People will always ask me where I come from, and laugh when I answer truthfully: “Indiana.” If I wanted to fit in, I needed to suffer.

I am a woman — the world taught me that no one would take me seriously. I will always be a liability. I might get pregnant. I might get emotional. I might cry. If I wanted to be taken seriously, I needed to suffer.

When you are a woman, when you are a non-white woman, when you are a non-white woman whose parents came here with little more than a visa and the clothes off their back, your grind never stops. You grind just to stay afloat.

In this way, we are so strong, aren’t we? We can bear so much pain and never break.

from “Six Months at Riot Games,” by Meagan Marie

08.

There are four noble truths in Buddhism. The first is that all life is suffering. The second is that the source of this suffering is desire. The third is that when we learn to stop desiring, we sever our attachment to this world. The fourth truth is that we can reach the “End of Suffering,” and this is the path to enlightenment.

But I think, I am not ready to practice the End of Suffering. I am not ready to stop caring. I am not ready to sever my attachment to esports and its community and League of Legends. If that is enlightenment, I reject it.

from “The Story of Why I Left Riot Games,” by Barry Hawkins

09.

from LoL Esports website

I must remind myself that I love many imperfect things, that this has been a year of teaching me that the things I love contain multitudes, can tear me up and build me up with the same casual motions. The country that gave my parents the opportunity to get advanced degrees, years of comfortable middle-class life, and a path to citizenship is the same country now that is threatening to revoke birthright citizenship and detaining citizens at the border just because they look foreign. The community that has been endlessly patient with me as I bumble through learning about League is the same community that refuses to recognize that we all come from different places, with different disadvantages, that some of us because of those disadvantages need our help and empathy.

That’s because these entities are made up of hundreds of individual people. Some of them want to hurt me. Many of them don’t. And I don’t want to hurt them either.

I am a part of my country. I am a part of the esports community. And I am a part of this thing I love.

10.

How to love something that hurts you: with your whole heart forward, knowing that it will break.

How to love something that hurts you: with your heart soft and open, because that is the only way you can let others with broken hearts in.

How to love something that hurts you: never forgetting your own suffering, but never letting it make you hard or cruel.

How to love something that hurts you: there is only one way. You have to out-live it. You have to take it over. You have to become the person who makes the thing that someone else falls in love with. And you have to love enough so that the thing you make won’t hurt anyone.

from “It’s Dangerous to Go Alone”, by Kirsten Fuller

two if by c.

Written by

cathy. bronze tier blogger. you win some, you lose some more, and sometimes you write some entries for your feelings diary while it happens. (lcs, lck, and owl)

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