Anxiety and Stress and Dungeons and Dragons

It has been a very stressful week in many ways, I’m debating wether I’ll even post this but it has been nice just to spill things out. 

As I write this, there is an out of control fire in my hometown of Shelburne County, Nova Scotia Canada. It is the largest fire in the province’s history. I won’t go into too many statistics because by the time I’m finished writing this they will have changed, this is how fast the fire is moving. I will say that after seven days it is still 0% under control, mainly because in places it has been reported that a 300-foot high wall of flames has raced towards firefighters, making it impossible to fight. This is a complete anomaly, my grandmother has lived in this area for over 70 years and never has a fire affected her or anyone near her. 

I was talking to my parents on FaceTime when they were told to leave, they had thirty minutes to get out, they grabbed what they could. Along with my grandmother, who is in her 90s, they travelled to Cape Sable Island, about thirty minutes away, where fortunately, they have a place to stay. However, as I’m writing this,  they are on the verge of being evacuated again as unbelievably the fire is predicted to cross over to the island and the only way off is a quarter-mile long bridge that connects them to the mainland. 

They have no idea if their home and my grandmother’s home, which is less than thirty feet from theirs, is still standing. The fire map provided by the government tells us that it probably isn’t, but fires act in weird ways and they simply don’t know. Today they were told it would be “several weeks” before they are allowed back to their homes, or what is left of them. I don’t know if that means it will be several weeks until they are informed of what happened to their homes or not. 

The feeling of helplessness and frustration of not knowing is indescribable for me as I’m in the UK and can do nothing. I can’t imagine what it’s like for my parents and grandmother. I do know that the house my wife and lived in for nearly 10 years before moving to the UK is gone, which is surreal to think about, to be honest. It burned in a smaller but devastating fire almost three hours away from the Shelburne County one.

My family are lucky to be alive and are not concerned about material things because they are fortunate to be insured and are relatively healthy, but it’s still heartbreaking. My brother, who died very suddenly and unexpectedly in 2018, lived in the house that is quite likely not there anymore. My parents have his ashes there.

Things that cost little to nothing but mean a lot, the baseball hat he always wore, letters he wrote and photos of course. Somewhere in there is a little wicker basket my grandmother always brings out to show people which is full of songs we wrote together as kids - mainly “rock songs” that reference Back to the Future, Dungeons and Dragons and Ghostbusters. It’s not about the material thing itself it’s the memories that are attached to them.  I think a lot about memories because one day all of us, if we’re lucky, will be in a bed dying, surrounded by loved ones with nothing but memories. If we’re lucky. 

I think about memories a lot because a few years ago I was told by a doctor that as an autistic person I’d already surpassed my life expectancy, which is around 35. This is something I think about every single day now. The idea that I’m “not supposed to be here” because of a diagnosis that I sought to get to try and make a shred of sense of my life is almost funny. This is why I do things with a lot of urgency I think. 

The act of doom-scrolling (I hate that phrase), every night until the early hours and then waking up at 4 am and doing it again has been tough to handle this week, I will say that selfishly. It has wore me the hell out. All I’ve been doing is posting stuff on social media that I think might help as I have followers from that area but they probably already have that info so I don’t know who I’m doing that for other than myself. 

I can’t read when I’m in situations like this and this is not unique, I just can’t focus. Reading is known to alleviate stress but I cannot do it. Last Wednesday I had scheduled a D&D game with some amazing people. I almost called it off as I’m the DM and I felt like I was going to let them down because for me, as a DM, all I really want is to make people laugh or gasp or forget things for a few hours and be in the game. I didn’t think I was going to be able to do it. And here I am a few days later still kicking myself about how I ran it as I don’t really think it was as fun for the players as it should have been, but that’s the way they go sometimes. 

However, as much as I felt down about how I ran that game, during the game I was completely immersed in it, I wasn’t thinking about the fire. Maybe that’s selfish but it helped me a lot because I felt like it has allowed me to reset my brain in a strange way. The day after this event I took out a little journal and started to write some D&D stuff, just bullet points. I am running a campaign called Rime of the Frostmaiden with some really great people and I decided to just jump into that world and prepare for our next session in a few weeks. 

