Of Video Games and Reclamation: The Unseen Advantages of DID

Tags

DID, disability, gaming, mental health, mental illness, multiplicity, neurodiversity, OCD, plurality, self acceptance, World of Warcraft

Back in the day, on another server in the different era of patch 3.3.3a, we mained a Survival hunter. Or, well, one of us did. The rest of us didn’t find a whole lot of enjoyment in hunters, though the general knowledge and occasional gameplay would seep through. But for whatever reason, hunters were what he was good at. I [1], on the other hand, did warlocks. Affliction, to be precise, and according to my guildies and partner(s), I was damned good at it. I delved into Destruction for a bit, but it just wasn’t my style. Too bursty. I do DoTs. I didn’t spend a whole lot of time on that hunter, even though she was 80 and our only skinner/leatherworker; Even as Survival, which is more DoTish than the other specs, she felt too… bursty.

Of course, once 4.0.1 hit, everything changed. By then, my current partner and I had switched servers and had new characters. Including another hunter. She hadn’t made it too far, and by the time the patch came around, her skills felt clunky. Why?

Because for whatever reason (I didn’t read into it, not being a, well, hunter) they changed the energy mechanism for hunters from mana to focus. And now she felt like… a rogue. Which are melee.

I don’t do melee. I’m a caster. Any sort of melee class or spec feels wrong to me, and I have a hard time wrapping my head (ha, ha [2]) around it and their mechanics. Tried warriors once, no go. Death knights are just weird. In an interesting sort of way, but still weird. And while I do have a paladin and I’ve tanked before, running up to something and smacking it with my mace makes me twitch – I feel like I should be casting Exorcism or something. Which probably explains why my current pally is Holy.

Yet, despite this, my fiance was poking at me (on occasion) to reroll our hunter. Apparently we were the only good hunter He’s played with. [3] But I refused, because they’re clunky and use focus and melee use focus/rage/runic energy, not hunters. Hunters and other ranged classes used mana, damn it.

However, instead of never touching hunters again ever (which is about the position I was in, go obsessive-compulsiveness), the sibling in my system that used to play them (as well as rogues, though not extensively) decided HEY. I’MMA MAKE A HUNTER NOW, K? K. (whut? DAMN IT GIVE ME MY HANDS BACK.) [4]

And… he’s managing it pretty well. Cuz that’s just what he does. He does hunters. For one reason or another, he feels comfortable using hunters even when they have focus now – something I can’t get my brain around. The only time I even feel slightly at ease with using one is when the two of us are co-conscious, and that’s because he’s the one managing it all. I just sort of feel like I’m watching in the background.

Being able to play a class that I otherwise do not feel comfortable with opens up other worlds to us. There’s different experiences, different play styles, little tricks in our arsenal that contribute greatly to our power (jump shot kiting mobs? Fuck yeah, even though it hurts our hand after a while). These are things that you do not experience with any other class, simply because each one is unique in style and technique. And yeah, while it’s commonplace to think that people can just get used to new experiences after a while, that doesn’t work so well with us because of our OCD. For one reason or another, I’m more severely impacted by it than my sibling is, and my reaction to the changes to hunters is an extension of that. Except, yanno, we also have DID – and he can handle them despite my inability to.

This is something we’re all still getting used to, the fact that alters (god I hate that term) in a DID system can have vastly differing skills, strengths and weaknesses between them. And yet, this is exactly how DID operates. That core identity is fragmented, and with that fragmentation comes the separation of flexibility and those strengths and weaknesses. That way, if one of us finds ourselves in a situation that we can’t handle for whatever reason, another can. That’s the development of this coping method at work to protect us.

Granted, me not liking hunters isn’t exactly a situation I need to be ‘protected’ from. But since he operates differently than I do, the sort to be up front and aggressive in a time of need, it’s a situation where he operates best out of the lot of us [5]. When faced with a situation that threatens me for whatever reason, I stand back and try to find another way to handle it. I don’t like to tackle things head on, and that carries over in games. I stay in the background, where it’s safe (unless fire spawns under me x_X). On top of that, I prefer to be in the company of trusted loved ones where our strengths help each other (healer + warlock = world of opportunities/dead mobs). Whereas he’s a very self-sufficient person. If there’s a problem that challenges him, he challenges it back. He has to, that’s the situation behind his development in our system and how he protected us and himself at the time.

So we’ve rerolled our hunter. Let’s see where this goes.

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1. For once, only one of us is writing this post. Fancy that. No names though.
2. I apologize to anyone who doesn’t get why this comment is so funny to me.
3. He doesn’t like hunters. At all. Especially after this one time when He had to rez one after they stood in the fire – and then, while still in the fire, proceeded to sit down. And drink. All while He was standing in the fire to heal them, because that was the only way He was within range. I will always remember that moment.
4. Yes, this is about how our internal conversations go.
5. Yes, I get that hunters are ranged – the focus thing makes them feel like melee to both of us despite this. And with the way a lot of the PUGs I’ve run with have been running up to mobs and smacking them instead of shooting at them, sometimes I wonder.

