A personal message in light of the 2016 election
over 9 years ago
– Fri, Nov 11, 2016 at 12:04:17 AM
Hi buckaroos. It's Zoe. This is gonna be pretty personal, just so you know ahead of time, but I want to kinda take that risk and be really vulnerable and honest with y'all here.
Yesterday was an extremely bad day. I'm sure it was for a lot of you too. Everyone I know who works in therapy and crisis centers told me it was the longest day of their careers so far. I'm not going to pontificate on the hows and whys of what happened, it's still too rough and fresh for me to want to read any of those, much less write one.
I want to tell you that we are going to keep pushing forward on this game, and why.
The team and I had agreed to not promote this Kickstarter on Tuesday, because we didn't want to take up any time and attention that could otherwise be spent getting folks to vote.
Then Wednesday came around, and it felt like the world was on fire, and I had to entirely step away from the Kickstarter and go to work.
While I am a game developer, I've been living a kind of double life ever since my abusive ex boyfriend painted a target on me for the patchwork golem of hate groups that some folks call the "alt right" (because calling them neonazis or fascists seems too charged I guess?). Despite their best efforts, I didn't back down and continued to assert my right to exist and make games, and being the scrappy jerk I am, I took it a step further. I still make art and program and go to GDC and run kickstarters, but I've also been advocating for victims of abuse, to tech companies, law enforcement, policy makers, and anyone who could make a difference in their lives. Most of this work I do quietly, for about a million reasons not worth getting into, but I think that quietness makes people think the abuse isn't as bad, when really, it was bad before I was targeted and continues to be fairly unchecked. It doesn't help that marginalized people have been talking about these issues for years and have been dismissed. People still ask me if things have gotten better, or if the hate has stopped, and the answer has always been no, but I'm better at dealing with it. I've been trying so hard to balance these double lives, and coming back to making loving, silly, experimental games like this one made me feel like I'd finally rebuilt what I'd lost and found my way back to myself.
Tuesday night, the candidate that is the voice of the people that ruined my life and so many others was elected. If that sounds metaphorical, it isn't - some of the people are even the same. The CEO of Trump's campaign ran Breitbart, making a name for one of its biggest figureheads off my abuse and spreading lies as well as my nudes and family's dox to their fascist fanbase, just as they have done to so many other marginalized people. Trump's election was the outcome I had expected, but had hoped to be wrong about. I don't know if I can accurately convey the personal horror from my connection to all this that accompanied the horror a lot of marginalized folks felt at seeing the hate their country feels toward us (that tended to be handwaved, downplayed, or outright disbelieved) quantified and given even more power.
I've spent going on three years now fighting against the varying aspects of those movements and trying to assist those they've hurt, not just in the online trenches but by showing up and lending one more body to causes like BlackLivesMatter LA. I've ended up with a fair amount of visibility along the way, and it's a response that I take extremely seriously (and am constantly intimidated by). Tuesday night, I watched so many marginalized people responding with fear, insight, calls to action, despair, attempts to rebuild hope, and exhaustion - all of them entirely valid. I felt the same. I put on a brave face and promised people that we could get each other through this, to process their feelings but ultimately get ready for a lot of work and community healing ahead of us. I wanted to remind people that its ok to feel emotionally trashed by this, but that afterward we can also do something about it and don't have to feel powerless and not to give up on resisting and enduring.
Wednesday morning was spent putting out fires. People in my life were falling apart, so I used what crisis training I had to stabilize everyone I could. I told everyone who was worried about me that I was fine and that I've been doing this for three years anyway, the only thing that changed was the scale and the stakes, but that we could rally together and resist the way marginalized people have been doing forever. I didn't want to answer if I was ok or not, because I thought I could outrun the despair if I just kept working and pushing back by helping others who were suffering.
My team asked me if we should update or promote this kickstarter since we're in our final week, and I said I'd think about it.
I'm still recovering from a surgery I had a few hours after launching this kickstarter and have pretty limited mobility, so I had someone come over to help me move my bed against the wall so I could potentially sleep a bit more comfortably. He had basic questions - where to move the things in the way, what if we do this, where my clothes could go, since the layout of the room is awkward. I said I didn't know, and to just kind of leave it wherever, thanked him for trying, and calmly left the room and cried in the bathroom until I hit those ugly sobs where you couldn't talk anymore if you tried.
A stupid question about where to put my clothes broke the emotional dam I was hiding behind. I felt like if I couldn't answer a question like that, how could I answer any of the harder ones I had that I'd been trying to ignore to get through the day and stay strong for others. So many people asked me what they should do, and I did what I could, but nothing felt like enough. Everything ahead feels so uncertain. What is going to happen to me and the people I care about when those who have been terrorizing us were handed even more power for not even pretending to hide their bigotry? How much more power to hurt us are they going to have? How many of my friends already suffering from the worst edges of institutional oppression are going to die? Was everything I'd done the last two years for nothing?