What happened was that I was able to get lost again and not experience the stress headache of looking at my phone every thirty seconds to see if the fire had spread or if I have a message saying my parent’s house is gone. After writing my ideas down for the session I was then able to read from the campaign book and actually take in what I was looking at. This became a kind of ritual for the last four days and I cannot emphasise how helpful it has been. Just the act of writing down a few things and then reading about D&D stuff and going back and forth has made this week better than I thought it could be.

There’s a few reasons for this, I will try to put them into succinct points:

I truly enjoy writing stuff in D&D while imagining the players’ reaction to it. It really does give me a huge amount of joy to think that someone else will gasp or laugh or react in a positive way in real time to something that I’ve thought of adding to a D&D campaign. Yes, it is selfish but if I know someone else is getting joy from it maybe it isn’t, and sometimes I can be pretty good at it. 

It is schedule fun. It’s a commitment, and, as a DM, you’ve got to honour the commitment. You can sometimes get away with it if one player can’t make it but if the DM isn’t there it can fall apart fast. I need things like this because I need that structure and knowledge that I’m going to be at this place at this time doing this thing. 

I’ve talk about this before but just knowing that for four or five hours I’m going to be laughing almost continuously or I’m going to be having people listening to a story I’ve had a hand in writing and it’s going to be silly and weird and interactive is a huge thing. It’s your brain saying “At this time, you are going to be experiencing happiness.” It will sound very, very corny but I try hard to just listen to what the players are saying to each other and to try and remember it as that moment, especially in D&D will only happen once and it won’t come back again so I try to remember it. Example: on the Wednesday night session the players held a funeral for a rat in between creating a successful book launch for a talking cat-man author. 

As a Dungeon Master I am also a player, I am not there to kill the players, I am there to set up challenges and cheer them on. There is something very therapeutic about being around a table, or virtual table and saying, even if it’s not out loud, “we are here and we are going to get through this thing by working together.” Even if the “thing” is creating an illusionary portal to hell in the floor of a pub in order to create a distraction so you can steal a singing fish that is mounted on a plaque on the wall. This happened in one of our games, the fish is now securely fastened to the wall in the players’ casino they built with a 500 year old mummy as a co owner (I don’t have time to explain this). 

The situations that the players create, the ones I do not expect, are the best, it does more than just keep me on my toes, it forces me to think differently and it diverts my brain from whatever garbage is filling it because sometimes I need to think very fast in order to keep up with what has just happened, like when they decide to feed magic chocolate to a baby yeti in an ice cave “just to see what happens.”

This stuff saves my sanity, I cannot explain it fully but it is truly a unique experience. I think it’s something to do with telling a story as a group, being completely immersed in creativity and also, and I think this is a big one for me, no one is “too cool for school.” What I mean is that it’s a safe space. Oh, I know I will be mocked for the voices I create for the NPCs (Non Player Characters) but I know where that mocking is coming from. The fact that I have no hesitation whatsoever to do a weird and funny voice for an NPC is what I’m referring to. I also know I can completely be myself and we can all vent in the game our outside of it. 

Through D&D and the creativity it pulls out of everyone that gets involved, I have found something that heals and is not just “filler” like TV or food, it is something that connects me to others. I do not have a lot of friends, I have struggled with employment my entire life, I feel like a burden to people around me a lot of the time but with D&D I can see past that in a weird way. People don’t like to discuss mental health and wellbeing, especially in the UK, but for me, D&D is taking an active part in wellbeing. 

You can relive these moments, these memories, over and over again with amazing people, you can write them down and keep them forever, you can record them on a podcast and listen to them. You can always have them, those moments where you laughed os hard you almost lost your breath, they can be tucked away safe and warm behind a little door in your brian. These memories matter in my opinion because they are unique and they are special and they make you feel less alone.