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anathemaalice · 9 months
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Struggling with salt and dysphoria
I am getting to the point that playing a game competitively makes me feel extremely dysphoric. I'm really not sure what to do. I have always taken games pretty seriously. I grew up in a very competitive household with 4 older siblings and felt like I had a lot to prove. My parents basically only gave us praise for excelling in school and 'doing enough' was getting 100%; the bar always felt set at perfection, especially as our family was pretty religious. When I play a fighting game, my competitiveness comes to a peak: Fighting head to head with someone else, I will get very tilted if I am losing and my control over my character is not perfect (and it never is) or if they are spamming a move, or if the matchup is slated against me. I've been playing melee for about 6 years, I've been playing video games and board games since I was little, and I only started transitioning about 3 years ago. All of my habits and expressions around games feel male-coded to me, and there doesn't seem to be a way to fix that or update it in any way. I really want to play melee in locals and meet other players, but I can't imagine being comfortable with actually taking it seriously in a room full of people who are going to potentially be judging my gender presentation. For the most part, in my life, I can tune out whether I'm 'passing' or not; I think this is due to already being fairly close to passing for a lot of people and thus this is my privilege talking, but even as I started transitioning I made it a point to limit who I let myself seek validation from. But this is an area that feels too raw, too old-growth to be comfortable just owning in public. If anyone can relate, feel free to comment. For now, I just do melee online on Slippi.gg and no one sees my cringey gamer rage, and with games I play with friends I make a deliberate effort not to take them seriously. Thanks for reading <3
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