Last month I met Derryl DePriest at Kentuckiana Winterfest. The topic of open characters versus predefined characters came up in terms of children’s play. Derryl has a degree in Developmental Psychology so I don’t expect the depth of my knowledge to exceed his. But I talk about how in Play Therapy children are encourage the pick characters, and the characters often exhibit some or all of the characteristics of their issues. In my own play, self told stories, and scenes I realized I was missing out on something: I don’t have a bad guy that I can relate to.

A big part of it is how my brain is wired. I tend to thing is definitive chunks where an infinitely small difference absolutely separates one thing from another. This makes things like Calculus and The Ship of Theseus seem easy to me but the ides that both drivers can be at fault in an accident hard. Ideas like to fall into quantifiable states like the bands of energy states on an electron. So when my 10 year old self decided that I was not going to be a Super Villian, the ”Evil” parts of me were not allowed into my thoughts anymore. For a neurotypical person this would be seen as repression, but for me it was more like setting the cut off level of an audio squelch filter: Across this threshold, none shall pass!

That works in a normal level of bad thoughts, so I was “just fine” until a car accident in 2004 left me with a chronic injury that eliminated many of the things that I enjoyed in life. Dark thoughts have effectively swamped the filter, leaving me prone to feeling of uselessness, having no agency in many areas of my life, a loss of purpose and of hope, and the feeling of being trapped preyed upon.

So what does this have to do with our “Lost Adventurer”? He was someone who also was trapped and felt a loss of purpose and of hope. From there he flipped his internal switch away from both “Good” and “Evil” to “True Neutral”. From there I project upon him the things that I choose not to be. I imagine him with a flat affect, showing no strong emotions. He feels like he is just taking up space with no useful purpose, so he does good or bad things as the situation calls for. Deep down, he feels that he never survived the the accident where he was left for dead. Because he no longer cares if he lives or dies, he will do the risky things without hesitation. Death would be a relief, but he would not spend energy seeking it. In short he is me as I felt in the darkest parts of my depression. I need him to be a role model of who I have chosen not to be as much as I need role model of who I choose to be. And hiving him as a character I can interact with give me a safe way to interact with that part of me without bringing it to the front of my personality.

Be who you choose to be,
And keep making this world a better place!