The Story Cabaret: The Most Important Weekly Column You'll Ever Read About Things You Don't Care About.
Join me in a convoluted ode to humanity, mental health, and transition by talking about things you don't care about.
How will I, a trans advocate and writer, make you care about video games and other miscellany by using developmental psychology, Linkin Park, a professor in a town you’ve never heard of, and She-Ra?
By using my exaggerated sense of self worth provided to me by being a curious person with an English degree and lots of life experience. If you’re looking for someone to blame in particular, might I suggest starting with the late Doctor Bill King of Davis & Elkins college?
The Prologue: Blame Dr. Bill King.
I believe I was a junior in college, working on getting three degrees at one time while running our school’s newspaper (a task which left me on a first name, drinking basis with all the English department professors). I enrolled in Dr. King’s course on literary criticism — and it changed the way I approached problem solving for everything I’ve done sense.
We did what you might expect in a class like that, we used thinking tools like feminist, marxist, and psychoanalytic criticism to examine works of literature. Then the man threw us a curveball by forcing us to use those tools on things that were not, in our minds, literature. I chose to perform a Marxist reading of Linkin Park’s album A Thousand Suns.
I enjoyed the assignment so much, I began using that same tool set in my other degrees (History and Political Science) and work. After all, recorded history is rarely fact, much like politics these are the realms of stories. I’ve never looked at anything the same way again, Dr. King taught me to use analytical tools in such a way that I would never stop being curious about anything ever again. That man is directly responsible for so many discoveries and theories I’ve made in my trans advocacy, deradicalization work, and writing. So, I’m dedicating this column to him.
I will shortly be inflicting his legacy onto you. I’d like to imagine he’s bemused about what I’ve chosen to do with his work.
The Most Important Story In The World
One day, before the spoken word was created, the sun rose on humans who had for the first time created a story, even a silent one. Standing under its light now existed beings who had created the first story of many they’d pass on: “I.”
I am hungry. I am horny. I am pretty. These are stories we tell about the world and ourselves, ways to help communicate to others what we feel. We used pictures, sounds, then letters to create things that had never been — like gods, justice, and desire. Since then, humans have been first and foremost defined by stories. Yes, I consider these even more important than the capture of fire or the creation of working tools for metal and stone. Before the wheel was ever a wheel, it was a story of possibility. If you have no stories, you have nothing.
Ebay, The Gifted Ring, and She Ra
This story is about how my grandmother had the wisdom of two crack marketing experts from 2009. I was once gifted a ring, a fiscally valuable ring, from my grandmother to do whatever I wanted with. At the time I was trying to do my best to do the “guy life” of finding a partner and getting married and successful, you know the routine. She didn’t gift me a ring alone: she gave me a story about how her ex husband had one day picked out a ring she didn’t like. So the two of them went back and he angrily exchanged his selection for one she preferred. He was so bitter and angry, in fact, that all she could think about when she wore the ring was his attitude towards giving it to her. By handing it to me, she gave me a new story where I was saving that poor ring from its origin story and I could give it a happy, exciting meaning by giving it to the right person.
Somewhere, around the same time, two experimenters purchased about $150 in total junk, wrote fictional stories for each item, and sold them on ebay for thousands of dollars: demonstrating that with the right story, all trash is treasure. They sold stories with items attached: fictions about love lost, humanity, and disaster.
Of course, in a very certain industry, this knowledge that stories have value when attached to things is old news: just ask the makers of She Ra, The Transformers, and comic books. These stories were created to sell action figures, toys, and more. The Transformers were just a toy — until the TV show turned them into a phenomenon, telling stories about justice and war between robots. The same goes with Pokémon, Mario, and more. These were just things, until they had stories that we all became a part of and cared about.
Because if humans need anything, it’s a story. Even when we’re starving and dying of thirst, we turn to stories for refuge and hope. Stories make empires rise and fall. They are the underpinning of everything humans do.
