"What I lack is the courage to accept myself for who I am.”
SOCIETY IS built in a very structural way, and many of us find ourselves stuck in a repeating system of schooling, career, family and not much else. We end up finding little to no breathing room in between, and we find ourselves just going through the motions, failing to pause and ponder if what we are doing is what we really want to do. Carving out a sense of identity is an intrinsic part of the human experience. Among other things, we have resorted to finding a sense of self in hobbies, or in a career; in love. A search for identity is something that comes up frequently in role-playing games and occasionally, playing the character and learning moral lessons from them can push us in the right direction.
While everyone else is going crazy for the Pokémon Go App, I find myself busy cleaning stuff from my past and found some of my old Nintendo Pokémon Gameboy cartridges. That was the time I remember what my experienced told me before, that identity is wrapped up in the things we already love the most.
I remember wanting this game over 10 years ago. It was the hottest thing out then. I spent 2 months saving up to buy it. That was when they first came out with holographic packaging too. I guess kids really are attracted to shiny things.
Now it’s less than half the original price. No one except the real nerds mentions it anymore. It’s funny how easily things lose their value over time.
But it’s even funnier looking back and remembering how valuable I thought it was. Sure, it was a pretty good game. I made a lot of good memories those first few sleepless weeks after getting it, but the real value, I think, was in the wanting.
Like a lot of kids back then, I've been on the precipice of a lot of important decisions. What Pokémon should I choose to be my partner? Will I be the league’s champion? Will I collect 150 of them? However, for me the experience means so much more (and in a way, be a lot simpler than I imagined).
I haven’t wanted anything as much as I wanted that game since then. It was fun just being excited, even over something as stupid as a shiny little cartridge that projected monsters onto a screen. It was fun getting hyped up and thinking of all the ways I would save up money, planning things out so I’d be able to stand in line on the day it first sold at the local mall, imagining that great feeling of finally holding that shiny cover in my hands and knowing it was really mine.
However, the idea of being a geek about this game is not acceptable to the society back then, especially to the opposite sex. So I stop playing when I was already in high school and keep those Pokémon cartridge on my closet. I never open them for more than a decade until few days ago.
It is in that precise moment, I realized “What I lack is the courage to accept myself for who I am.” In life we are often very quick to turn away from the things we love the most because they are deemed unpopular, or not desirable. But if you turn those things away, like I did for many years, you might just be turning away the thing that makes you, you. Your identity.