New Game +

“Nice work you did—you’re gonna go far, kid.”

There is a loop I often find myself in. 

"If I had known me in elementary school," I think to myself, "or middle school, or high school—would I have remembered me today? 

"And," I continue, "if I did, would I assume my traits calcified? That they grew with me and defined the person I am today? Or would I understand the 'me' that I had known as one snapshot in a greater process of becoming?"

Oftentimes, in Safeway, or the dollar store, or on the freeway, or at a green light just itching to go yellow while behind an SUV taking a rather long time to turn the corner, I make sweeping generalizations about the people—rather, the entities—that populate the world around me. That person who sat in the left lane for ten minutes while going two over the speed limit? Idiot. That lady who is blocking the aisle with her shopping cart while browsing, oblivious to the others attempting to navigate around her? Inconsiderate. The dude in the Taco Bell line taking five minutes to decide on their order when he had ten minutes of waiting to figure it out? A vacant shell of a human.

In these cases, their actions serve as a flag to define the entire human by; a meronym to replace the personality that I don't know about. Sure, sitting in the passing lane is objectively idiotic, but it doesn't necessarily make one who sits in the passing lane an idiot. Blocking the aisle shows a certain level of thoughtlessness, but it does not imply that the person blocking the aisle displays such obliviousness in every facet of their life. And, try as I might, I can't find a concrete reason why the Taco Bell dude is a vacant shell of a human, so I suppose it's not necessarily fair to label him as such (though I will try—dude, it was ten minutes).

We have a need for categorization. A need to order the universe for our monkey brains to be able to understand what is happening around us. It's far easier for my brain to label the lady blocking the aisle as an idiot, as someone who is decidedly against me, and recalibrate to seeing them as an antagonist toward my own grocery shopping—my self preservation—than for my brain to spin in circles for a few minutes and try to figure out if this person is always like this, if this person might have something else going on in their life today, if they deserve the grace that I would be more likely to give to someone I already see as being on my side. Why should I give her the benefit of the doubt when I am already having the emotional response attached to overcoming some obstacle? 

That girl who picked on me in elementary school and was rude and snippy? Clearly that person is still an insufferable child who I absolutely would not vibe with today. That teacher in middle school who didn't pay enough attention to me and let me slide by with a passing grade in math even though I didn't learn anything? Clearly that teacher is still an ineffective teacher who is doing her kids a disservice.* 

And, potentially the strangest thing in all of this, I see myself in the exact same way. In my own understanding of my life—in "my book," as my fifth grade math teacher would have said—I don't see myself as truly being on my side until my first year of university. Every other memory from my life has been separated out into a "before" and "after" with that moment serving as the bifurcation; before that point, everything I did, everything I was, was actively positioned against the person I am today, and after that point are the actions I take to clean up the pieces. 

It's hard for me not to assume every person I have ever met sees me in the exact same way. In a solipsistic universe, after all, I would be the only brain in the proverbial jar. This is remarkably telling to the roots of the philosophy of solipsism in general: we are all infinitely more focused on our own perspective of ourselves than the perspective that others truly have of us. Of course people have been juggling this idea around for centuries. There's no other way to analyze our life than through the perspective of a brain looking back on the actions of another. The brain I had when I was 22 was far different than the brain I had when I was 12, no? And I have been taking steps to improve my own appreciation of my life, correct? Then, by default, any temporally distanced position I could possibly take to look back on my past actions and understandings of those actions is a better position to take in relation to my understanding of myself. 

Right?

* Sorry, by the way—I know this was on me.

Answering this question requires a bit of a tangent.

Every few years, I revisit artifacts from my youth. Not necessarily physical artifacts—those are mostly locked away in the basement of my childhood home. But middle school, in particular, served as a particularly important, potentially the most important, kairotic moment in my life:

I began to make things and put them online.

While technological literacy and knowledge about the internet is tantamount to basic reading and writing skills today, social media was still very much in its infancy when I was a middle school tween. In 2008, I was given access to my very first email account through my school. Playing games other than pinball and solitaire (and FreeCell, if we were feeling particularly adventurous) was banned at my school, but my friends and I were still really into technology and computers and desperately wanted to use them at any given opportunity. This led to us emailing each other back and forth, figuring out secret codes, methods of formatting messages in order to get around school content blocks, and memorizing the page URLs for our email accounts so that we could navigate around our inboxes purely through typing strings of characters starting with http:// into the search bar. Writing—no, typing!—things? Not only things, but things that other people could immediately read(!) and respond to (!!) no matter how far away they were(!!!)?

