As a 10-year-old, I was suspiciously miserable. For some reason, the parts of my brain experiencing misery seemed to be far more developed than those of my peers. I was a bad student and slow to make friends. I fell into video games in an attempt to escape from continuous misery. Why wouldn’t I take the first out I could?
The great thing about hard games is that they present obviously unclimbable mountains that can be tackled in hours. The distance between picking up a difficult game and achieving mastery over it is maybe 20 hours. When I started writing a book, the lessons I learned from games — Don’t quit! Never give up! — transferred, even though the scale of effort was completely alien. It took me a year to finish my book.
Happy 20th birthday! Take 18 credits, work out for at least 45 minutes every morning, do editing and part-time work for rent, write 4,500 words, attend at least three club meetings a week, host friends once a week for at least four hours, cook your own meals, keep your apartment clean and above all else, keep a degree of flexibility while balancing the rest of these. Because if any classmate, friend or acquaintance wants to go out drinking the night before an early class, you will be judged if you say no, and none of this counts if you are judged. You will break down, you will want to die, but that doesn’t matter as long as you get back up tomorrow and go to class. You will not be the dropout you’re primed to be. You cannot quit.
As a 12-year-old, I biked to the sub-industrial sprawl of strip malls and four-lane roads and listened to people I didn’t care about talk about games I didn’t care about very loudly. Sometimes I took a notebook and drew. I loved drawing. It felt like the only way to really get thoughts out in a way that makes sense.
The common narrative says difficulty in games is an accident of capitalism. One quarter per try means more tries equals more quarters. As a design philosophy, it outlived arcades. Once again, as economy: More difficulty means more time spent. A game goes from $60 for a movie’s length of entertainment to the same price for thousands of hours of entertainment. Be careful, though — if you make it too hard, no one will want to play it.
At 18 years old, I had quit drawing more times than I had actually drawn anything on purpose. Every time I held a pen or a pencil, all I could think about was the massive gulf between where I was and where I wanted to be. I ran three mostly unsuccessful webcomics at different times. One of them, a repost to iFunny, still comes up if you search a very specific combination of words — I can’t even quit successfully. I want to wipe the slate perfectly clean so as few people as possible know that I have given up on drawing. They can think I never tried at all.
When writing my novel, I was also working part-time and taking classes full-time. Momentum was their law of the land. Breaks meant torturous, days-long periods between “getting anything done.” I liked to imagine my brain in three parts: school, work and writing. One would be powered on at a time while the other two rested. I was absent in totality from this model, just three processes working as intended with human life as a side effect. That worldview was cozy like a small apartment: Never get above your station and it doesn’t seem so bad.
Always had clumsy hands. Takes twice as long to make half as good. Throwing on the wheel is different. It doesn’t do what I ask, but it doesn’t seem to do what anyone else asks either. This time, I’ll get ahead. I love it. Community college class. Teacher’s an old guy. He knows everything, but he’s kind of checked out. Don’t mind. Lets me work.
I have always been jittery. Just imagine this disgusting kid, shaking, trying not to cry, trying not to vomit, sniffling in a locked high school test room for four hours.
As a 17-year-old, I was certain that I would drop dead of a heart attack if I stopped stressing about work. I was just trying to maintain my grades. I used work to limit my view of the future, making sure I couldn’t even conceptualize past tomorrow.
As expected of a peer group, I have no clue what drives people to spend time around me, and most of the time, no idea what drives me to them. Lots of friends, and clubs, and work — I just know what a college experience ought to be.
As a 19-year-old, I was desperate to finish writing this book. Just finish writing the book before I die.
I have played 800 hours of Nuclear Throne, and twice that of the Binding of Isaac. The vast majority of those hours were in a cool, dark room, listening to podcasts I didn’t particularly enjoy, trying to force the time to pass. When I left the house, I took my iPod and listened to the same podcasts. I thought nothing of listening to 22 hours of content a week, I just wanted to end each day with as little presence as possible.
As a 20-year-old, a month after giving the book to my closest friend to read, I had a vivid dream of my death by nuclear fire. My last thought, as I was thrown into the air and turned to ash, the thought that followed me to my waking mind, was “If I die now, at least I finished my book.”
