Rolling Film

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I finally was kind of invited to play a game yesterday night. It was the demo of an unreleased frog sledding game that also had fishing in it and it was featured on Steam's Nexfest page, which is a page dedicated to upcoming games I think? It's a cute game I guess. I said I was kind of invited to play this game and not really invited because I kind of invited myself to the game. At first, my friends were on Discord playing War Thunder and I want nothing to do with that game since I really hate it that much, but then suddenly I see them switch to the game I mentioned. It looked cute and I don't really see them playing other games that often, but I thought to myself, I wasn't invited so maybe I should just stay away. 

[Random Author's Note: I literally couldn't stop crying and it was hard to make out the characters on the screen. I had to pause for a while here just to calm down a litle bit, though still tearing up but still enough to see the characters on the screen. I was listening to Thornhill's "All The Light We Don't See" with lyrics like these (it's the music player on top, it's functional! I highly recommend listening to the song. Other than it being really good, it would set the mood for the blog well. I just didn't want to put it on autoplay because I get scared when random music starts playing from my tabs..) 

Take all that I am, break the silver cord

I don't belong in this world anymore

Tell all what I am, paint the silver gold

I don't belong in this world anymore

I related a little too hard to it, so obviously it was hard to keep my composure while writing this] 

I was busy writing yesterday's blog and just having time on my own. I did talk to people while writing that blog post as some of my other friends were online and were quite responsive to my chats, so I felt less lonely for a while. However, I kept watching the timer of the Discord activities thing kept going up and I've managed to only ignore it for an hour. I know this was not the intention, but I felt severely excluded from their activities. I do know that their voice channel is always open and free for anyone to join in if they want to try the game, but somehow I felt like I needed an invitation to enter. I think I've mentioned somewhere in my previous blog posts before about how I've somehow developed so much fear to speak in my own friend groups? It happened this time. Before joining the voice channel, I was thinking a lot to myself:

• Do they even want me there? They're having fun on their own and they didn't seem to be asking me to join..
• They didn't tag me to join and nobody said anything about it in the chat. They probably don't want anyone else to join.
• If I join, would I be ruining the mood? I was crying at the time, and I don't want to be heard sniffling or clearly having a very raspy voice. I know everyone is in the voice channel to have fun, and I don't want them to deal with me joining sounding like I just lost a loved one. 
  
• At this time, I already knew that they were waiting for another friend to finish eating to play War Thunder with him, so if I join, I don't want to extend the sledding game's gameplay so they could play their War Thunder again.
  
• and a lot more... basically, I felt excluded and uninvited. This just made my hate for War Thunder even stronger, seriously. I don't want anything to do with that game anymore.

This got me thinking about the way I grew up. As mentioned in my previous blog post(s), most of my childhood (primary school up to highschool, even university I guess) was made up of me being away from people and I didn't have much time for myself or friends because I constantly had to study and go to after-school lessons and stuff, but earlier on in my childhood, I somehow always felt the same? This was a recent relevation. Probably down to my earliest days in kindergarten or something, I was always different from others and made others exclude me due to my behaviour. I was a huge fan of Naruto at the time, and I remembered somehow relating to his upbringing of being different and not being a part of any sort of friend group. I related to this specific Ending of Naruto the most, where he's shown to be forced to be playing and living in a world of his own even as a young child: 

I also remember having thoughts as early as... I could remember.. that I always saw myself as someone worthless. I would constantly try to sleep on the floor with just a blanket because I decided that I was not deserving of a bed. This was in Kindergarten B. I remembered the moment I moved away from my primary school, I thought to myself that it must be nice for the school because they won't have to deal with me anymore. I also vaguely remember thinking every time I went up a grade that it must be relieving for my previous homeroom teacher to not have me in their class anymore. I also constantly got made fun of for my hobbies (art and anime), not by just the students, but the teachers as well. They'd think I'm weird, and the teachers would try to take some points off my homework and exams whenever they find a doodle on the test paper. I was once used as a punishment for a senior who was misbehaving back in primary school too, somehow my presence itself was enough to scare some guy shitless. This has become a random trauma dump. Let's go back to the main topic. 

I ended up asking my friend in direct messages if the sledding game was that fun to the point that they played it for an hour at this point. He said it's a cute game, and that another person in the voice channel said that I should join. My friend also told me he's currently drunk at that time, and was probably more open and hyper to whatever I would have to say or do. I swallowed all my sadness and I asked if I could join in the worst way possible. These are the the words I sent him word-by-word in the direct messages: 

Umm is the game fun?

I don't want to invite myself to an event but the game looks fun so maybe I might like it..

But I already turned off my laptop so I don't know

Maybe not this time because I'm already crying lol

I'm just scared if I join it'll ruin the mood

I joined the voice channel anyway, but I was muted for a bit because I didn't want them to hear me sniffling. I was welcomed into the game and the voice chat. It felt kind of surreal. I didn't expect this sort of reaction. They were having fun in the game and the voice chat. It took some time for us to figure out the server situation because it was crashing the time I joined the game, but we ended up getting it back up and thankfully everyone's progress was saved so the others could show me how to play the game and gain some items.

