I named my MFA creative thesis “Bones I Found in the Garden,” because when I came through my strokes, I had all these pieces of essays and stories and poetry left from the person I was before them.
I don’t actually know who I am now. The best way I can explain it is this.
You’re playing a video game. It’s your first playthrough, Save File Number One, so it’s kind of halting and messy and imperfect. But you’re *really* attached to it. You’re so invested in this game. You’ve played hundreds of hours, exploring the map, learning the controls, learning how to respond to the environment as this character while *using* those controls. You’ve *finally* gotten past the basic character establishing arcs and are getting into the meat of the story, establishing your home base and making it suit you, assembling a team to play co-op with, finally deciding what aspect of gameplay you enjoy most after *years* of gameplay and maxing out your skill tree in that area. You’ve wooed your romanceable NPCs and they’re super into you and you’re probably gonna get married to at least one if gameplay allows it. You’ve spent so long practicing life as this character, can practically do the sequence for your special attack combo move in your sleep. You’re a few XP away from leveling up and getting to multiclass for the first time. You’re not necessarily a competitive player on a professional level or anything, but you’re doing really well by your personal standards and you’re really focused on your game progression.
And then you wake up to a dead screen. The game crashes. Total fatal error.
You message the developers and they say they are on top of it! They announce that it’s not just you, there’s been a major crash across the whole game, for everybody! They’re doing everything they can! Coding patches as fast as they can and trying to salvage everybody’s save files, but they’re only human, and they have lives outside of work. Children to feed, spouses and friends to attend to. Their lives can’t be all about fixing your gameplay experience.
The first big patch is released, and you log back into the game only to find that your beloved Save File Number One is corrupted. There’s an archived version of it that you can view but not play, but the archived images are degraded to blocky pixels in places, completely warped in others. Some images are flipped, mirrorlike. It’s a viewable story, albeit somewhat scrambled, of the hundreds of hours you’ve put into learning this game, but it’s not *accessible*. You can’t add to it or repair it or fix it, it’s just an image of what you accomplished before. There’s no continuing your beloved Save File Number One.
So, after a period of mourning and avoiding gaming entirely, you take the plunge and make Save File Number Two. You do your best to recreate your first attempt, to build your gameplay back up to the same point it was before so you can *get back to the actual meat of the game*, but since the patch, the controls are slightly different. The developers insist it’s normal small redesigns over time, but everything feels just a little bit *wrong*. The character moves at a different, choppier pace, and the control haptics vibrate harder in your hands now. Your special attack combo move sequence has changed, and you can’t seem to memorize the new one, and every time you go to do it, it kinda hurts your hands because the button layout is much less intuitive since the update. The NPCs all have different dialogue, and it plays at either twice the volume and twice the speed it did before, or *half* the volume and speed, but either way, most interactions feel like riddles instead of exchanges, and you can’t shake the feeling that this was translated from some other language by an AI translation service but not checked by a human. You keep sending error reports and messaging the developers, but they don’t seem especially concerned as long as you still have some access to the game and are paying your subscription fees to play. The subscription fees don’t seem worth it, but what are you going to do? Not play? You’ve put your whole life into this. You’re desperate to just get back to moving forward in the game’s story, finding out how it progresses, but you’re struggling just to get through the same in-game achievements that felt, while challenging, *enjoyable* and *fulfilling* the first time. Now they feel hollow—you’re not enjoying the gameplay, and you’re saving every 3 seconds but pretty sure it doesn’t matter because it can all just disappear in an instant the next time there’s another crash, and since the crash was code-based and had *nothing to do with you*, there’s no avoiding it. You try really hard to attach to the game, to Save File Number Two, but it’s hard to enjoy a game you know is likely going to crash again and get even less developer support than it had when it was a better, more popular, more playable game. They’re not going to waste resources on a game that’s already crashed once and isn’t ever going to get its big following back and make them the money they want. It’s not a good investment.
You barely log in anymore; you let your subscription fees lapse. Save File Number Two is nothing but a pale echo of the game you loved, and playing it mostly makes you sad (and a little bit angry at the developers for not providing better support.) You spend your time offline, logged out entirely. You’re not really sure for how long. Sometimes, a friend will nudge you to hop on and play a bit, and you’ll drag yourself up to make the effort for them, but it’s not doing anything for you. It’s mostly just making you sadder and angrier and trapped by either incompetent programmers or ones just not being paid enough to care that your whole way of connecting to people and relating to the world around you is basically reduced to an awful-to-play trashfire parody of itself. You write angrier emails to the developers. They insist that new players and most old guard players like you seem ~fine~ with the controls, aren’t struggling like you are with them; maybe the problem is that you’re depressed or have grown bored with the game, or are too lazy to learn the new interface?