Going into my senior year of college, I had a horrible realization: I can make it. I can survive another year of this. I will subject myself to another year of this.
Back in August 2020:
“Are you having fun?”
“Do I look like I’m having fun?”
“Then why don’t you stop?”
“I’m not done.”
“It’ll be here when you get back.”
“Get back from where? We’re not going anywhere.”
As a 15-year-old, I got so excited to talk about a book in my high school English class that I quadrupled the max word count in a single, two-page essay consisting entirely of six-point footnotes. I stayed up until two in the morning editing it for an audience of no one.
Not Another Needle Game is certainly too difficult to be marketable. Across hours and hours of precision platforming, it asks a player to accept failure for no reason except the possibility of overcoming that failure. It gamifies struggling. The game’s difficulty is twofold: Can you perform a precise series of inputs, and can you keep trying to perform that series after hours of getting them wrong? It trains you to want to keep pushing yourself. Screen by screen, it attunes you to the infinite pleasure of being mostly miserable with short reprieves.
As a 20-year-old, I accepted that this is not the kind of book people are buying from someone like me, and all that aside, it’s not very good on its own merits, and I hoped that every great writer has written exactly this much trash before creating their early-career masterworks.
I will drag myself dead-eyed through the motions, make friends with the people around me, keep good grades and stay active, because in five years I don’t want to look back on a quitter. I repeat to myself, in my head, again and again, “She can have it all,” as a mantra. I can be complete. I can be what is expected of me in every category. I can exceed it. I have already begun. I only need to hold momentum. I just need to stop myself from cracking.
Halfway through the ceramics class, the old guy left. In between classes, dead center of the term, with no warning to students or faculty, he quit. He escaped. No one seemed to know what made him do it; he had been teaching at that studio for 20 years. In his place came a new teacher. For that half-semester, I’m not sure I heard him say one positive thing about a student’s work. In the community college environment, endless criticism wasn’t what anyone wanted. Multiple of my classmates said he was the reason they were abandoning ceramics altogether. The most common excuse for poor behavior is honesty. When my friends complained about him, I agreed — everything they were saying was factually true — but I felt protective of him for that same harshness, because it was true.
I don’t have time to play video games anymore. In every waking moment, I’m playing a game. I’m optimizing my behavior, I’m grinding all of my work. I’m suffering to discover the perfect executable series of actions and events that will free me from this screen, and on to the next. I just wish I knew how to quit.
Capital looms over my artistic work. I have been privileged with a long runway, but all this is going to have to start paying debts and rent pretty soon, and I’m not sure I’ve made anything good with the time I’ve had. As artists, we must constantly measure ourselves between breaking from overwork and starving. We are all having our hands forced. We all have to count the days before our bodies give out, our minds wander too much and we are left to hopefully float by with what we have accumulated but far more likely to remain in obscurity, piecing together shitty gigs and part-time work, infinitely hoping for a breakthrough after one more day. You’ll never reach it if you give up.
As a 21-year-old, I just began my next project. It’s another novel. It will be 600 pages long at a minimum and far more structurally complex than the last. Even though I can picture it turning into a burning wreck in the near future, I know I will be trapped inside, rolling over and over in slow motion for months. I kill the projects I start, and someday, one of them is going to kill me back.
I have removed my ability to choose by systematically refusing to stop doing anything until it’s done. I have diminished myself as a person. As I am, I can never grow. I can do more and more and more, but amid the art I make, the art I interact with, classes, writing and my social life, I have deprived myself of the silence necessary for growth. This is the road. I imagine it like a wicker basket I can’t stop picking at. Surgically, carefully, I pull one more piece out, certain that this time the whole thing will collapse. Maybe this will be the piece that empowers me to quit everything I love and languish in unemployment and misery. Maybe one of these pieces will be the one that does to ceramics what I have already done to drawing. It keeps me up at night. The fear is paralyzing, but I will march and continue to march into a sense of that sustainability. We must metastasize into stable human beings because we have begun along this path, and we aren’t very good at quitting.
Daily Arts Writer Holly Tschirhart can be reached at htsch@umich.edu.