Returning to Myself Through Narrative, or Grown Man Cries Playing Video Game

There’s a point about midway through the Main Story Quest of Final Fantasy XIV: Endwalker where the Warrior of Light is asked to regale a very important lore character about their adventures. I won’t get into the specifics, because all of it is a huge spoiler, but after it’s over, that character turns to the Warrior of Light and asks if all of it, the heartbreak, the betrayal, the dead friends, if it was worth it. However, the way the camera frames the scene, I realized that character wasn’t talking to Ariadne, my Warrior of Light, but the man behind the keyboard. They were asking if everything I had been through in my life, all of my heartbreak and betrayal, had been worth it.

I’m not going to get too deep into Endwalker spoilers, or even talk much about it, but one of the major themes of Endwalker is whether or not life is worth living. This isn’t really a spoiler, it’s a question a lot of Final Fantasy games ask. The answer that Endwalker gives is a lot more nuanced than the general “yes, of course it is, roll credits” (the answer is still yes, but there’s like a discussion) after you beat the bad guy. However, it was that scene that stuck with me. I think, in a lot of ways, it’s going to be the defining scene of the expansion for me, even if it wasn’t my favorite scene, or the most narratively or emotionally satisfying. I mean, I could be wrong, I still have the last zone to finish, but I’m fairly positive it will be the big one for me.

I’ve spoken at length on this blog about how I suffer form a mild form of depression. It’s a cyclical thing, caused by stress, exacerbated by loneliness and is often expressed as a form of anxiety. So, it’s not surprise that the past couple of years have been extremely hard on me personally. About two years ago, I lost my job and my entire professional life looked completely uncertain. By profession, I’m a teacher. I got into the profession, after journalism didn’t work out, because I wanted to help people directly. I wanted to be a role model for young men, I wanted to show children the joys of literature and writing and I wanted to be there for kids in a way I didn’t have growing up. Then, because of a single filing error, I lost my certification and couldn’t renew it. I got lucky, within a year, I was able to fix it, but it meant I spent a year unemployed and then the pandemic happened and, well, I said it was hard.

However, one of the things I haven’t talked about it is that a few months before I lost that job, I had been going to therapy and had been getting treatment. Part of the reason I wrote that first blogpost about my depression was because my therapy had done a good job of that. One of the reasons I had been going to therapy, though, was because I had withdrawn personally almost completely. I had gone through a bad breakup maybe a year before, which was largely my fault, and I felt like I wasn’t good enough to have a girlfriend again. I don’t know if that’s childish or silly or whatever, I was a grown man in his thirties acting like a teenager, I know that. Sometimes, depression hits you like that. So, I was getting to a place where I felt comfortable starting to date again when all of this hit me, all at once. It was devastating, and I spent a long time just trying to keep my head afloat.

Things didn’t actually pick up when I got my certification back, either. It didn’t come in until after the school year started, so I had to take a job at a private religious school in town, and not the religion I grew up with. I’m not a religious person to begin with, but I have a healthy respect for what other people believe, but this was quite a culture shock. More to the point, though, I was already financially unstable having been unemployed for a year, and this job didn’t pay a lot. I mean, it was a private school, so it’s not like they had a lot of money, but I was in a better place than I had been just a month before. I worked through that year and it was a nightmare. The thing about religious schools is that they tend to attract the most fervent supporters. I felt about as comfortable there as I would in an Evangelical school, largely for the same reasons. Being a straight, white dude, I might have actually been able to hide a little better, but I think things would have been just as awkward for the same reasons.

So, here I am, struggling for months, hoping against hope that things will work out and I’ll be able to keep my head above water. Most of my friends by this point have moved out of state, and I don’t know whether or not I’m even going to have a job teaching at a public school ever again. It becomes a lot harder for me to write and THAT begins to suffer to the point I wound up finishing a book that I threw out all of, because it was awful. I never want anyone to see it.

So, I’m lonely, depressed and tired. I’m not writing well, and all of my friends are gone. However, I keep going. I keep working at it. All of this is temporary, and I do have people who love me. I have a lot of advantages other people in similar situations do not have. I have a lot of privilege, and I’m not the only one here, either. So, I kept at it and eventually, I got back to public school. Still not in a classroom, but it is a teaching job. Virtual teaching and online classes, for kids dealing with the pandemic and everything. It’s weird, and I’m still not where I want to be.

However, when that character asked me if it had all been worth it, through my tears, I just said “yeah, of course it was.” I know not everyone can find hope in a video game where you play as a sexy, Amazonian witch who blows people up with fire (Samus did a number on me as a kid, let’s just leave it at that), but there’s hope somewhere in the world. If you need it, I hope you find it.

There was more I was going to write, connecting the different parts of the story, but I think I’ll save that for the Final Fantasy Challenge blog post. Which, yes, I’m still doing. I didn’t have the money to get the Pixel Remasters, so I took a break.