01 Skull Bash

Lemme tell you exactly what it was like growing up with my sibling and a Nintendo GameCube sitting in our living room. We spent a lot of time on the couch playing Super Smash Bros Melee, and we moved on to Brawl, for hours on end. I always picked Pikachu (cause of course I did), and they always chose Fox, and for the life of me, I could never win a single match against them. Like it was so bad that they'd literally toy with me in the match just because they knew I couldn't stop them. I genuinely wanted to beat them, so I tried reading up on the meta and practicing the moves in training mode, but nothing would ever stick in my head during an actual match. They always had the upper hand, and I always walked away from the console feeling completely embarrassed.

Fighting games got something that you call the mental stack, which is basically the amount of information your brain has to consciously process at any given millisecond during a match, and successfully managing that mental stack and actually recognizing your opponent's behavioral habits requires you to be present in your physical body. So when you play a fighting game, your brain is basically running through a bunch of quick hypothetical scenarios, and that cognitive process is completely relying on your central nervous system functioning normally and reacting to stress in real time. If your nervous system shuts down, your adaptability is completely throttled. You literally can't adapt to a changing situation on a television screen if your brain has deliberately disconnected itself from the stress of the present moment.

The reason I could never learn the mechanics or beat my sibling had absolutely nothing to do with my dexterity, and it took me a long time to finally figure out what was actually happening to my body. I was an super hyperactive kid, and I got in trouble with my parents constantly for just existing in our house. Whenever my tired, overworked parents would scold me for being too hyper after a long day, my immediate response was to get angry, and that anger almost always caused me to cry, and crying just got me into even more trouble.

And because of that, I developed a fear of the negative consequences my anger and my tears would bring down on me, which led to me shutting the emotion down the exact second I felt it coming; to make it short, I cut the connection between my brain and my physical feelings entirely to avoid getting yelled at. I repressed my anger so hard and for so many years that it literally made me physically numb to everything happening around me. Don’t get me wrong, I still felt joy and sadness, but never anger.

The most fucked up part about this entire situation is that I had absolutely no idea I was even doing it. I would sit there on the couch getting my shit absolutely wrecked by my sibling's Fox, feeling my frustration start to pile up, and I would automatically suppress it to prevent me from crying over a video game. I just assumed I was stupid and naturally bad at the game. I was completely unaware that I had emotionally lobotomized myself just to survive my childhood environment.

The numbness became my default state of existence, and it destroyed my ability to process the mental stack of a fighting game, let alone process the actual events happening in my real life. We would put the GameCube controllers down, and I would carry that exact same unfeeling emptiness with me to school, to the dinner table, and straight into my teenage life. I spent nearly a decade wandering around in a complete state of emotional dissociation because I thought protecting myself from my own anger was the only way to exist safely in the world.

02 Healing

Over the years of sitting on this exact couch and running countless matches against each other, my sibling eventually picked up on my lack of visible frustration, and noticed that no matter how badly they beat me or how humiliating the in-game defeat was, I never reacted at all. We were hanging out one afternoon, and I finally asked them why they got angry sometimes when they lost a match or messed up an input. I asked them this because I genuinely expected them to view their own anger as a personal flaw or a failure of self-control that they needed to fix, like I did. But instead, they looked at me, and just casually replied that getting mad was just a normal thing that happens.

I stared at them for a second, really confused by their answer, and I followed up by asking if the anger actually goes away after they feel it. I remember they just smiled and asked if I knew that being angry is actually a good thing. I cannot overstate how genuinely insane I thought that was at the time. It sounds so alien to me now, but I literally couldn't comprehend anger being healthy, because my entire childhood conditioned me to believe that anger was a dangerous behavioral defect that would only ever bring me punishment, and I had even forgotten why I got numb by that age.

Our culture actively punishes negative feelings to keep people compliant. A completely docile and emotionally numb population is much easier to manage in a capitalist environment, whether you’re sitting in a classroom or working for a boss. We're taught to view frustration as an unproductive waste of energy that gets in the way of our daily labour or our social interactions, which makes it so hard to understand why our bodies produce these feelings in the first place; which brings me to tilt.

When a player starts tilting, the frustration completely overrides their objective reasoning, ruins their real-time decisions, and delays their reaction times. Pros start repeating the exact same predictable habits because the emotional overload hurts their working memory. I lost another match to their Fox, and a sudden physical sensation of frustration started in my chest. On that afternoon, I finally just let it take over, and then had the most embarrassing meltdown you could possibly imagine a teenager having over a video game. I started crying right there on the couch. I didn't just shed a few tears, nah, I'm talking about uncontrollable, ugly sobbing. I sat there crying, and I literally felt that anger come in, and then leave my body a few minutes later. After the crying completely stopped, I experienced a peace that I had never felt in my entire life up to that exact point. I realized right then that my sibling was right. We have these big emotions for a very specific reason, and keeping them forcibly suppressed means you just aren't living a life, y'know? You're just forcing your body to be in permanent state of suspension, and I finally understood that I needed to actually feel my anger if I ever wanted to feel alive.

