They Drive Me
Earlier this week, a friend asked me an interesting question: why do I heartily prefer one video game character over another in a situation where both are facing extremely similar traumatic pasts and current problems?
My friend asked because she knows about my struggles with mental illness and thought that I’d have equal sympathy for both sides of the story. And I do - but for me, sympathy isn’t what determines a favorite character. It’s that one character lives a life I’d dream of, and another lives a life of my greatest fears.
Both characters, D and E, experienced a traumatic event at about the same age. Both characters lost their families and navigated the world basically alone. But while D lived in the past, E was aggressively forging a path to her future.
It helped me associate with E even more that her trauma was more medical than violent. It also helped that there was a madness in D’s eyes that frightened me - not because it was alien to me, but because I’d seen that look in my own eyes. Thankfully not for many years, but it was there at one point, and for years after, I was afraid of seeing it in the mirror instead of myself. And even more frighteningly, he had no desire to get rid of that madness.
When I read a comic about these two characters comparing their experiences, that solidified for me the major difference between them and why I so heavily favor E over D. They discuss their differences over a battlefield, and D says that the voices of his past are disgusted with her and urge him to kill her. E then tells D that she had a very similar experience to him, which he never knew, and illuminates the difference between them succinctly and beautifully:
“I hear their voices too. But they don’t control me. They drive me.”
The image accompanying the words is even more powerful - D being dragged backwards by the hands of the ghosts he can’t or chooses not to fight, whether literal or figurative. And E charges forward, using the memories of things that hurt her to help her make a better future.
It instantly got me thinking. When I was little, I felt controlled by the voice inside me that told me I was going to throw up or break Mom’s back because I didn’t touch the wall a certain number of times or got germs in my mouth or sat next to a kid on Monday when he’d thrown up on Saturday (yes, of all the things that happened in my childhood, I still remember that one).
I remember hoping and praying that one day, I’d be able to wake up and the thoughts would all be gone. I never prayed for a day when I could live like today, where I still have obsessive thoughts, Automatic Negative Thoughts (ANTs), and other hallmarks of OCD. I never thought I’d be able to manage them - it had to be all or nothing.
I still have all or nothing thoughts today - they’re one of my most common type of ANTs. But I also know enough about thoughts to categorize them and work towards countering them. I still get overwhelmed sometimes, but the vast majority of the time, I am able to live my life the way I want it and use my OCD in ways that are helpful for me.
I use it to organize complicated projects at work and to inspire the “what ifs” of my story ideas. I use it to hit goals in games, win cutthroat Lord of the Rings trivia, and get joy from things like fandoms, conventions, and video games that I would likely not enjoy to the same obsessive degree otherwise.
I hold the reins of my life tightly in my control. And although I have immense sympathy for people whose disease controls them, I am so afraid of falling into that pattern that I can barely stand to see it in the media. It reminds me of my childhood, my worst fears, and everything I learned about my paternal grandfather all wrapped up in a too-neat package.
To give both sides a fair chance, I played through D’s story as well as E’s. Even though I tried my best to give him a good chance, I couldn’t help but feel frustrated at making myself play a story that frightened me as he allowed the thoughts to rule his life and his world until everything fell apart. I’d only ever done something like that in a video game once before - a game that involved characters self-harm - but I still played it for the sake of fairness.
In the end, I knew for sure that I preferred the character who fought bitterly against her struggles was someone I identified with far more than someone who never tried.
Nowadays, I don’t pretend that I don’t take sides in the great debate of D and E. Among other fans of this game, I make my preference clear, and now, instead of not knowing how to express why, I bring back this comic.
There are so many times in my life when I could have chosen to get swept away on a tide of obsessions or trauma, could have surrendered any shreds of control I still possessed. But instead, I fought to reach a place where I could have the control over my life that I yearned for and deserved.
Inspired by the comic and the game that it is based on, I feel that I, too, am someone who does my best to let the past and the mechanisms of my brain drive me. They drive me to fight for my dreams, never give up, and encourage others who are undergoing similar fights to not fall into despair. Even if I didn’t know it when I was little, there is a world where negative thoughts can be kept under control and used in a positive way - and when I think of characters like E while I am on that journey, I feel encouraged, empowered, and ready to renew the fight for a good life.
Ellie, a writer new to the Chicago area, was diagnosed with OCD at age 3. She hopes to educate others about her condition and end the stigma against mental illness.