At the same time, my brother and I were getting really into AdventureQuest: Worlds, a browser-based Flash MMORPG that was relatively kid-friendly. This game would occasionally advertise art competitions, both for new weapons to be introduced to the game and new sets of armor for players to buy, wear, and trade with one another. There was pay-to-win currency, but—as this was the early days of microtransactions—many items could be obtained purely through grinding, making it ideal for two tweens with finite allowances. My brother and I would print off template sheets from our family printer, drawing armor sets, writing flavor text, and thinking about what the best new idea for a thematically linked sword and chest plate could be. 

It was the first time I realized the amount of possibilities the internet could give me and the amount of agency I could exert over the activities and passions that I pursued.

Unfortunately, our designs never got folded into the greater world of AQ:W—I'm not even sure if we ended up submitting anything for consideration in the first place and the specificity of my memory has been decidedly lost to time. But the mark had been made on my psyche. And when I got my first smartphone? Game over.

One of the first apps I loaded onto my phone was a stupid little thing called Talking Tom. It was definitely a cheaply made app, quickly developed during the time where app developers were suddenly becoming multi-millionaires and everyone wanted to get a slice of that action. The entire app was a 3D model of a stray cat in a brick alley, staring at the camera with his hands behind his back. You could poke him! You could make him burp! You could say something into your phone microphone and he would repeat it back to you in a squeakier, formant-shifted voice! Wow, what fun!

Weirdly, this app also included a built-in recording feature. This allowed the user to hit record, speak into their phone mic for Tom (or do any of the other included actions), and then send the video to someone in your contact list… or directly to YouTube. 

You'll never guess what my first YouTube video was. On September 30th, 2010, I uploaded "Talking Tom" to my YouTube channel, then called "Coomandude111." And yes, you’re very welcome for un-privating these old videos.

It's absolutely hilarious to go back and realize that if I hadn't uploaded "Talking Tom," I may never have uploaded another YouTube video. It wouldn't have been a hurdle I had already crossed—even back then I remember being petrified of what would happen if one of my parents discovered the fact that I was uploading videos to YouTube. They instilled a great fear within me of posting anything online. This wasn't because I was scared of having parts of me online. Far from it; my parents had made it clear that I was not allowed, under any circumstances, to have any social media before the age of 13. And here I was, 12 years old, posting videos on YouTube.

But this "Talking Tom" video? I didn't change any upload settings, titles, descriptions, or anything. I remember recording the video in the bathroom of my childhood home, hitting "send to YouTube," and hitting "okay." If it had been any more difficult than those couple of button presses, would I have ever seen YouTube as something that was for me before high school? Would it have permanently changed the way that I saw my mark being left on the internet?

All I knew was that I needed to have more.

I had taken a couple introductory video editing units in middle school and had played around with a slideshow maker in Windows 2002 when I was in third grade. I enjoyed watching people on YouTube play video games that I also played. "Hey," I thought, "I could do this." 

I pirated a piece of software called ScreenFlow 2.0. Exactly one month later, on October 30th, 2010, I uploaded my second video ever: "Paradise Paintball on Temple of the Raven." This was a recording of a browser-based FPS I enjoyed. It didn't have sound. My gameplay wasn't particularly good. I had cropped it incorrectly. But check this out: 

• I had a way to record my screen.

• I had recorded video content, put it into an editing program, exported it, and uploaded it to YouTube.

• This was really me, not some talking cat. I could send videos of me performing well in video games to my friends! I could get a following—heck, this video got a like!

I began to record and post more and more. Games I was developing in a language called MicroWorldsEX. A "weapon demo" of various guns from Paradise Paintball, soon to be renamed to Uberstrike, followed by a couple more videos of me playing TDM. But then, something big happened: numbers. One of my videos, by chance, racked up more than twenty thousand views in a few months. These numbers lit a new fire underneath me—there truly was no reason why any of my videos, no matter how weird or different, couldn't achieve the same amount of relative fame. 