Galled by the accusations of laziness and incompetence, you double down on Save File Number Two. You try your absolute damndest to memorize the new special attack combo move sequence. You befriend and romance the NPCs by blindly gifting them all your resources even though they speak basically gibberish; eventually you give them the right things to make them like you better, and you arduously complete the same friendship achievements that the first time felt like an adventure. You don’t actually feel attached to the NPCs, though, because you’re not sure what you did right or wrong, and your efforts don’t seem to directly correlate to how much they appreciate them, it’s just random whether or not you stumble into the right dialogue and gift selections. It feels mostly like playing BINGO with people. The engaging, multifaceted characters of before are just memories you mentally overlay over the character portraits so you can try to pretend you still have that connection to them. There are other players online, too, but the in game live communication system has been too buggy to use since the update, so the whole experience feels terribly lonely now.
Still, you’re not an incompetent idiot. Other people are enjoying this game. Other people are finding ways to make it playable for themselves. Surely, you can grind through this tedious morass and get back to where you were in Save File Number One and finally, *finally* progress further in the game. Your friends that play have caught back up; you’re not sure why you can’t seem to make the new controls work for you, why your character moves so jerkily, why the screen keeps randomly flashing all the text into alien letters and then back again. They say they aren’t having those issues, just the normal ones that went with the systemwide crash for everybody.
For the first time, you start asking everybody what the crash was for them, and what the update fixed. You find out that the crash was just people not being able to connect to the game, not anything that should’ve made things so unplayable for you. Nobody’s special attack move combo sequence was changed. Most people’s saved files were still playable. The NPC dialogue issue and translation issues seem to be something wrong with your machine, not something wrong with the game. No wonder the developers were so dismissive; they were *sure* they’d fixed *those* problems. And they were right! You just seem to have another problem, too. But they’re not responsible for problems with the console, just the game, and trying to get support from the *console* production company proves even more futile than trying to get it from the game developers. At least you’re not barking up the wrong tree anymore, though, right?
You can’t get a refund or a replacement, your warrantee is years out of date. They don’t sell new ones of this version of the console; you’d have to chuck the whole thing out and start over with a model several generations newer, and you can neither afford that nor want to go that far.
So you start taking apart your console. You’re not great with technology and it doesn’t make a lot of sense to you, but you ask your friends who have more experience. Eventually, you find a bunch of messed up wiring and a wad of what looks like lint and battery acid wedged up under the buttons. Your special attack move didn’t change, one of the buttons for it was just misfiring when you hit it, signaling twice or not at all, ruining the sequence. Digging a little further gets you more answers: tiny wires connected to the wrong things, or just straight up corroded away. You message the game developers asking what to do—should you try and cobble together repairs to this console or just give up and start over from scratch with a new one from the new generation? You just want to be able to play and basically enjoy the game you used to love.
Somebody at the game company actually sees your message and bothers to reply. It takes you a while to get your console to let you even read their message; it keeps flashing the letters into alien characters randomly. Eventually, you find out that they’d had a friend with a similar issue, and they’d tried a different solution: they’d gotten their old console professionally refurbished. It took finding a very particular specialist with a very specific skill set and a very long and expensive waitlist, but that if you’re attached to playing the game with this interface, it’s probably your best bet. You’ll have to pack up your broken console and send it off for an indefinite amount of time to be fixed, and you don’t know what it’ll cost you, but it’s literally the only option if you don’t want to just throw the whole experience in the trash and start over from scratch and hope you get a better console next time.
So you pack up the console. Lovingly, but exhaustedly, and with so much anxiety that you’ll never see it again. This is your whole life. Your only chance to get back to the story you’re so invested in and finish its arc and see what you can do with it. You pack it up, and you send it off, and you wait.
And you wait.
You message the restoration specialist, but they’re very busy and they haven’t gotten to you yet.
So you wait.
You can’t play the game without a console, so the most you can do is hover on message boards and FB groups about it, reading about each new update and unlocked achievement and even complaint with fierce jealousy and impatience. You just want to get back to the game. You just want to see how you’d be doing if you’d had a machine that worked, or even one you’d known was broken. You just want to be experiencing the game, part of the story, connected to the world.
You obsess, because there’s nothing else to focus on while you wait for the console to be repaired; you can really only be trying to prepare yourself to play the game better when the console comes back.
You start reading the game wiki and trying to understand how the game *works*. You go down rabbit holes about programming and game development and you end up knowing the game world better than you ever thought you could. You still can’t *access* it, but you know you’d be better at it than you were the first time. You could probably speedrun some of that shit.
Finally, the console comes back. It’s been *years* since you’ve seen it, handled it. You’ve been wrapped up in a net of its specs and in game trivia, but the actual object feels almost foreign in your hands. The restoration specialists have left a note: it’s refurbished and restored, but it’s a finicky machine now. It’s old, and fragile, and while it’s optimized to the best of what it can do, you shouldn’t expect it to behave like a brand new machine.
Fine, then. You can’t speedrun anything, but you can still at least play it better than before, right?
You load up the game. You log in. You play around a bit on Save File Number Two. And it *is* easier, it *is* better, than when you had the broken console. But it’s also not Save File Number One. You’ve got max hearts with a bunch of NPCs, but they’re not your actual favorites, they’re just the ones you lucked into the right dialogue+gift combo with when you couldn’t actually understand them. Now that you *can* understand them, it feels…wrong. Uncomfortable. The home base you’ve got, you built with whatever resources you had left over after trying desperately to win over the NPCs and it’s honestly a shambles. Your skill tree makes absolutely no sense and is way more stunted than all your friends’ because you couldn’t even operate your special attack combo move for so long. Not only is this not anything like Save File Number One, it also just…sucks.