How much stamina do I have left to keep fighting and trying to be strong for other people before my depression or PTSD wins out? What is going to happen to my team, when none of us are straight cisgendered white able-bodied men?
In light of how awful all of this is, is it even okay for me to spend time making an absurdist game about love and queerness?
I couldn't hide my fear anymore and I and broke and blubbered all of this to the first person who asked me if I was ok. As I talked, I calmed down. Turns out, I was a dingus and realized I kind had been a bit shit about practicing for myself what I had spent the last day preaching to other people.
I was too busy trying to provide care for my community that I forgot community goes both ways. I got too wrapped up in telling people that they need to take care of themselves because even refusing to die when oppression wants you gone is an act of resistance. I was too caught up in reassuring friends who couldn't go out and march in the streets due to health issues that they weren't somehow failing to do enough because everyone should be doing what they can according to their means. I spent so much of my time reminding people that they were human and not oppression-fighting robots while completely forgetting that it applied to me too until I was crying over furniture.
When powerful institutions fail you or outright hate you, it's so easy to be overwhelmed by legitimate, knot-in-your-stomach fear. It's a fear that some people are experiencing for the first time, and a fear that others have known and seen reinforced their entire lives. It's a valid fear, and there is a horrifying road ahead of us. While it's overwhelming, it's a fear so many of us share, and community care and individuals standing together to defy it *right now*, each according to whatever we have to give at the moment. Small things count. One of the first things you learn in psychological first aid is the power of small acts that make a difference. Supporting pre-existing community orgs and activists can be something you do to resist. If you're experiencing this fear and worry for the first time in your life, going and reading stuff made by marginalized folks who've been dealing with this forever and writing about it is something you can do to resist. Checking in with people who you know that are likely scared out of their minds right now is something you can do to resist. Showing up to protest or donating time to affected communities is something you can do to resist. And yeah, sometimes simply doing what you need to do to get through a really fucked up day in spite of oppression is resistance. We don't have to give up, we can stand together and work around the margins, each according to what we can do.
Community is, was, and continues to be the thing that keeps me going.
Resistance doesn't mean the entirety of your life has to be marches and protests and organizing, especially if you're a marginalized person, because that means that the only people who get to do things like make art and be silly or have fun are the people who aren't at risk to begin with. Asserting our humanity means fighting back against hatred and violence, but it also means taking care of each other and trying to heal the wounds we sustain in the process. If we're to have any hope of turning a tide, we have to live and laugh and not burn ourselves out in the process of fighting back. Another activist who has been doing this stuff way longer than me and is a god damned goddess once told me that her natural personality is basically that of a pixie, and she had to put that aside so often to go into get-shit-done-mode. Lord knows I have had to do the same, since my default personality is basically that of a sentient dad joke.
But we have to be able to come out of get shit done mode too. We can't lose ourselves. We are all more than our suffering, or our struggles. We deserve not just to survive, but to thrive.
There's a lot of work ahead of me in both of my weird double lives. I will continue to try and help marginalized people survive AND thrive in both. As a game developer, I've always believed that comedy is one of the biggest tools for healing that we have as humans, and I still believe that. As an activist, I've said that supporting and investing in marginalized people's lives and work beyond the parts that center on their suffering is critical for progress, and I still believe that.
So while we as a team, community, and country have a lot of hard and emotionally devastating work to do ahead of us to resist fascism and heal those hurt by it, we have to care for each other along the way. We can't just have the struggle, we have to have room to be pixies and dad jokes and unicorn butt cops sometimes. We have to be able to laugh and take breaths and give each other the room to do the same, because burnout is extremely real. Every level of oppression is important to fight, and while we fight violence and oppression, we want to additionally heal the emotional pain and self-hatred that bigotry leaves on its targets.
We understand & support anyone who chooses to donate money elsewhere to organizations instead of funding our game (like this one, this one, and this one for starters). But we are still going forward with making this (if we get funded), and making the biggest love letter to queerness and self-love possible (if we get overfunded, by trying to loop in more folks like Dante so the message of self love can be delivered by people you may already know of and admire). At no point have our proclamations of Proving Love Is Real been ironic. None of this has been ironic. We are dedicated to working our asses off to celebrate our queerness, even more so now that next year we will have a vice president who supported the use of federal funding to "cure" children of it through abuse.
I know a political post from a game about Vampire Night Busses might seem odd, but we are a queer team and our identities have always been politicized regardless of if we want to acknowledge that or not. So I wanted to make it explicit where we stand and how we feel at such a historic moment, and to reach out to my fellow queers and tell you I love you, I'm scared too, I will continue to fight for and with you, and I want to offer some laughs and lightness along the long hard road we're stuck on. I wanna keep fighting and being strong when I can, while admitting I fall apart too. I want to keep getting better at standing with other communities staring down the same bullshit we are, and helping them resist and live and thrive too. And I want everyone to be allowed to be themselves and give themselves permission to have fun and heal even while we push to make our communities, our friends, and the family we choose whole again.
Love is real, and scoundrels will never ever win.
Love,
Zoe