They decided that I should go sledding first so that I could get enough points to get a fishing rod. Before we did that, I was told to go inside of this canon and press "F". I got shot into the air from ground level to the top of some mountain. My friends did the same, and they said apparently around there, there's a sled race track, however, before we started the race, I noticed that on the top right of the screen, there's a little tutorial tab that shows you the controls that you could do in that area, and apparently the button "C" at that certain part of the map lets your frog character make a snowman. The others didn't know this at the time, so everyone tried it out. Everyone was trying to make their own snowman. It also suddenly became a competition of who can make the biggest snowman because stacking one snowball on top of the other allows you to make a snowman. 

I found out sometime during this moment that you could also roll down the giant snowballs if you were at an area with an angle. One of my friends saw it and thought it was cool, so he said "Woah, she teaches us cool stuff!" and everyone started doing the same. 

I had fun. I was pretty happy, though I was still muted at this time. I somehow started crying even harder, I was practically sobbing at this point. I didn't know that this is just how they operate on a day-to-day basis. How could they be so happy? I know I was included and that the "star" of the show at the point right now was me because they had to teach me the controls and how the game works, but it felt like I was standing there as the world goes by. It felt like I was just observing everyone else having fun as I stood there as an observer. I know I did get called a few times by my friends, I was making snowmen with them in the game, but it felt so unreal to me, that my brain decided to register my experience as an observant, make everything feel like a rolling film, and it was hard to try and consier myself an active participant of the whole thing. I started crying because of that. Why am I so lonely? Why do I feel like this when I'm almost getting the very thing I wanted? I am playing a game with my friends, but everything feels like it's all fake.. 

As my friends were making snowmen and trying to make the biggest snowball the game has ever seen and created really disproportionate snowmen, I noticed that there was a little hot cocoa stand at the back of the map. I went there to try and make myself one, but there was a certain order that I had to do it in, so my friend taught me how to do it. It makes your frog extra fast apparently. After that, we decided to do the race sledding a few times so that I could have enough points for a fishing rod. They told me they spent most of their game time fishing instead of sledding before I joined, so they wanted to invite me to do the same. I think it was around this time I decided to unmute, though I think people could pretty much tell I was still too anxious, or too scared, to speak. I was sniffling a little here and there too, but I don't know if they noticed or not. Hopefully they didn't. 

Everything still felt like it was just a movie rolling and I was sitting in a cinema watching this movie in an empty theatre. It felt really weird.. 

I finaly got the fishing rod and we went to another part of the map where there were designated fishing spots. My friends and I fished for the next hour or so while chatting and trying to catch the rarest fish in the game, some of us got sharks, some of us got whales. Some of us got sea cucumbers, some of us got golfdfish. I stopped having a raspy voice and started speaking more around this time because it has become of a more dialogue-focused time. During the fishing, some of the fish were really big and would jumpscare everyone in the game because the sprite would be really big, some of the fish were so small you could barely see it - it looked more like a dead pixel. We took some screenshots. Time flew by so fast, I didn't notice it was 2:30 AM already. I had to go. When I left, my friend told me another one of my friends said "Nooo, we lost a friend!" when I left. That also felt so weird to me. Oh, the smallest people (me and one of my frinds) kept getting the biggest fish and it was pretty funny to us. One of my other friends have been begging to catch a big shark or a big whale but it didn't come to him easy. It did come to him at the end of our fishing session though, but it took a long time. When my friend built a chair for him for the fishing session, he purposefully angled it to make it hard for him to see the water and to make it harder to cast the rod, and he would complain about it sometimes so he built walls surrounding him to make sure that he doesn't fall from being at an angled position like that. It was pretty cute. There was also a screenshot of one of my friends holding the tiniest fish and his character looked pretty proud of the catch. This was also pretty cute. 

Again, I did have fun, but somehow, I can't feel so much from it (this will be its own blog post soon enough..) I didn't really feel fulfilled, but I do remember that at the time, we laughed a lot and shared a lot of random stories and memories with each other. Maybe at least I experienced it? I do think back to it now and then even though this just happened quite literally yesterday to try and get some more joy out of it because I know these types of moments won't come as often, but there's just not much joy to squeeze out of it anymore. At least I know that at that time being, I was probably really happy and enjoyed the company of everyone. I was also able to speak more to the two people I was most scared of in the friend group. 

Hopefully in the future, my interactions don't feel like rolling film anymore. I kinda don't really wanna be in that spot anymore, I wish I could fully immerse myself in the moment and really jump in the movie. It also just didn't feel nice at all. The sobbing was pretty bad, it got to the point I had to look down at the floor and kind of squeeze my hair as I tried to keep my composure. Thankful for the mute button forever. 

I'm thankful for my friends for letting me join their frog sledding game session. Evven though maybe right now it might seem like a fun yet also sad experience for me due to the rolling film effect, it will always be a good memory in my head. Hopefully I can look back to it again in the future with a happier outlook on it. I also hope that these things happen more often. I don't want them to play War Thunder all the time.. These games make me feel included and gives me a chance to have fun with them too. 

Even with the rolling film effect, I will remember this as the time I didn't feel lonely anymore for a brief moment in my darkest days.