03 Rising Uppercut

Anger is also useful, especially when you look to the past. Audre Lorde talks about how anger functions as a necessary tool for marginalized communities to survive. You can also tie this directly into the concepts from Mark Fisher's writings on capitalist realism, where he talks about exactly how these capitalist structures enforce behavioural compliance. Capitalism actively tone-polices marginalized people at every fucking level of society. The ruling class expects you to just endure material harm, poverty, and legislative violence every single day without ever raising your voice in protest, because they can. The second you show any justified rage about your lack of basic human rights or your inability to afford food, the apparatus uses that reaction to label you as a dangerous threat and invalidate your existence. They demand perfect civility from people who are actively being crushed by the state. Actively reclaiming your anger and allowing your body and mind to feel proper rage is refusing to be some convenient victim for a corrupt political apparatus. When you let yourself get angry about these fucked up policies destroying our lives, you're indirectly rejecting the societal expectation that you have to suffer in total silence to make the people oppressing you feel comfortable.

I have to talk extremely plainly about what this means for me personally, because the grim reality of being trans right now is incredibly exhausting on a daily basis. I'll literally just walk into a normal grocery store or a gas station, open my mouth to ask the cashier a basic question, and be immediately clocked as trans because of the pitch of my voice. I then have to stand there and watch a total stranger undress me with their eyes in genuine disgust, as if I had personally murdered their loved ones right in front of them. The pain of experiencing that unprovoked hatred from random people every fucking day, just takes a toll on you. I’ll spend my day in a public space but have to keep an eye out because harassment always happens, and the increasing volume of transphobia we all encounter just trying to run basic errands is enough to make anyone want to completely shut down their emotions again just to survive the grocery trip.

I actively choose to process that anger now instead of reverting to my childhood numbness, and I manage to stay grounded by bringing my focus entirely back to my actual friends. I have to actively remind myself that my friends live on this very same planet, and I know for an undeniable fact that they are good, caring people; and that means that the world is good and filled with the same people for others, regardless of the hostile interactions I have. My anger is always boiling, sitting right under the surface, but because I actually process the emotion instead of pushing it down, I can aim that fire directly at these corrupt, putrid institutions and the systemic failures where it belongs. I direct all of my anger entirely at the politicians and the billionaires causing the harm, and I save all of my peace, my patience, and my humanity for my friends and my community.

04 Final Stage

Because I was no longer dissociating, that blind spot that kept me locked out of the game, vanished. I could actually sit down with a controller in my hands, watch the television screen, and process the rapidly changing info in real time. I realized that it was finally time to actually learn how to play the game properly and beat my sibling. It had been several years since then.

I decided to pick up Little Mac to play alongside my usual Pikachu. When I spent my childhood entirely numb and disconnected from my feelings, I would just mash the controller buttons in a attempt to avoid getting hit by them. I would jump my character into the air constantly because I was just reacting to the stress of losing by flailing around the screen aimlessly, and once I stopped repressing my emotions, I stopped flailing. I sat in front of the console by myself for hours and learned the proper mechanics of the game. I got to work, and learned exactly how many frames Little Mac's smash attacks lasted, and I specifically studied the exact timing of his mechanics so I knew exactly when I could power straight through my siblings incoming attacks without getting staggered. I took all of that frustration and I used it to ground my fundamentals, forcing myself to keep my character planted on the floor of the stage where his damage output was the highest.

I put so many damn hours into it, and I will never forget the day I finally beat them. The match started exactly the way it always did, where they'd usually rush me down, but instead of panicking and mashing the jump button to get away, I just stayed there. I felt the stress spike in my chest, I allowed the frustration of dealing with their attacks to happen naturally, and I used that focused aggression to time a Down+B smash attack. They tried to hit, and I punished it with the reflect. Three rounds of new strategies I learned, and I finally won the match. I sat there holding the controller, staring at the victory screen, with the biggest fucking grin on my face.

Nowadays, it's much more balanced with the wins and losses; they've also gotten better and started to study to beat me, and we both been improving alongside each other... I just wanted to gloat about my win! I spent over a decade getting my shit completely rocked on a regular basis, so I am absolutely going to enjoy winning and learning from my losses now that I actually know how to play the game.

Anger arrives whole, every shade from flicker to thunder, flooding the heart in a single breath. Yet every storm spends itself. The air turns sweet, the sky clears, and you remain: whole, steady, and okay. You're okay.