Short post, probably, but an important one.
I came out as genderqueer on Facebook a couple of days ago to a select group of people. I was in a bad mood when I did it, feeling the overwhelming effects of gender dysphoria, and thought for sure I was going to regret it. I've had nothing but support from my friends since. It makes me want to cry, I'm so happy that my friends are such a fantastically accepting group of people.
I've had two different people who called me by my given name, then quickly corrected to my chosen name--Taylor's name--and asked which I preferred. I've had several people asking in advance which name I wanted to go by and what pronouns they should use with me. My Sis asked me tonight if I wanted her to start having her nearly-three-year-old daughter call me Taylor instead of my given name. It feels kind of weird, but so good. For the most part, I tell them that I don't care which name they call me and which pronouns they use,not day-to-day. At least, for the time being. For now, the fact that they're checking with me and that they're rolling with this and accepting me for who I am is enough to make me indescribably happy.
Better yet? Since coming out, the dysphoria's been easier to deal with, and I'm feeling less of a psychological divide between myself and who I want to be inside. It's like just saying the words to everyone--saying out loud that I'm genderqueer--gave my own identity permission to integrate.
I really do have the best friends in the world.
Saturday, March 13, 2010
Wednesday, March 3, 2010
Emotional Involvement in Fictional Headspaces
The longer I go on playing Taylor in this Vampire: the Requiem game, the stranger it gets, because the deeper in character I get. Slipping into the accent and the swagger. Developing the laugh and the grin. Finding the right subtleties of expression. All the actions and reactions, all the phrasings and witticisms, the quirks and neuroses, the delusions and derangements. Loving and hating all the right people. Bringing it all together and being unafraid to let it out. It's an art I'm still learning, and one I'm not sure I'd be good at in a professional capacity.
But I think there comes a point when one goes beyond acting.
Maybe I'm just discovering what method acting is indirectly, which I suspect is the case, and it's how I explain what I'm doing to people who don't get the concept of roleplay, anyway. It's improv. It's me getting into character and not getting out. (I'm finding I'm having a harder and harder time getting out of character lately, but that's probably because I'm in so deep in the first place.) It really is a lot of fun, and I always love the opportunity to stop being me for a little while.
But it kind of worries me sometimes when I react in unexpected ways when I'm in character. It means I'm in the headspace of someone I don't fully understand, and that never fails to catch me off-guard. The character is in my head, fully formed, and we're suddenly switching places and I don't know my way around in theirs as well as they do in mine. It normally doesn't bother me that much, because it just means I'll be writing and go "oh, hey, I didn't know that about this character," and I'll keep writing. But in roleplay...it means that someone can say a passing word that falls like a rock in my stomach, or I'll start shaking, or I'll start laughing, and it feels like I'm not entirely the one in control, because I don't know why this is happening. It's the character fully taking over.
Tonight at roleplay, the final act of the game was that my character was handed an envelope, presumably from the woman who is basically out to kill him. In the envelope was a picture of this woman torturing the girl I had just slept with the night before--someone who reminded me far too much of the woman who had been the mother of my child, my baby girl. (You see me slipping into first person here.) Now, what startled me about this is the fact that when our storyteller described to me what was in the envelope, in very simple straightforward terms--no description of the torture, no real description at all, in fact, I'm only assuming that she was being tortured, because I have no idea--I felt as though someone had poisoned me. Lightheaded, stomach knotting, knees weak. I felt the colour drain from my skin. My hands started shaking. I had to sit down. I did not know Taylor would react that way. This girl...the one I'd slept with, and the one I'd been with way back when (before I was a vampire), I thought they didn't mean anything to him. Not much. I didn't realise he was so tied up around this girl. And now I'm wondering if she really left him, or if maybe she died. Or was killed. Taylor won't tell me. Or he doesn't remember, one, but it still is a little disturbing to me that I'm having this powerful physical reaction in character when he obviously would expect to react this way in this situation and I don't. And I couldn't shake the feeling after I got out of character, which is kind of strange.
The point of all this is that I was entirely too in-character tonight for it to be healthy, probably.
Mind, this is all vampire!Taylor. The Taylor I speak about in the canon (the one where he's not a vampire) is a different person than vampire!Taylor is becoming. Which in itself is odd to me. Even Dameon didn't change this much when I played him as a werewolf. Then again, I did give this version of Taylor a much more traumatic backstory. That's probably all it is.
I don't know. I have a headache from roleplay tonight. And I love the storyteller for doing this to me, it's great, I like tormenting my characters, don't get me wrong. It just throws me off when they're so deeply affected by things that I did not know would screw with my head this much. The sacrifices we make for our art, really. Or the bizarre twists of a game.
But I think there comes a point when one goes beyond acting.
Maybe I'm just discovering what method acting is indirectly, which I suspect is the case, and it's how I explain what I'm doing to people who don't get the concept of roleplay, anyway. It's improv. It's me getting into character and not getting out. (I'm finding I'm having a harder and harder time getting out of character lately, but that's probably because I'm in so deep in the first place.) It really is a lot of fun, and I always love the opportunity to stop being me for a little while.
But it kind of worries me sometimes when I react in unexpected ways when I'm in character. It means I'm in the headspace of someone I don't fully understand, and that never fails to catch me off-guard. The character is in my head, fully formed, and we're suddenly switching places and I don't know my way around in theirs as well as they do in mine. It normally doesn't bother me that much, because it just means I'll be writing and go "oh, hey, I didn't know that about this character," and I'll keep writing. But in roleplay...it means that someone can say a passing word that falls like a rock in my stomach, or I'll start shaking, or I'll start laughing, and it feels like I'm not entirely the one in control, because I don't know why this is happening. It's the character fully taking over.
Tonight at roleplay, the final act of the game was that my character was handed an envelope, presumably from the woman who is basically out to kill him. In the envelope was a picture of this woman torturing the girl I had just slept with the night before--someone who reminded me far too much of the woman who had been the mother of my child, my baby girl. (You see me slipping into first person here.) Now, what startled me about this is the fact that when our storyteller described to me what was in the envelope, in very simple straightforward terms--no description of the torture, no real description at all, in fact, I'm only assuming that she was being tortured, because I have no idea--I felt as though someone had poisoned me. Lightheaded, stomach knotting, knees weak. I felt the colour drain from my skin. My hands started shaking. I had to sit down. I did not know Taylor would react that way. This girl...the one I'd slept with, and the one I'd been with way back when (before I was a vampire), I thought they didn't mean anything to him. Not much. I didn't realise he was so tied up around this girl. And now I'm wondering if she really left him, or if maybe she died. Or was killed. Taylor won't tell me. Or he doesn't remember, one, but it still is a little disturbing to me that I'm having this powerful physical reaction in character when he obviously would expect to react this way in this situation and I don't. And I couldn't shake the feeling after I got out of character, which is kind of strange.
The point of all this is that I was entirely too in-character tonight for it to be healthy, probably.
Mind, this is all vampire!Taylor. The Taylor I speak about in the canon (the one where he's not a vampire) is a different person than vampire!Taylor is becoming. Which in itself is odd to me. Even Dameon didn't change this much when I played him as a werewolf. Then again, I did give this version of Taylor a much more traumatic backstory. That's probably all it is.
I don't know. I have a headache from roleplay tonight. And I love the storyteller for doing this to me, it's great, I like tormenting my characters, don't get me wrong. It just throws me off when they're so deeply affected by things that I did not know would screw with my head this much. The sacrifices we make for our art, really. Or the bizarre twists of a game.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
