Giving up a piece of self

I was 16 when I discovered gaming. I really can’t express to you how much it’s been a part of my life over the years. To say that it was the entirety of my social life for the greater portion of my adulthood, would be an exaggeration, but it would still FEEL like an understatement. I’m not really sure how I got there, but at parties, I’d wait until the party broke into some kind of game. I went to rpg’s at one point 4-5 nights a week. The other nights we’d play board games.

I went to conventions to game for days and days. I ran convention game rooms, locally and otherwise. And even to this day, I met nearly all my friends, even my non- gaming friends, through gaming. It’s how I met people, how I interacted with people, who I dealt with recreation, and it was my art. I sold board games for a small company for a while, did some freelance work for Chessex, and the Larp, oh the Larp was so pervasive in my life, that I literally had to make rules that people couldn’t talk about it around me unless it was prearranged, so I’d have some social time that wasn’t Larp related. It was everything. And I loved it.

And now for some apparently unrelated history. When I was in high school I met someone who was passionate about the calliope. He was the youngest professional calliope player in the US, and everything he did had to do with steamboats. He knew what he wanted to do with his life, his career and his art. He had one thing that overran everything else. I admired him greatly, and for many years, he was my best and dearest friend. His passion and love for steamboats music, and that painful yet beautiful loud music, were just a few of the things I loved about him.

Over the years, as these things go we did lose touch, and I have recently seen him online and learned that he kept that passion. I envy that. It seems so easy. It may not be true, he may have had doubts, but he always seemed to know he wanted to be a part of steamboats and callipopes. In some ways that part of his life seemed mapped out to me.

Despite what I say about gaming, I never totally felt that way about it. Even though I tried,  I never found a way to make it a carreer, and  I didn’t totally want to make it my life. It just became my life. I also wanted to take part in political activism, writing, comic collecting, making movies, film reviews, internet communities, polyamory activism, and participate in Unitarian Universalist conventions and committees. I did all of that, but gaming was always there, somewhere in the background. I’m 48 years old, and I still don’t know what I want to do when I grow up.

And I’m bored with gaming. Thing is, I’ve been bored with it for a long time. I’m not sure how long. I know my rpg campaigns that I’ve run have gotten shorter and shorter and shorter. It takes less and less time for to get bored with a character or a story. And for the first time, I find myself cancelling board games night to go hear music or visit art shows.  It’s holding less and less interest for me, and in some ways, that scares me.

It makes me feel great that I’m expanding my horizons. I feel like maybe now I can be a whole person. But now that I step away from it, I also recognize the obsession, and maybe I miss it. I don’t miss gaming exactly. I miss being obsessed with gaming. I miss the clarity of knowing how I wanted to spend my time. I’m more conflicted now, even more than before. I’m just not sure I want to spend all my time in rpgs and board games.

So last week I decided to stop running any rpg campaigns for at least a year, and it’s scary. Do I have a social life without gaming? Am I me?

I took a break not to long ago for a few weeks, knowing it wouldn’t last. Knowing I’d miss gaming before to long, and before that longing could completely take hold, I leaped back in. I wasn’t ready really. Maybe I needed more time. Maybe I’ll never be into it again. It’s almost like a part of me has died.

But it’s also very reassuring that there may be someone in there that’s been hiding in fantasy for over 30 years. I will still be doing some rpg, playing a character, but even that I’m drifting from.  Plus, I've always run the games, so this is a drastic new shift for me. I’ve barely taken weeks off in the last 30 years, and now I’m taking at least a year hiatus. Change is scary.