Sometimes One More Disorder Isn’t Such A Bad Thing

Tags

disability, mental health, mental illness, Mental Illness Awareness Week, NAMI, neurodiversity, OCD, self acceptance

This week is Mental Illness Awareness Week in the United States! Started by the National Alliance on Mental Illness, its a week dedicated to help bringing awareness about the effects of mental illness and support for loved ones that live with it. I hope to be able to write something about living with mental illness each day this week, spoons permitting – fingers crossed!

Got to watch an awesome live interview with RMJ of Deeply Problematic over at HealthyPlace TV yesterday, where she talked about her experiences with OCD. And it kind of got me thinking about my own experiences.

I feel like an odd one at times. I developed my OCD as a way to cope with other other disorders – namely, the Schizotypal and DID. Dealing with both of these, even when I was younger and didn’t fully know what was going on, left me feeling like my life was completely outside of my control. So I fought to take it back. I found little things, anything, that I could have a level of control over. And if I lost control over that, I’d break down because it was all I had.

Later in the years, I explored various coping methods for my disorders. And some of these coping methods became my new obsessions, either out of that feeling of being without control or paranoia – sometimes both. Other obsessions and compulsions have stayed, but for the most part they’ve shifted so that I may function in life with the chaos that all of my conditions, physical and mental, combined creates in my life.

Organization and the order of things helps me keep track of where things are. My room and desk are still a mess, but if I organize books or game cases, it’s always by alphabetical order (unless it’s a series, in which case it goes in the order of the series, regardless of the name of each release, based on the name of the series itself), and in terms of books they must also be arranged by size. I cannot have books of different heights mixed up, and I will sit there for hours if necessary to make sure that they’re placed properly, even with differences as small as a fraction of a centimeter. That way I can reliably find any game or book I want to find, without having to worry about “okay, where did I place this last?” like I usually have to do with my memory loss issues. Clothes hanging up are arranged by color, length and fabric weight. Length and fabric weight for the temperature and weather differences in the seasons, and color because of identity shifts and likes/dislikes. Since not all of us are comfortable wearing the same clothes, being able to find the ones we are comfortable with wearing at the time makes it easier for us to interact with the rest of the world.

Another good example is how I have to deal with counting things, especially things like money when I’m at work. Due to cognitive disorganization things that are “out of place” can leave me feeling a bit frazzled, causing a pause in thinking as I try to register what’s happening that’s hard to come back from. I compensate for it by making sure that all of the bills are facing the same direction, and that all of the papers are in specific places so I can find them if necessary. I’ll do this with any inventory that’s shifted or turned over too, since it makes my brain think “that’s wrong” and stops, so I fix it. I just make it look like I’m doing it for customer service and presentation, when in actuality it’s just so I can keep thinking.

I also have an obsession with time. When I don’t need to wear my braces, I always make sure to have a watch on me and I check it compulsively, even multiple times within a short interval, because I’ve lost my ability to perceive time the way most people do. Clocks, watches, calendars and planners are the only way I can keep track of time. Without these I can lose months at a time, not having any idea what happened because I’ll think it’s only been a few weeks at most. I miss appointments, I arrive late, I won’t even know what day it is. So I make sure that everything is logged, things have time stamps on them, I’m always within sight of a clock. Anything so that I can know what day and time it is. People talk about how we’re too controlled by our schedules and time – but sometimes, that is the only structure available and without it, everything can fall apart.

On top of that, I use obsessing and repetitive behaviors to wind down and relieve anxiety. The game Harvest Moon on the Super Nintendo is awesome for that – I can sit there and clear everything on the farm until it’s completely empty for hours upon hours to take myself away from the world. My mind says it has to be completely empty, and I take advantage of that. While I’m doing that, the outside world doesn’t matter anymore. All stress starts to melt away and I become more grounded.

Can it be debilitating? Absolutely. Like when dishes pile up and I’m sitting on the ground, freaking out and trying not to cry because I need to clean them but physically my body can’t handle it anymore. Or when loved ones are late and I worry, not just for their health but because I can no longer rely on that event happening at that specific time. It screws up my thinking for the rest of the day and leaves me obsessing over it. Or when I’m sitting on that floor trying to make sure that the books are arranged properly for hours without any regard for whether or not I’ve eaten.

But overall? I think it actually helps me function. Things would be all over the place for me without it. I wouldn’t be able to cope with my other mental disorders if I didn’t have OCD to help. Their impacts on my life would be too extreme. And I know it’s not a perspective people are used to. But that’s okay, I don’t mind being the odd one once in a while.