I broke things apart back then. I’d use glitches and exploits in my favorite video games to clip through geometry, fly beyond the textured world and into the formless, where the game designers never thought you’d reach, where nothing existed beyond a blue skybox void. When that failed, I’d use a GameShark, mess with the game’s code until it became an almost unrecognizable version of itself. When wires and systems faltered, I’d splice and segment, disassemble and swap, more often than not breaking something in the process but learning, always learning.
By destroying, you can also learn to reconstruct.
I dabbled with out-of-body experiences, lucid dreaming, astral projection, sensory deprivation, anything to get beyond the existence I’d been given and into the one I intuited existed beyond all of this. I sat in front of screens for hours at a time, reading stories of other worlds, different planes, at a young age teaching myself to tell hoax from truth but wanting, still, for the fiction to be real. I lived a complex and detailed inner life that I shared zero percent of with anyone else around me.
In the absence of stimuli, the mind will invent its own.
The first time I tried sensory deprivation, I cut a ping pong ball in half, covered my eyes with it, and piped white noise into my ears. I said I did it as research for a project, which was true, but I also wanted to know what life outside of my body could be like. How different things might be. A decade later, I floated in a sensory deprivation tank for the first time. I said I was doing it as research for another project, which was true. What was also true: as I removed the last of my clothes and got into that salt bath, as I looked at my body before the lights went out, I finally recognized that old and persistent feeling for what it was: gender dysphoria.
A person can get used to just about anything.
For as long as I could remember, I felt dislodged from my body, untethered, floating somewhere in the corner of the room and observing. When I learned of trauma beyond what I’d intuited of it through experience, I told myself that this accounted for the disjunction. This was true, but not completely. Even as a child, I knew that the ‘me’ I saw in the mirror didn’t correspond to the ‘me’ I felt like. I was stuck controlling a character I was told to play as. So I learned the controls, figured out the game, and played along for as long as I could, until I couldn’t anymore.
You can’t pour from an empty cup.
The first time I heard that sentence, I was inpatient, barely here, and clinging to anything that might keep me from the endless black. I’d tried to quit the game and found it wasn’t that easy. Reloading wasn’t an option, or if it was, it wasn’t something I’d consciously experience here, as me. I’d have to deconstruct the game, break it apart and find a way to build a new one from the wreckage. So I went inpatient when I needed to, outpatient too, made my appointments and stuck with the treatment plan. I didn’t know who I was, but I made a promise to myself to stick around until I might find out.
Although of course you end up becoming yourself.
Less than a month after my first float in a sensory deprivation tank, my egg cracked completely. Before then, I’d cycle from knowing and accepting I wasn’t cis to repressing, burying, over-correcting in my presentation, playing the part even harder than before. But I simply couldn’t anymore. As I sat in the amniotic warmth of that float, disconnected from all senses and most thought, I could be anyone at all. I didn’t have to pretend or be someone I wasn’t. I could be, simply and finally, me. And now I am. My future, a thing I once thought I’d never have, now feels as unlimited as the place beyond the game world: nothing but endless blue forever.
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Liza Olson (she/her) is the author of the novels Here’s Waldo, The Brother We Share, and Afterglow. A Best of the Net nominee, Best Small Fictions nominee, finalist for Glimmer Train’s Very Short Fiction Award, and 2021 Wigleaf longlister in and from Chicagoland, she’s been published in SmokeLong Quarterly, Cleaver, Pithead Chapel, and other fine places. One of her proudest achievements was getting to run (mac)ro(mic) for four incredible years. Find her online at lizaolsonbooks.com or on social.