Corona stole my spring, and in doing so, it also stole my fresh start.
I had been in a deep depression since February 2019 until this January. After eleven months of blood, sweat, and failed projects, I was, to say the least, at the end of my rope. In this new semester, I found purpose again—only to have it swept away. Without a regimen to guide me, I fell back into a downward spiral. I’d started a habit of waking up at 2 PM, adding to the never-ending trash pile growing under my bed, and avoiding general tasks—all slowly leading to me becoming a human pile of laundry.
I had pinned all of my hopes on this semester to lift my spirits. I imagine that COVID-19 has taken a lot from everyone—family, friends, and in some cases, faith. But in this season of isolation and slow decay, I managed to find faith in humanity.
How?
Dungeons and Dragons. . . .
and Zoom.
When the retreat from social interaction began in March, I assumed, like most people, that this would be over by April. So, I fortified my apartment in preparation for a LONG vacation. I’m talking back to the stone age of dorm life: chicken “pot ramen”, s’mores pop tarts, and piles and piles of liquor receipts. I told myself that I was ready for anything…
Well, anything except the basic needs of human beings to be an active and social member of the species. I didn’t realize it, but according to most schools of psychology, I was setting myself up for cranial electro-chemical catastrophe, or the brain stupids, as I call it.
Until I was forced onto Zoom.
The New School, like every other university, made the transition to online classes. Everyone in academia, whether student or staff, knows that this transition was painful and byzantine. However, for me, it was like putting hydrogen peroxide on a cut—painful, but the first step of healing.
I was thrown into the pool of online educational social interaction. I was in agony with every light nod and brief “oh yeah” or “for sure”. It felt like I was forcing every smile and smirk just to satisfy my classmates.
Yet, I was ignorant of the gift I had been given: the unlimited Zoom meeting.
I ended up asking my friends to download Zoom during the last week of March. It turns out that a couple of weeks was the only amount of extended vacation that I could handle. I managed to wrangle three friends together to read the first of many plays: Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson by Alex Timbers and Michael Friedman.
It went horribly.
My method of sharing the script made the text illegible to everyone but myself, as I had balanced my phone on a copy of Irma S. Rombauer’s The Joy of Cooking. My friends hardly knew what was going on, but my highly capable girlfriend, who cares about my crazy notions, made it happen by registering for a free trial of the website “Scribd”. Through Scribd, she was able to access the entire book and share it with the group—along with several other scripts that we read later on. I was lucky, and my friends were desperate for social interaction. We began reading with no idea of plot or character intention, and most of us just used the opportunity to experiment with silly voices. As awful as our reading was acting-wise, we managed to have quite a lot of absurd fun. We embarked on the first in a long line of insane Zoom meetings.
Every bat-week, we read some crazy bat-ass bat-script—from fanfictions about Sonic the Hedgehog and Harry Potter (some of which were written by AI) to Tony Award-winning plays. Eventually, my small group of Zoom-sketeers got tired of monotonous, trite play readings and poorly-written fanfiction, so we branched out to Reddit threads and Yahoo answer recitations.
Although I still felt a little off, and my room still resembled a trash can, I finally started feeling like I was on the up-and-up. Riding my high, I decided to begin a bi-weekly session with some art students for the holiest of nerd hobbies: Dungeons and Dragons.
I was forced into a DM position, which is a storytelling/game maker position, by one of my improv friends. We’d been trying to get a group together for a while, but then, you know, the world crumbled. She convinced me to develop a story, a series of creative and engaging characters, and even an entire Mythos (should the characters decide to avoid the main plot)—all in under 2 days!
When it all went down, the session was as calamitous as one would expect. My fellow members were an opera singer, an improv actor, and an animator. We were definitely the pack of wild animals you’d expect to derail a story.
But, fortunately, it forced me to be on my toes and pay attention to others for the first time in weeks. I constructed new stories to accommodate my players and activated the creative side of my brain that I had been neglecting.
Through this bizarre series of coincidences, I realized something about myself: I am reliant on others to motivate my action. I was sorely lacking in social interaction. While I do sometimes dread it, sometimes it’s necessary for me to feel productive and positive. And, in this time of crisis, a person needs all the help they can get.