Satisfaction
The summer before high school, my family went to China. We got all the vaccinations in time before our trip, and excitedly left the United States for a month.
The week before freshman year of high school, I found out I had come into contact with tuberculosis[1] — not that I had active, live, destroying-my-body tuberculosis, but that I had interacted with someone who did and would always have a slightly higher chance[2] of contracting regular old active, live, destroying-my-body tuberculosis later in life. My dad had it too, but the rest of my family didn’t.
I don’t know if it was in China that I came into contact with TB or if it was at the Daddy-Daughter-event at my high school earlier that spring at the end of eighth grade. I say this because a girl in my eighth grade class, Annika, had to drop out early freshman year because she had — you guessed it — a variation of active, live, destroying-her-body tuberculosis. Good ol’ fashioned Pott’s disease.
It doesn’t really matter where I came into contact with it — TB and I ran into each other somewhere along the way, and I was forever tied to it. Still am forever tied to it — never going to not test positive for it.
Because I was under the age of thirty-five when I came into contact with it, the doctors made me take intense anti-tuberculosis medication. My dad did not have to take medication. This preventative drug used for patients with “latent tuberculosis” — people like me, who don’t have an active form of the disease — is called Isoniazid. I was supposed to take this medication daily for nine months. Rarely, the doctors warned, Isoniazid can cause various mental disorders — depression, anxiety, suicidal thought, anorexia, etc. Rarely, they said, so rare that it isn’t even on our radar.
Within a few weeks of taking Isoniazid, I started showing those “rare, never-gonna-happen” side effects. But because the doctors talked about them like they weren’t even a possibility, we didn’t consider the possibility that I could be experiencing those severe, and rare side effects. It was just the difficulty of entering high school, combined with my best friend switching schools, my boyfriend breaking up with me, getting bullied, and the wonders of puberty.
It wasn’t just those things.
Thankfully, my mom recognized that something more was wrong. She started taking me to therapy outside of school after I came home despondent because the school guidance counselor told me that it was “All your fault and it’s completely understandable to want to kill yourself.”
The funny thing about getting help is that along with most of freshman year of high school, I can’t remember it. I blacked it all out, I guess.
The one thing I do remember is my mom handing me a bright pink journal, with a beautiful cursive sprawl standing out against the elaborate flowers decorating the cover, proclaiming, “Be Happy!” My mom, the strongest, kindest, most bad-ass person I know, looking at me and saying, “Happiness is a choice. It takes a lot of work to get there, but if you make sure every day to write down the things that give you joy — even if it’s just that there was a blue sky today or that you ate a microwave dinner that wasn’t as bad as you expected it to be — then you’ll find your happiness.”
And Mom, I don’t know if you’re ever going to read this, but nothing has ever stuck with me more.
Some days are definitely harder than others to find the joy in living. Sometimes it takes a phone call with you, where you sigh exasperatedly when I start to cry.[3] Sometimes it’s a phone call with Dad or Alice, sometimes it’s a phone call with Ben.[4]
Sometimes its hiding from reality, burying my nose in a book or gluing my eyes to the screen.
Sometimes it’s watching endless hours of cooking videos, sharing those videos to Facebook, meticulously copying down the recipes, and then trying exactly three of those seventy-two billion recipes.
I’ve always wanted to live in a fairytale and go on an adventure. Perhaps it’s because I grew up reading books and playing video games, or perhaps that’s why I decided to read books and play video games in the first place. Either way, I wanted to find a world to escape in and, sometimes, most of the time, I can combine those imaginary worlds with this one in my dreams.
It started when I was very small, and my dad and Mom took turns reading chapters from Diana Wynne Jones’ Howl’s Moving Castle. More than anything, I wanted to live in a world filled with magic and mystery and romance and adventure. Ingary was the perfect place for me to grow up. The Witch of the Waste prowled the distant horizon, waiting to wreck havoc on the land once more, and the Evil Wizard Howl who ate young girls hearts was looming over the town of Market Chipping. In my dreams, I was Sophie Hatter, the main protagonist, but at the same time, I was me. Sophie and I were one and the same, and depending on the moment in the dream, sometimes characters in the story called me Ellie too. As I grew older, Howl and Sophie and the Witch of the Waste and Michael the wizard’s apprentice and Calcifer the fire demon started entering the real world more and more — sometimes I could see Howl in his glittering robes walking down the street.
After I started taking the medication for T.B., things got worse in every way. I wanted so much to deny this world and fall into the open embrace of the fantasy inside my head. Except I couldn’t escape there anymore. Somehow reality had taken root in my mind and stolen that joyous escape for me.
I’m a bit obsessive when it comes to playing video games. If I play a game that I really like, then I have to complete every single thing in that game — the “main quest,” “side quests,” “secret events,” and so on.
My mom hates it when I play video games. She doesn’t mind a few hours, here and there, with friends or family; but when I play something comprehensive — let’s say The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild[5] for an example — I can play for a few hours, and then a few more hours, and then a few more hours, until my hands are stuck in the shape of the Wii-U gamepad and my eyes are red and sore.
But despite my inevitable bodily pain from sitting that long staring at a screen, there are few things that bring more joy than finally killing that one damn monster that kept whipping your ass so hard that you just kept dying over and over again, making it through the labyrinth without looking up the correct pathway on the internet, or finding the complete set of ridiculous clothing[6] that has absolutely zero purpose in the game other than for you to run around looking like a fool.
Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock swallowed my soul and trapped my body in an endless vortex of pushing buttons on a fake guitar. In fifth grade, Ben[7] got Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock for the Xbox 360 and we played that game for days-on-end, surviving on the tortillas thrown at us by his mother and pausing only to go to the bathroom, until we had beaten all of easy and normal difficulty, unlocked the rare songs, and started working on hard difficulty. When I graduated from fifth grade and was preparing to switch to a new school, my mom surprised me with a present for the Wii — you guessed it — Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock. Needless to say, I completed the game in its entirety before summer was over, and could play easy, normal, hard, and expert levels.[8]
Knack, another game that destroyed my life, is a bit of a paradox. It was one of the first games that came out on the PlayStation 4, so it seems as though it was a bit rushed toward completion. The gameplay for Knack is at first fun, but quickly devolves into rage. The levels are long and complicated, and if Knack, the playable character made up of ancient “beads” that you can collect to grow your size, dies, you restart the ENTIRE level. Not just respawning where you were, or at a checkpoint a few steps behind where you were, but the e n t i r e level all over again. Two-player mode is available, where the second player plays as a completely metal version of Knack. The second player’s death doesn’t matter, so when I played with my friend Julia who lived across the hall freshman year, she always went first, beat everything up, stopped all the traps, and, then, only then could I go. Knack had some great potential for a complex storyline, but instead of embracing the obvious opportunity for a ~love-story~ between the mad scientist’s presumed-dead[9] ex-girlfriend and the maniacal goblin king, the story just claims that she helped him build an army of evil robots because she was nice like that and never bothered questioning to what purpose war machines would be used for. AND THEN SHE ENDS UP BACK WITH THE MAD SCIENTIST WHO ABANDONS HER? *Ahem* excuse me, I digress. While texting a few weeks back, Julia provided a good summary of Knack: “The cool graphics/art styles did not make up for the lack of variation in gameplay, flat characters, thin predictable hole-riddled plot, and overall bad writing. It’s just a really bad game and I am astonished that so many people approved of it enough to put their names on it.”
But, despite the garbage quality of Knack, Julia and I compulsively had to finish the game. We spent well over 40+ hours meeting after class to play Knack throughout the entirety of freshman year. After almost giving up on the final boss after a six-hour failed attempt to beat it, we finally tried again after several months of heatedly raging about the bad quality of the game and the impossibility of the final boss — and won in one try. Perhaps the hold was the constant hope that the story would resolve itself by the end in the final scene before the end-credits, or the fun in joining together to vehemently hate something. There was something undeniably satisfying about finally being free of Knack.
In September 2017, the creators of Knack decided instead to release a sequel, creatively titled Knack II. In a way, I’ll probably never really be free of Knack, since someone out there had the funds to release not one, but two heaping piles of shit and have the audacity to call them video games. When I texted Julia about the existence of a sequel, she wrote back immediately, “Who the FUCK thought that was a good idea.”
Jury’s still out on whether or not I buy and rage-play Knack II though.
What Knack gave me is the chance to slip into that imaginary world again. It revived something I thought I had lost, and let me fall back into the comfortable space of hiding from reality, even for a moment. With Knack, I could create alternative storylines, each one more complicated and interesting than the last, that would take away from the pain of the here and now. When I played Knack, I didn’t have to think about being away from home for the first time. I didn’t have to try to figure out how to bridge the ever-growing gap between my boyfriend and I as I tried to embrace college life and he tried to balance being the only person in full-time responsibility of his brain-damaged mother. I didn’t have to acknowledge that somewhere inside of me, tuberculosis slept and could someday wake up and ruin my life forever. Knack took control, if only for a moment, and for that, I’ll forever be grateful; even if thinking about just how bad that game was is a total mind-fuck.
I don’t pretend to be someone I’m not anymore, but the comfort of quieting the real world with the consumption of an imagined one remains. I think I’ll always need that momentary escape in order to acknowledge reality.
For a time, tuberculosis stole my ability to find joy in living. With the help of my mother and her journal, I could recognize the things that I loved most in the world. And with the arrival of games like Knack, I re-discovered the pleasure of losing myself in an imaginary world, even one that didn’t actually exist within the game itself.
Without bad feelings, there are no good feelings. How can one recognize that they’re happy if they’ve never felt sad, mad, or just plain bad? Satisfaction in life is about finding a balance between the good and the bad, the great and the awful, and the okay and the most definitely not-okay.
[1] According to the CDC, “persons with latent TB infection do not feel sick and do not have any symptoms. They are infected with M. tuberculosis, but do not have TB disease. The only sign of TB infection is a positive reaction to the tuberculin skin test or TB blood test. Persons with latent TB infection are not infectious and cannot spread TB infection to others.” I’ll repeat — I am not infections and cannot spread TB to anyone.
[2] This is only about a 5 to 10% increase, and only without preventative treatment.
[3] I cry a lot.
[4] The same boyfriend who broke up with me freshman year of high school, but we started dating again sophomore year of high school and have been together ever since.
[5] An open-world game where everything is “interactable,” and nothing is “out-of-limits.” Most games have scenic backgrounds that you can see, but can’t explore — Breath of the Wild lets the player explore everything in the game.
[6] Breath of the Wild is the first game in the Zelda franchise that allows players to change Link’s outfit of their own volition. Earlier Zelda games sometimes had varying beginning outfits and then Link changed into his standard “green hero outfit.” Sometimes after completing the entire game, you could replay it and wear the beginning outfit the whole time, as in the case of The Wind Waker.
[7] Same Ben as previously mentioned — we’ve been friends since I was eight.
[8] Easy uses only three buttons, normal uses four buttons, hard and expert both use five buttons with increasing speed at which you push the five buttons (this means that your poor pinky has to stretch from the fourth button to the fifth button on the guitar).
[9] She’s not dead.