Over the next few years, many things changed. My parents still didn't know I was posting anything to YouTube, and I hid it from them at any opportunity I could. I continued to post videos, from this new game taking the world by storm called "Minecraft" to my decision to finally post videos of me playing a particularly violent FPS that I hid from my parents at all times. YouTube and gaming existed in a sort of symbiotic relationship in my head; I would always be thinking about how I could record whatever game I was currently playing for YouTube content, and be scouring YouTube for video ideas that I could also complete. When I met a kid in 8th grade who was also into Minecraft, it was only natural that we would team up and try to be a YouTuber duo ourselves. "OhGodCreepers" was born and quickly died—turns out you need more than passion to be able to sustain a YouTube presence. 

Many, many more events happened over the years to change my interests and redirect me into different artistic media and purpose-driven creation—Lord knows I could talk at length about the incredible amounts of art I made in fandom-tangential circles—but email, AQ:W, and YouTube catalyzed a lot of my desire to put things out into the world and have people connect with me based on what I chose to put out there.

The next manifestation of that desire, in 2010, was a blog.

Demanding that the meronym others were defining me by be thrown aside in favor of my true thoughts, what I really wanted to show people about me. "Some Thoughts from My Life." I wrote about video games, love, lying, failure, success, and weird takes about hotel staff (hey—middle school is a weird time). And then, on February 23rd, 2012, I promised that I would be sticking around on a posting schedule and would be talking about "my thoughts on random psychological and philosophy [sic] subjects" in the coming future, and never posted again.

"Then, by default, any temporally distanced position I could possibly take to look back on my past actions and understandings of those actions is a better position to take in relation to my understanding of myself.”

The last time I looked at those posts on that blog, at the words that I was writing and the topics I was writing about when I was twelve years old, was more than five years ago. I remember my thoughts about them well:

"Wow, what an idiot."

“Wow, what a fake-deep thing to say."

"Wow, you truly had no idea what you were doing, did you?"

"Wow, everything you were doing back here was actively detrimental to the person I am today. Look at you. Actually look at you. Why in the world were you focusing on this so much instead of math? Or social skills? Or literally anything else?"

I feel as if I have reduced middle–school–me to a memory that someone else would have had.

Seeing all evidence to the contrary as meronyms to mean the same thing again. "Yeah, you were good at writing, but you could have been more, and you weren't." "Yeah, that kid wrote a weird thing, and I'm going to use that to define every action I remember that kid taking for the entire time that I remember knowing them."

I remember myself like I remember my bullies. In ironic, post-ironic, and meta-ironic layers.

I'm trying to love that little kid more every single day. I'm trying to remember that my own bias toward seeing my current brain's understanding of a situation as the only correct one is actively detrimental to being able to think about my own progression of social and emotional learning. Everything I did set me up to be the person I am today. The choices I had made carved out a niche in the world for me to fill. 

As a high school teacher, this is also important to keep in mind for another reason. All of my students see themselves as adults, as the expression of a brain judging where their brains have been, and they will see themselves like this, undoubtedly, for much of their life. Perhaps the entire thing, unfortunately.

I'm not saying where I "was" in middle school is better than where I am now. But I am saying that I need to work extra hard to see my memories as projections altered by ego and distance. I need to work extra hard to see the entities inconveniencing my life as people who are as fallible as me. When I take extra time in the fast food line, I've got a laundry list of reasons why I can excuse myself from being a bother. When someone asks me to move my cart so they can get past me in the aisle, I've got a CVS receipt's worth of grace to give myself. When I hate myself for a choice I made, I've got reasons I can tone down the heat. I just willfully keep myself from seeing them.

It hurts knowing I can do this to myself. It hurts knowing that other people can do this to me, both now and based on the person I was when I was still developing everything I know about myself today.

C'est la vie. 

Thanks for working so hard on your writing and blogging in 7th and 8th grade, Gabriel. Thanks for doing all that YouTube stuff, all that early design work, all those evenings spent messing around in GarageBand and Logic Pro X, and opening all those doors as early as possible. 

You made it all happen. And hey—nice work. You went far, kid. 

Let's see how much further we can take it.

— Gabriel Stenson Pehrson, 2022