Gaming is my therapy
Video games have been part of my life for as long as I can remember.
Walking to and from a predominantly South-Asian school in North West London, I liked to imagine I had Navi from The Legend of Zelda floating alongside me — my own fairy companion, never leaving my side, giving me guidance and supporting me through my daily torturous quest. I was never able to tell my parents about my bullies, or the nature of their bullying — the teasing about my body was too humiliating and the thought of relaying their slut-shaming slurs to my immigrant parents was too horrific to fathom. Years later, my white therapist would tell me that my parents’ lack of knowledge about what was happening to me was a form of child abuse. But she has no idea how expert second-generation kids become at living double lives! I was Sam Fisher in Splinter Cell, undercover agent in my own home, using stealth tactics to conceal and survive. I would walk through the door, talk about my day with a smile on my face, do my homework like a good little Indian girl, and sit down for dinner with my loving family.
Body-shaming came sporadically, but almost always from within the South Asian community, from the girls at school teasing me about the hairs on my upper lip to the extended family members exclaiming “you’re so skinny — doesn’t your mum feed you?”, and an aunty whispering advice in my ear, to wear a padded bra so that my fiance wouldn’t change his mind about marrying me (that one doesn’t make sense to me either). In video games, I could be a sword-yielding, handsome Hylian boy named Link, or have the incredible strength and the perfect physique of Lara Croft, or disappear altogether as a faceless, nameless tycoon of theme parks. Gaming allowed me to step out of my body and become someone or something else altogether, or become nothing at all.
I have spent a lot of time living my life to appease others — laughing at jokes at my expense in the workplace, or quietly accepting criticism about my body or my choices from my ‘community’. It’s exhausting trying to say and do the right thing all the time and to only really start challenging and breaking free of that decades later. So exhausting, in fact, that switching on my console and entering a fictional, digitised world — to ride across open plains on horseback or shoot zombies or simply, collect seeds — is the best way to escape it all, and the thing that most calms my tired mind to this day. After all, isn’t so much of meditation about focusing the mind on something to achieve calmness? For me, gaming does exactly that; it allows me to block out all the other noise completely.
Gaming is my therapy, and over time, is teaching me how to play life in God Mode — to know how fortunate I am to have a body that has endured and achieved so much for me, that I have the privilege of health, and that I can choose what I do with it. As I navigate through this open-world game — one in which I started off alone and unequipped — I meet enemies and mini-bosses along the way. But as I progress through each realm, I gain confidence, pick up the right knowledge and tools, and discover new friendships and allies. The final boss is a culmination of all of those things, and once conquered, I will level up as my happiest and most authentic self.