Stories in Trench Coats
(Content Warning: Rape, Torture)
If you’ve been reading long, you know that I have a condition called Dissociative Identity Disorder. This used to be called Split Personality Disorder or Multiple Personality Disorder, but was later renamed as those names didn’t tell the accurate story about what was happening.
The most commonly afflicted with this disorder are sufferers of advanced childhood abuse, I was no different. I’d been raped, molested, and mistreated for years, left in the care of a psychopathic (a word I do not use lightly) caregiver who mastered story telling, and survivor of more than one house fire — all before I was 10.
The consequence was that my brain, which like all human brains had learned to have a “self” and tell stories about that self, cleaved off more selves who could handle the extreme circumstances I was in. They were stories about someone who couldn’t feel pain, someone who could keep me safe, someone who would hold the bad stories away from my mind, and more. Stories, human stories, saved my life long past the point that a human being should have survived. Stories are a part of me that I can never change — and you.
The Biology of Stories
You, too, are a pile of stories in a trenchcoat. All those memories and ideas about yourself, your favorite flavors and people, it’s all stories all the way down. The change the world, including your brain. The more you tell stories, the more you rehearse them and they become biological facts inside your mind. The taxi driver has a different brain than you, more capable of navigation and spatial memory, because of rehearsing the story and actions of being a cab driver. Now, that taxi driver will believe herself the kind of person who knows people and gets around well.
And they can change others. I was a victim of people who told stories about their right to use my body for their pleasure, or how little I mattered in this world.
Not all stories are true, honest, or helpful but they have the power to shape reality all the same — from a sense of perspective. The truth is that what happened to me has left me torn between the stories of myself and the stories inflicted on me, forever trying to navigate the trauma of being turned into an object while holding my humanity.
The Trans Agenda
So yeah, anyway, that’s why I want to write about video games and poppy bullshit, among other stuff. Because as a woman of trans experience, I fret over the way stories about me and others like me inflict a reality on me and others that is not true.
I am a woman, I worked hard to get people to understand and believe me in that story. It has shaped so much of my reality and my transition was an incredible journey of self invention. I would very much like to one day tell that story, but much the same as Dr. King taught me that to view a story through only one lens is to never experience it at all, I worry about the lens that I give others by not writing the good stuff: the life stuff.
The trans agenda is a story about an afterlife. It’s a dream we seek to make reality and each of us has our own trans agenda. Mine? It may look like yours: kids, cooking, pets, and warming my toes by the fireplace. It looks like footie pajamas and Christmas mornings sucking down coffee while my children destroy hours of wrapping and arranging. It looks like a very contented sort of jubilee. I know a lot of people with stories like these.
But it also looks like me sharing my little joys with you. One of my little joys, lately, is playing games on my phone, watching anime, and caring for myself. These are stories I want to share with you because part of my story of myself is that I am an obsessive lady who turns into a ravenous nerd under the light of the full moon.
Get In The Damn Robot, Loser, We’re Going Shopping.
Using my tools of literary analysis, my observational skills, and my research skills as a total nerd I will now be bringing to you a weekly column about the stories I love, reviewing them and giving my unique perspective on what they’re saying. You might see just a game, but I see a nostalgic celebration of playsets, family, and board games. The mechanics and form of the game are merely the punctuation of the story telling, no different than a period, comma, or headline for me.
So, I invite you to join me for a self indulgent cabaret of story telling through games and other non traditional literature because you might just learn something about me, you, and the stories that bind us together.
If you’re here to be a better person, work for what’s right, and expand yourself, can you turn down such a delicious opportunity to see the world from new perspectives? Laugh, cry, and grow with me as I use what I know to show you things you’ve been overlooking for a long time.
Good, good, let the nerdiness flow through you as you try to decide if I’m being sincere or if this is just a manipulative ploy to talk about my hobbies.
Time will tell.
I’ll be starting with Zenless Zone Zero since it JUST came out.