This Makeshift Life — Personal Reflections on Animal Crossing: New Horizons
Before its release, I was suspicious of Animal Crossing: New Horizons — suspicious of the idea that it could have anything to offer me, anyway, that it could do anything but make me feel worse than I already did. I definitely didn’t see the appeal in all of Tom Nook’s talk of island getaways in my Twitter feed, and for a very simple reason: my life feels like an island already. People visit sometimes but there’s never anyone who stays.
I live alone in a studio apartment. I have a small number of people I consider close friends but I don’t see them nearly as often as I would like to. I don’t now have, nor have I ever had, someone who is really in the thick of it with me, experiencing this thing called life in all its wonder and mystery and hardship alongside me and in partnership with me. As a result, for a very long time the great, looming question of my life has been: What can all this, my spare little life, actually mean, what can it be worth, as long as it is entirely mine and mine alone, as long as it remains unshared, unwitnessed, unjoined with the life of another?
When your life is an island, it’s not relaxing. It’s crazy-making. Your brain starts to wither. Your skin starts to scream with the need for touch. As long as my life continues to be a largely solitary experience, I will continue to find it lacking, and I didn’t see any point in creating another life for myself, a virtual life, that tried to sell the isolation I already experience back to me not as a bug but as a feature. Especially when that virtual life also lacks the possibility for the kind of deep connection that I’ve been seeking for so long. I mean, I’m not going to form meaningful bonds with any of my island’s animal residents. They have sketches of a personality but they can’t understand or relate to you, they can’t appropriately respond to the letters you send them. I may as well have tried forming a meaningful connection with Dr. SBAITSO on my family’s PC in the early 90s.
My earliest experiences with the game weren’t promising, either. Shortly after my fellow travelers and I arrived on our new island home, Tom Nook raised the important issue of naming it. He proposed that we all offer an idea and then take a vote to decide the winning suggestion. I suggested Rifugio — ”refuge” in Italian — but I actually liked the ideas put forth by Tammy (Guitarborough) and Drift (Isla del Biceps). But of course, because Animal Crossing, like most games, wants to bend as much as possible to the player’s will, it’s not even a contest, not even a question. Your suggestion blows everyone else away, and wins without even the formality of other ideas being put to a vote.
I’m just so over games trying to make me feel like the center of everything. Yes, I know that as the player, I am in fact the gameworld’s sole raison d’etre, but you don’t have to make me feel like I’m the only one who matters. Even now, even at this moment of crisis and larger cultural uncertainty, I don’t want this kind of comfort. To me, being the only one who really matters doesn’t sound comforting at all. It sounds like one of the defining aspects of my own personal hell.
What I kept thinking I wanted right now, in the midst of this crisis, was not a world of calm and comfort, but a world of rough texture and resistance, a world that reminded me I was alive by both swallowing me up and pushing up against me, activating the places inside me that sometimes need a galvanizing work of art or at least a galvanizing gameplay experience to be activated. A Dark Souls. A Breath of the Wild. A Death Stranding. What could the gentleness of Animal Crossing mean right now, when our fragile, fucked up capitalist society feels like it’s being pushed to the breaking point? How could a game that tries to make capitalism (and colonialism) cute and cozy be the right game for this moment?
And yet, as I continued playing, I did find something of value in Animal Crossing: a new way of seeing myself. It first hit me when I had my little avatar hop into bed one night when I was getting ready to save and quit the game. Her tent was sparse. She was wearing a t-shirt I’d hastily made in the game’s design maker that was supposed to read Trans Pride but the text didn’t sit well on the shirt. But even though her life looked like a mess, she hopped into bed with the most contented smile on her face, and after a moment, closed her eyes. She did not feel shame or uncertainty about her awkward, makeshift t-shirt, or about the slapdash state of her surroundings. And she was me. Or at least a part of me.
I mean, wait a second. What had even possessed me to create a t-shirt that read Trans Pride in the first place? I had done it without even really thinking about what I was doing, but in the real world, I do just about everything I can to avoid calling attention to my transness. I even resent my transness at times. I feel as if my transness is part of why I’ve found it so hard to form the kinds of lasting connections I want to form, why I’m not as visible in the world as I wish I were, why the people I want to be seen by never seem to see me in the way I want them to. But here, in Animal Crossing, where I know I’m not going to be attacked or misgendered, where nobody is going to say or do anything that makes me feel like I’m “being a woman wrong,” one of my first impulses was to declare my trans identity, to celebrate it.