You have a choice here. You can
a) say “screw it” and yeet the whole thing into the sun and hope the next game you play comes on a better console and has better developer support and a bunch of other factors you have zero control over;
b) double down on Save File Number Two again because you’ve already given it hundreds of hours, you’re *committed*…while comparing it endlessly to the memory of Save File Number One because it’s nothing but an attempted mirror of that file, feeding how many hundreds more hours of grinding into a game you are not enjoying for a save file you are not proud of or happy with or even especially attached to, since you’re considering throwing the whole thing out at all; or
c) make a new save file. Make one that isn’t trying to be Save File Number One. Make one where you play through from scratch with this refurbished console, learning its quirks as you go, as messily and organically as you did the first time, but not trying to mimic it. Trying to pick a new skill tree this time, one that works better with a controller that feels kind of laggy when you try old expert moves but just feels normal levels of unfamiliar that come with trying a new skill in a new game with new controls. It won’t be the perfect speedrun you dreamed of while the console was being refurbished, but you’ll actually be *playing the game* again, actually engaged with it in an organic way with *some* potential to enjoy the process.
You still miss Save File Number One. You’re still insanely proud of it, and how well you fumbled your way through the game that first time. You’re not really proud of Save File Number Two, but you suppose you should just be grateful you kept playing the game and didn’t give up entirely. Yeah, if you start a new one, the game could crash again, or your console could fail on you again, and you might lose everything all over. But surely it’s worth starting something potentially risky if it’s your only chance at actually enjoying your experience?
So you take a deep breath and you try not to think about it too hard and get bogged down in perfectionism before you start and you load up the game. This time, when the intro screen pops up, instead of “LOAD”, you pick “NEW.”
With Save File Number Three, you definitely do still befriend and romance some of the same NPCs as the first time around, because you’re just drawn to them, and you even enjoy some of the same aspects of gameplay. But you don’t worry about trying to get your skill tree to look like the one in Save File Number One. You don’t actually like the way these controls handle the finer aspects of that branch of the skill tree, so you try out others. It’s a broader tree, less tall, and you’re way behind on achievements as compared to your friends, but you’re actually enjoying the game now. You’re enjoying seeing the updates the developers have made, the way this console differs from the first time around, rather than feeling trapped by them. You’re not *really* behind anything; new players are joining every day. You make friends with some of them, too, and other players with refurbished controllers, because even if they’ve played hundreds of hours fewer than you have, or are way less far in the game than you’d gotten last time, they’ve got new tips and tricks that didn’t even exist when you played the first time. Your old friends give you some gentle shit about having n00b friends and getting game advice from memes, but their original consoles still work, and they don’t really get what it’s like to have to engage with gameplay piecemeal. You don’t mind; they love you, and they game with you, and if you don’t spend as much time directly with them as you used to, it’s just because you want them to see you as this Save File Number Three instead of comparing you to their memory of Save File Number One, like you had for so long. You don’t grudge them their love of the memory, but if you keep comparing yourself to it, you’re not going to be able to enjoy the game. You need to properly invest in Save File Number Three if you want to explore the story before your console gives out more permanently and you can’t afford whatever fancy repair is required.
And you do. Want to explore the story. You never *wanted* to throw out the game or your console, you just wanted to be able to *play the fucking game with a working console*. And it might be a slightly different game and a slightly different console than when you started last time, but you can either focus on that and waste what hours you have left on trying to recreate a memory that can never be recreated, or you can focus on relearning the game and enjoying the process.
So that’s what happened, and I’m doing the latter. Because if I don’t find a way to enjoy the game again, I’m going to throw my console into the sun. And I want to play through the whole damn game. I want to see my character go from the fumbling child she is now to a greying elder, surrounded by loving community. It won’t be the child I was once or the elder I might once have been or the community I’d planned, and I might not make it all the way to the greying end like I hope, but I will be playing the game and learning the controls like it’s new, and doing my best to feel joy in the journey of it.
I don’t feel like Alena. I don’t know what Save File Number Three’s name is, but trying to be Alena after my strokes hasn’t worked, and I’m tired of wasting everybody’s time, especially my own, pushing that rock uphill when I don’t even want to.
I don’t know what rock I’m pushing next. I don’t know. I don’t know my own name; none of them ring like a bell in my chest. I don’t know, and I love that you care, all of you, but I’m not her, and I don’t know who I’m becoming yet. I don’t know. Don’t ask me, and please, don’t try and tell me. I don’t want to just waste who I’m becoming by remembering me as I was and missing her. I want to be something new. I *have* to be somebody new. And I’ll keep what works, but I can’t carry the rest. I never should have tried, really, but I did the best I could with what I knew at the time. Now that I know better, I have to try and do better, even if it means starting mostly over. Otherwise I’m never going to get to play at life again at all. And I truly, deeply want to. 💖
So yeah. Stay tuned to see what I become, I guess?