Life is for the living …

My experience with Banishers yesterday brought up a lot of thoughts I had about myself and others in the various realities outside of my own. It’s rare that I feel what most would consider to be anger anymore. Either it was exhausted out of me 30 years ago or longer or I just really stopped seeing the point of wasting energy on emotions that serve no positive purpose. What I felt yesterday in that situation in Banishers was something I’ve been ruminating over …

As a Banisher in the game your calling is to protecting the living from the dead … The dead have no place in the world of the living, sustaining themselves on living people’s essence.

You feel strongly about this … and it’s not about good or evil or anything so mundane, just about protecting life and allowing people to live peacefully without being haunted by those whose time as passed … but of course the dead linger in different ways … The dead are manifestations of what the living have wrought … in some ways their presence is a result of living beings and the energy put out by them … or the things the living have done to create the dead in the first place … in the case of Banishers you’re dealing with abuse, patriarchy, familial strain, domestic violence, violence colonization, and more … all these negatives create a feeding ground for lingering “ghosts” … and you, as a Banisher, are there to deal with it all.

The situation with this character I spoke of was beyond abhorrent to me and it triggered a lot of things for me … not unresolved things, but inevitable things. How people see me, how the world sees those with disabilities, how the world sees the elderly, how white folks see pretty much any minority, how the world sits off balance by default and people simply have to make peace with it or lose their minds and souls to rage 24/7 … What I felt yesterday wasn’t anger but resolution. What she had done was … wrong. That is not to say there was no logic in it or that I didn’t understand that in those times it was necessary to make certain kinds of sacrifices … but they way she went about it … the callousness and they cruelty that she took in it made me sick to my stomach.

She was a character, a woman, that I actually admired in the game. A strong, hard, determined woman surviving in those times and being in charge … but then … she was beyond my understanding. What I saw instead was someone so hardened by the world that she became … a plague upon it. What I saw instead was someone forced to survive by any means necessary and placing that same expectation upon everyone around her. What I saw instead was someone who created pain under the guise of making people stronger.

I grew up with one such person who had all these same ideals.

What this character ended up creating was a nightmare … a creature born of the suffering and death that she brought about through her morbid ideals of what people should be and who was worth saving … I had to fight and banish this monstrosity. I had to battle everyone else’s pain. I had to face this demon created by someone with no regard for others …

It was so much like what I have dealt with my whole life; being a victim of everyone else’s trauma and mental dysfunction … I wasn’t angry … I was resolved. I fought it … and the whole time I did and the whole time it screamed “Save us” … and I even cried at one point because how many times have I met people so broken by their families or by the world who have lashed out at me or others because they are trapped in this place of despair and pain and just need help … just want to be saved from that darkness that they live in? I don’t blame them. I blame the people that did it to them. I decided, long before the battle started, that this character who created this monster was going to meet a deserving end for doing so.

It wasn’t about revenge … it wasn’t anger … it was just … this is how it should be. If anyone needs to die, to suffer, to be removed from the world, it wasn’t the “ghosts” she created … it wasn’t the victims that needed to be banished … it was HER.

Banishers protect the living from the dead and to me that includes living people who are dead inside. So I banished her. I didn’t give her a nice, forgiving ascension … I gave her a nasty end … yanking the dark and twisted part of her heart right out and leaving her on the ground. In the end her spirit tried to tell me that she was once a good person … and that she became hard and pitiless because the world forced her to become that way …

My father used to say (and still says) something similar … about needing to be strong and needing to make his children strong because the world is awful and how as Black children we have to work twice as hard and be twice as strong. I think people can find their own strength if you let them. I think when the world pushes people they will push back in their own way and they will grow from their struggles or they will be destroyed by them … but that is THEIR choice and THEIR fate … and I don’t think it’s something anyone needs to take into their own hands to beat someone into submission, to hurt them, to break them under the guise of saying it will make them more resilient …

Abuse doesn’t work like that. Abuse is abuse. Abuse creates monsters.

When you bring pain to people it makes more pain for others. When you hurt someone they sometimes go on to hurt others. You’re not making people stronger by inflicting pain upon them … you’re only creating darkness in them … you’re only making the world a worse place by creating a cycle of pain that will be perpetuated on and on and on … forcing other people to deal with it … giving the world a need for “banishers” who bring light to that darkness.

Triggers are good things as I’ve always said … they let you know when something is wrong within and without. Was I triggered by this character? Of course. Was that trigger fueled by anger? No … but recognition of what a monster looks like and what a monster says and what a monster thinks … and resolving to banish them from the world so they can stop hurting others for their own gain or deeply personal and often misguided beliefs.

That is comforting … that is positive … a far cry from anger.