Is this a little glimpse of what it means to live a life that is not dominated by fear?
Because I do live a life dominated by fear. Fear and shame. Tied up in the feeling that I’m always doing basic things terribly wrong or in danger of doing basic things terribly wrong. When I was in kindergarten, I couldn’t draw within the lines. I believe that this was a reaction to the chaos of my home life, where my father’s drunken rampages cleaved the world in two for me — the world of performance and pretend normalcy that I had to enter when I went to school, and the world of inexplicable, terrifying things that I came home to every afternoon. I believe my mind and spirit were so shaken and shredded by confusion and terror that the chaos couldn’t help spilling over into the coloring book pages where I was supposed to focus, be neat and tidy and orderly and keep things inside the lines. Years later my mother told me that my kindergarten teacher had told her that she thought I’d have to be held back a year because of my inability to focus on simple tasks. But then reading lessons came along and I blew most of my classmates out of the water. Words were already a refuge for me.
Still, though I had that one thing that I knew I was good at, the deep conviction that basic, simple things that most other people instinctively understand and know how to do and that I just fundamentally don’t get has hounded me my entire life. In grade school, I dreaded being asked to make anything, knowing that my classmates would turn in projects — models of California’s historic missions, dioramas of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy — that were detailed and beautiful, while my creations, made while swimming in feelings of helplessness and hopelessness, would just be sad little things. That same feeling persists today, a sense that I just don’t get a lot of the fundamentals that many other people take for granted. It’s been worse lately, because I can’t seem to figure out anything anymore that I’m both good at and that the marketplace actually values, so I have no idea what my professional future looks like, and I’m terrified, and I feel like a failure.
But I believe that there is a place inside me where my spirit remains undaunted, where I am still the same whole, compassionate person I was before decades of fear and shame and trauma and dissociation distanced me from myself. I believe that even while I constantly worry that I’m not and never will be enough — that my life is too ramshackle to accommodate another, that I don’t have the experience or the interpersonal awareness to connect deeply with another person in the way I so desperately want to — my true self knows that she is enough. And when my little Animal Crossing avatar hopped into that bed in her makeshift t-shirt with that smile on her face, I felt that there was a sense in which I was looking at a representation, a manifestation, of that true self, and that she — I — was giving me a glimpse of who I am underneath the fear and shame that has overshadowed my life.
On Twitter I see people posting photos of their elaborate, immaculate Animal Crossing setups. People who have everything arranged just so. Some of them probably were once the kids who made me feel, in comparison, so inadequate and broken in grade school. Now, I see their Animal Crossing homes and gardens and islands and am still impressed by the order, the aesthetic sensibility, the style, and I see how my little house and my plot of land are comparatively simple, slipshod even. But now I can admire theirs and still like my own. Now I can catch the shame before it can pounce on me. It’s funny that it’s taken me well into adulthood to even start understanding what Mr. Rogers meant when he said “I’m not very good at it but it doesn’t matter.” Seeing her, this version of myself, who knows that she is enough on her desert island, helps me in some small way know that I am enough here in the world of people, even if the world is always telling me that I’m not.
There’s a line I love in the film Frances Ha. The line is:
The truth is that I do, too, even if I’m often too ashamed or afraid to admit it. Here on my Animal Crossing island, though, I can embrace this aspect of myself. I can like my creations in all their awkward imperfections. Here I don’t have to worry about not passing, I don’t have to worry about the world’s judgment. Here I can rock a skirt because I feel like it without worrying that this will draw more hostility my way.
It’s not that here in Animal Crossing, I finally feel like I can succeed at the things that I’ve always fumbled and failed at. It’s that I feel like I can accept that I don’t succeed at them, not in the way most people define success anyway, but that this can have its own kind of beauty and value.
Here it’s okay to not have all your shit together. It’s okay to live a life askew. Here I can be enough. For myself. And for another. And because that little avatar is really just a manifestation of me, a version of me who creates what she feels like creating and whose vision isn’t narrowed by fear and who knows that she is enough just as she is, she’s giving me something to take back with me when I return to the real world, too: a clearer, more loving and compassionate vision of myself.
