my heart is a city.

made for Velox Fabula 3.

__________

(CW for discussion of trauma, mental health, and emotional dysregulation.)

Hey, so, remember when I said a few months ago that I couldn't figure out why I kept making games about my mother?

Well, it's safe to say that I figured it out.

This year, I submitted a game called High On Grief to the Interactive Fiction Competition (aka IFComp).  It's a sequel to my game Yancy At The End Of The World!  Both have Yancy's (my) abusive mother as a focal point.

When making HoG, I was more self-aware of myself throughout the development process, mainly thanks to the Dear Mom VN i released two months ago.  I noticed that I was writing these awful scenes and heartwrenching things, but I didn't really feel much of anything while writing them.  Just a, "Yes, that sure is awful.  Now, onto the next scene," kind of attitude.  It didn't feel cathartic; it felt routine.

This week, I got two reviews on HoG that really hit me in the gut.  This happens every IFComp year: I release a game about trauma/mental health that's very personal to me, it's misunderstood by some who review it, and I feel personally misunderstood because the game is so close to my heart.  It's basically me but wrapped in hypertext.

Feeling this way again was frustrating.  I've been entering IFComp since 2015, and I feel this way every year.  It made me wonder why I haven't gotten over it by now, become numb to it.

I made what I thought was a forum thread about feeling misunderstood in the private forum for IFComp authors only and went to sleep.  Only to wake up in the morning and realize I had accidently posted it in the public IFComp forum (though it was since moved to the right place by a mod) and both reviewers had seen it, reaching out to me in DMs.  Seeing this made me fee frustrated and embarrassed beyond belief. 

The responses to my thread didn't make me feel much better.  It felt like people were treating me like a newbie who'd never received criticism before, when I'd been entering the comp for 9 years. Obviously, people were not doing that intentionally; they were trying to help by sharing advice on how to let the reviews not get to me.  But it just made me feel even more frustrated.  Mainly because everything they were saying, I logically knew, but emotionally, I still felt gut-punched and personally upset by the reviews.

I talked to a few people about this in my life, and eventually, I talked to my therapist about it.  As we were discussing it, and how I do this every year, they basically said something that hit me so hard I felt like I had been stabbed: "You're reenacting trauma in a public space."

And I was like . . . oh.  You're right.  I am doing that.  They continued, "You know every year what will happen, that you'll get dysregulated by it, but you do it anyway.  Why?   Is it worth doing that anymore?"  I told them I didn't know.  They suggested, "Is it because it's comfortable?  Familiar?  The unknown can be scary."

After the session, I was still thinking about what they had said.  I googled "trauma reenactment" and read various web pages on it, trying to finally pin down why I did this.  One of the pages said something about a maladaptive coping strategy, and that's what blew the whole thing wide open for me.

Since I was a young child, I've been writing about my trauma, even when I didn't know it yet.  I made/make so many things where I take the meat out of my heart, serve it raw in the form of a story, and put it out on paper or into the world.  And I started doing that with my games in 2016, with my IFComp game The Mouse, which was a cry for help.  Though a lot of people misunderstood that game, a few did understand it, and that made me feel seen.  So, I made a habit of doing the same thing for the comp for years.

But there's no need to do it anymore.  I get nothing out of it emotionally, except for being dysregulated when the game is misunderstood.   It certainly doesn't help me anymore. I have to stop.  There is so much more I can do with myself than just reenact trauma indefinitely until I drop dead.

And so, I've decided I am breaking that habit; I am retiring it.  That doesn't mean I'm never making games again, or stopping personal projects, or not making projects about mental health & trauma--those are still very important things to me.  But when it comes to creating a project that is full of my guts and was only made to receive external validation, I shouldn't do it anymore.

I've been doing it for a very long time, so it feels weird putting that away, and committing for it to stay away.  It makes me feel like there's this empty hole inside now, a vacant area.  My friend Alex said that I should consider that space a blank canvas on which to paint other things.  I like that line of thinking.

I'm not sure what I'm going to do with all of this extra space in my heart.  It's exciting but also a little scary.  I guess we'll see where things go from here.

Thanks for reading.

-- Bez, 9/15/25